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not domestic ones.
No-one knows this better than the workers at Holden and Ford, for whom global exchange rates are more important than any subsidy or tariff our elected representatives can devise.
This has always been so.
A sudden increase in the cost of bank lending in London caused our first true depression - the largely forgotten Depression of the 1840s. We suffered along with the rest of the British Empire.
Our better-remembered second depression occurred in the 1890s. What little modern Australians know of the Depression of the 1890s is perhaps the housing boom in Melbourne which preceded bank failures and unemployment.
But the Australian episode is only part of a story that encompasses the near collapse of the London-based Barings Bank, sovereign debt crises in Latin America and the Mediterranean, a gold panic in New York, and a mining market collapse in South Africa. Our trouble - as traumatic as it was - was just one crisis among many.
The Great Depression was even more clearly imported. No way were we going to avoid suffering from the stock market crash of October 1929 or the collapse of world trade.
Historically our good times correspond with good times in the global economy too.
We boomed in the 1950s and 1960s along with everyone else. We suffered stagflation in the 1970s along with everyone else.
And the recession we had to have?
Well, that recession had to be had by the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Japan as well.
This all makes sense. Australia is tiny. Overseas there are cities with more people than our entire country. We're almost entirely dependent on imports for consumption and exports for economic growth. And we need foreign capital for investment. A small country highly integrated into the global economy is going to be very sensitive to international crises.
Yet for each of these historical episodes there exists a cottage industry trying to explain the unique Australian factors that caused them. The 1840s Depression is blamed on problems in the Australian wool industry. The 1890s Depression is blamed on reckless Australian banks. The depth of the Great Depression in Australia is blamed on our obsession with balanced budgets.
It goes on. We've all heard Paul Keating blamed for the recession of the early 1990s and John Howard credited for the subsequent growth.
If there is growth or recession in the next term Abbott or Rudd will take the blame or credit. They probably won't deserve either.
In the past I've mentioned research that suggests political success is more about dumb luck than virtue or competence. In truth Rudd or Abbott will win government then cross their fingers.
But political debate struggles with powerlessness. Voters like to assign blame and give credit for things that are actually outside any domestic politicians' control.
Kevin Rudd rightly points out the global financial crisis dumped a bucket on Labor's first term. The policy agenda of any party would have been drowned out by the global consequences of America's subprime collapse.
But then he claims his decision to artificially stimulate the economy was responsible for Australia's relative endurance.
Not, for instance, Chinese demand for West Australian minerals.
In other words, Rudd believes the disease was entirely foreign, but the cure was entirely domestic.
Yet even if you are a card-carrying Keynesian - that is, you believe the government can and should spend more to boost the economy in a downturn - it is just as plausible that China's enormous stimulus package in 2008 is responsible for our prosperity, rather than Labor's smattering of insulation and community projects.
Australia spent around $90 billion to stimulate its economy. Sounds like a lot? Well, China spent over half a trillion dollars. And nearly three quarters of that spending went towards the infrastructure whose raw materials we supply.
Our politicians pretend they can steer the economy like a ship. But we have a very small ship and it's a very big ocean. During an election, it pays to remember our economic future is determined by the wind, not the sails.
Chris Berg is a Research Fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs. His most recent book is In Defence of Freedom of Speech: from Ancient Greece to Andrew Bolt. Follow him at @chrisberg. View his full profile here.
Commenters on Drum articles might have noticed that over the past several weeks we have had numerous "service unavailable" errors. We are working with our technology department to resolve this and apologise for the inconvenience.
Topics: federal-elections, business-economics-and-finance, economic-trends, government-and-politics, elections, federal-governmentConstitutional right to privacy a figment of imagination UNACCEPTABLE ARGUMENT
Figment of imagination
There is no constitutional right to privacy. Call a national referendum to settle the issue
In this season of politicized and contentious confirmation hearings to fill vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court, some of the sharpest debate and disagreement concerns a so-called "right of privacy" in the U.S. Constitution.
The advocates of a constitutional right of privacy speak as though that right were expressly stated and enumerated in the Constitution. But the text of the Constitution does not contain the word "privacy" or the phrase "right of privacy."
Consequently, in my view, a constitutional "right of privacy" could only be unenumerated and is therefore a figment of the imagination of a majority of the justices on the modern Supreme Court. Let me explain why.
Webster's Dictionary defines "enumerate" as "to name or count or specify one by one." Roget's Thesaurus states that the synonyms for "enumerate" are "to itemize, list, or tick off." Adding the negative prefix "un" reverses the definitions or synonyms so that "unenumerated" means not named, not counted, not specified, not itemized, or not listed.
The right of privacy is unenumerated because neither the word privacy nor the phrase right of privacy appears anywhere in the Constitution or its amendments. Nor does the text contain any words related to other rights the Supreme Court has found to derive from that right, including the right to an abortion and rights related to sexual preference. Neither "abortion" nor "sexual preference" appear anywhere in the text of the Constitution.
The idea of a constitutional "right of privacy" was not even recognized by the Supreme Court until 1965, when Justice William O. Douglas used the idea in writing for the majority in Griswold v. Connecticut, where the court concluded that a state law criminalizing the use of contraception was unconstitutional when applied to married couples because it violated a constitutional right of privacy. That was 176 years after ratification of the Constitution, 174 years after ratification of the Bill of Rights and 97 years after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.
In his opinion, Justice Douglas cited cases that he maintained, "bear witness that the right of privacy which presses for recognition [in Griswold] is a legitimate one."
Note the phrase "which presses for recognition." That phrase reveals that the right of privacy, that is still hotly debated by the American people today, was first recognized by the Supreme Court in this opinion. Note, also, that if the right of privacy had been "named" or "listed" or "specified" or "itemized" in the Constitution, there would have been no need for it to "press for recognition" in this opinion.
What the Supreme Court was really doing with such language was interpreting some of the specific prohibitions enumerated in the Bill of Rights as indicating the existence of a general right of privacy that is not expressly written, and then finding a new specific right, i.e., the right to use contraceptives, as an unstated part of the unstated general right of privacy.
This same technique was used by the Supreme Court in 1973 in Roe v. Wade, in which the majority stated:
"The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however, going back perhaps as far as [1891], the court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. In varying contexts, the court or individual justices have, indeed, found at least the roots of that right in the First Amendment, in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, [and] in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights.
"This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or as the district court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."
Just substitute "a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy" (Roe) for "a married couple's right to use contraceptives" (Griswold) and the Supreme Court again found an unstated specific right within the unstated general right of privacy. Note also that the Supreme Court admitted in the first sentence of the above quotation that "the Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy." I think my use of the adjective "unenumerated" in this context is both accurate and appropriate.
The court's choice of the word "penumbra" and the phrase "penumbras of the
Bill of Rights" in these opinions is revealing.
According to Webster's, penumbra comes from two Latin roots: paene, meaning almost, and umbra, meaning shadow. The meaning of penumbra, as stated in the dictionary, that is relevant to our understanding of the Supreme Court's opinions regarding the Bill of Rights is "an outlying, surrounding region."
So the use of the word penumbra by the Supreme Court should be understood to mean that in the court's view the right of privacy exists somewhere in the region that surrounds and lies outside of the Bill of Rights.
But there is absolutely nothing in the text of the Bill of Rights about any such surrounding or outlying area, nor is there any catch-all phrase (like "other similar rights") indicating that the rights specifically enumerated exemplify a larger class of rights that were not enumerated. Consequently, whatever rights might be found in the phrase exist only in the mind, contemplation and imagination of each individual reader and are not part of the constitutional text.
Some proponents of a constitutional right of privacy insist that it can be found in the liberty clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But the liberty clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is identical to the liberty clause in the Fifth Amendment; and just as in the case of the Bill of Rights, neither the word "privacy" nor the phrase "right of privacy" appear anywhere in the Fourteenth Amendment, much less in the liberty clause.
The fact that the Supreme Court has said that the right of privacy could come from the First, Fourth, Fifth or Fourteenth amendments is solid evidence that the court is just guessing about where it does come from.
The Supreme Court's actions I have just described amount to an attempt to amend the Constitution rather than an interpretation of its text. Let me explain why.
There are two ways to amend a document like the Constitution:
(1) you can delete words that already exist therein; or (2) you can add new words not previously included.
The latter is what the Supreme Court has done, and this action differs fundamentally from the court's legitimate task of interpreting and applying existing words and phrases like "cruel and unusual punishment," "due process," "public use" and "establishment of religion" that appear verbatim either in the text of the Constitution or its amendments.
But the Constitution does not give the Supreme Court the power to amend the Constitution. Neither the Supreme Court (the judicial branch) nor the president (the executive branch) is mentioned in Article V of the Constitution, which defines the process for amending the Constitution.
As defined in Article V, the power to amend lies with the American people, acting through the Congress and the state legislatures. It is "We, the people, of the United States" who are expressly denominated as the acting parties in our original Constitution who "do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Likewise, in our Declaration of Independence, one of the truths we declared to be self-evident is that "Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Our first president, George Washington, put it this way in his farewell address to the nation in 1796:
"The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.
"If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by amendment in the way which the Constitution designates but let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed."
Similarly Chief Justice John Marshall wrote as follows in his historic opinion in Marbury v. Madison:
"That the people have an original right to establish, for their future government, such principles as, in their opinion, shall most conduce to their own happiness, is the basis on which the whole American fabric has been erected.
"From these, and many other selections which might be made, it is apparent, that the framers of the Constitution contemplated that instrument, as a rule for the government of courts, as well as of the legislature."
The Constitution does speak to the circumstance of unenumerated rights in the Ninth and Tenth amendments. The Ninth Amendment in simple plain English says, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
The right of privacy is not one of the rights enumerated in the Constitution, and consequently, the Ninth Amendment gives us two instructions: first, we are not "to deny or disparage" the existence of a right of privacy simply because it is not enumerated in the Constitution; and second, we are required to recognize that any such right of privacy is "retained by the people."
Clearly, a right of privacy exists at some level, but it has not been made subject to the Constitution unless and until the people act to make it so.
Likewise, the Tenth Amendment simply 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."
The Constitution does not delegate to the Supreme Court (or any other branch of the U.S. government) any power to define, apply, or enforce whatever may be the right of privacy retained by the people. Similarly, the U.S. Constitution does not prohibit any state in particular, nor all states in general, from defining, applying or enforcing whatever the people of that state may choose as the right of privacy. Therefore, as the Tenth Amendment clearly provides, the power to define, apply or enforce a right of privacy is "reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
By finding a constitutional right of privacy that is not expressly enumerated in the Constitution, the Supreme Court has "usurped" the roles and powers of the people, the Congress, and the state legislatures.
Shed of all semantical posturing, the critical issue becomes: Does the U.S. Constitution permit amendments by judicial fiat?
Some argue that the Constitution must be a "living, breathing instrument" and that it is right and proper for a majority of the Supreme Court to decide when, where and how the Constitution needs to be changed so as to be "relevant to modern times."
These folks operate on the premise that the Supreme Court is infallible and omnipotent, and that once the Supreme Court has spoken, there is no way to change its ruling.
I disagree with that view. But we as a society must decide which view should prevail.
On several occasions the Supreme Court has held that Congress does not have the power to change by legislation a prior Supreme Court decision. Similarly, nothing in the Constitution instills the president with the power to do so. Therefore, to remedy the "usurpation" by the Supreme Court as to a "right of privacy," we must go to the highest authority — the people.
Thus, the ultimate remedy to this controversy lies not with the individual members of the Supreme Court, but with the people whose will could be expressed in the form of a national referendum either affirming or rejecting the Supreme Court's actions.
Such a national referendum would be a win-win situation. For those who support the power of five justices to amend the Constitution as they see fit, it would afford the opportunity to demonstrate that a majority of the people in each of a majority of the states agree with the Supreme Court and that therefore, the right of privacy should be treated as a part of the Constitution, just as if it had been adopted by the amendment process in Article V.
On the other hand, for those of us who believe the Supreme Court has usurped the power of the people to consent or not to consent to a constitutional change, a national referendum would afford the opportunity to demonstrate that a majority of the people in each of a majority of the states reject the power of the Supreme Court to make constitutional changes.
The will of the people would then override any judicially fabricated constitutional amendment, and the right of privacy would not be treated as part of the Constitution.
This referendum could be called by Congress and placed on the November 2006 ballot for Congressional elections.
This controversy has been brewing for more than 30 years with little sign of resolution. The best thing would be to settle this controversy one way or another as quickly as possible by a vote of all of the people.
As a U.S. citizen, I respectfully petition the Congress to call a national referendum to permit the people to just say no or yes to the Supreme Court's usurpation of the power to amend the Constitution. I invite others who share my views to do likewise.
DeMoss practiced law in Houston for 34 years before being appointed in 1991 by former President George H.W. Bush to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where he now serves.Chomsky's statements, annotated
Direct quotations from Chomsky and his interviewers are shown in this color. Words in bold are of particular relevance.
1. Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia / Living Marxism (LM) controversy Chomsky has made statements at various times that call into question the existence of Serbian concentration camps, where Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croat prisoners were often tortured and killed. The camps were exposed in August 1992 by Penny Marshall and Ian Williams of British television (ITN), and by journalist Ed Vulliamy. Diana Johnstone's book Fools' Crusade echoes Serbian denials of the substance of these reports. The British publication Living Marxism likewise repeated those denials. Chomsky's statements assert that these denials are valid. Chomsky:
The Serbian concentration camp at Trnopolje "was a refugee camp, I mean, people could leave if they wanted."
Extensively documented reports on the Serbian camp are "probably not true."
Serbian atrocities - ethnic cleansing, torture camps, mass executions : " a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication. "
Chomsky: From On the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia (transcript), Noam Chomsky interviewed by Danilo Mandic, RTS Online [Radio-Television Serbia], April 25, 2006
Video: The pertinent section is here (at 1:38 into the video). The interview video sequence begins here. Chomsky:... if you look at the coverage [of the Bosnia war], for example there was one famous incident which has completely reshaped the Western opinion and that was the photograph of the thin man in a concen - uh, behind the barb-wire. Danilo Mandic [interviewer]: A fraudulent photograph, as it turned out. Chomsky: You remember. The thin men behind the barb-wire so that was Auschwitz and 'we can't have Auschwitz again.' The intellectuals went crazy and the French were posturing on television and the usual antics. Well, you know, it was investigated and carefully investigated. In fact it was investigated by the leading Western specialist on the topic, Philip Knightley, who is a highly respected media analyst and his specialty is photo journalism, probably the most famous Western and most respected Western analyst in this. He did a detailed analysis of it. And he determined that it was probably the reporters who were behind the barb-wire, and the place was ugly, but it was a refugee camp, I mean, people could leave if they wanted and, near the thin man was a fat man and so on...
Chomsky signed an open letter to the Swedish publication Ordfront: "We regard Diana Johnstone's Fools' Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition. But whatever opinion one may have of that book, there are more fundamental issues at stake, namely freedom of expression and the right to express dissenting views." In the same article, Chomsky continues: A Swedish journalist sent me sections of an article in Svenska Dagbladet that stated:... "Mikael van Reis published an article in Göteborgs-Posten. I quote:
"… the revisionist author Diana Johnstone, foreground figure in the slander-convicted magazine Living Marxism. She insists that the Serb atrocities - ethnic cleansing, torture camps, mass executions - are western propaganda...." Johnstone argues -- and, in fact, clearly demonstrates -- that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.... In an introductory letter on the same page, Chomsky writes: I have heard from various friends in Sweden about an ongoing controversy concerning Diana Johnstone's book on the Balkans. I have known her for many years, have read the book, and feel that it is quite serious and important. I also know that it has been very favorably reviewed, e.g., by the leading British scholarly journal International Affairs, journal of the Royal Academy.
...
I don't read Swedish journals of course, but it would be interesting to learn how the Swedish press explains the fact that their interpretation of Johnstone's book differs so radically from that of Britain's leading scholarly foreign affairs journal, International Affairs. I mentioned the very respectful review by Robert Caplan, of the University of Reading and Oxford. It is obligatory, surely, for those who condemn Johnstone's book in the terms just reviewed to issue still harsher condemnation of International Affairs, as well as of the universities of Reading and Oxford, for allowing such a review to appear, and for allowing the author to escape censure.
Chomsky was interviewed by Emma Brockes of The Guardian, October 31, 2005. (While Chomsky has objected to certain statements in the interview, he has not specifically taken issue with the portion quoted here. For his list of objections, click here.) Brockes wrote: As some see it, one ill-judged choice of cause was the accusation made by Living Marxism magazine that during the Bosnian war, shots used by ITN of a Serb-run detention camp were faked. The magazine folded after ITN sued, but the controversy flared up again in 2003 when a journalist called Diane Johnstone made similar allegations in a Swedish magazine, Ordfront, taking issue with the official number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre. (She said they were exaggerated.) In the ensuing outcry, Chomsky lent his name to a letter praising Johnstone's "outstanding work". Does he regret signing it? "No," he says indignantly. "It is outstanding. My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough. It may be wrong; but it is very careful and outstanding work." How, I wonder, can journalism be wrong and still outstanding? "Look," says Chomsky, "there was a hysterical fanaticism about Bosnia in western culture which was very much like a passionate religious conviction. It was like old-fashioned Stalinism: if you depart a couple of millimetres from the party line, you're a traitor, you're destroyed. It's totally irrational. And Diane Johnstone, whether you like it or not, has done serious, honest work. And in the case of Living Marxism, for a big corporation to put a small newspaper out of business because they think something they reported was false, is outrageous." They didn't "think" it was false; it was proven to be so in a court of law. But Chomsky insists that "LM was probably correct" and that, in any case, it is irrelevant. "It had nothing to do with whether LM or Diane Johnstone were right or wrong." It is a question, he says, of freedom of speech. "And if they were wrong, sure; but don't just scream well, if you say you're in favour of that you're in favour of putting Jews in gas chambers." Eh? Not everyone who disagrees with him is a "fanatic", I say. These are serious, trustworthy people. "Like who?" "Like my colleague, Ed Vulliamy." Vulliamy's reporting for the Guardian from the war in Bosnia won him the international reporter of the year award in 1993 and 1994. He was present when the ITN footage of the Bosnian Serb concentration camp was filmed and supported their case against LM magazine. "Ed Vulliamy is a very good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true."
E-mail exchange with Chomsky Professor David Campbell, of Durham University in the UK, wrote in detail about the defamation lawsuit of the ITN reporters against Living Marxism. In a November 2009 e-mail to Chomsky, he wrote: In 2002 I published two lengthy, refereed academic articles in the Journal of Human Rights on the controversy surrounding the ITN news reports from the Bosnian Serb camps in 1992. These articles were the result of two years research using many primary sources, and they have been freely available on the web for the last few years. [ Atrocity, memory, photography: imaging the concentration camps of Bosnia – the case of ITN versus Living Marxism, 2002, Part 1 and Part 2, PDF] I am aware that you have made a number of statements repeating and endorsing the substance of the Thomas Deichmann/Living Marxism critique of the ITN reports. I am referring to two items available on your web site, namely the 2005 interview with The Guardian and the 2006 interview with RTS. In light of my research, I find those statements very disturbing. I believe if you examined the empirical details of the case you would recognise that the Deichmann/LM position is without foundation when it comes to the accuracy of the original TV reports and the meaning of the camp at Trnopolje. I hope you will read my work, and I look forward to your response. Chomsky replied to Campbell: Thanks for the reference. I’ll look it up. I doubt that I’ll have any comments, unless you raised the matter of freedom of speech. On the camp and the photo, I’ve barely discussed it, a single phrase in an interview, in fact, which didn’t say much.
Comment: Given the opportunity to discuss the issue of human rights abuses in the former Yugoslavia in the interview he gave for Serbian Television - part of the apparatus used by Slobodan Milosevic to conduct the wars of the 1990s - Chomsky focused carefully on the Fikret Alic photograph ["the thin man"], refuting its significance as evidence of atrocity and avoiding the opportunity to raise the issue of the wider human rights abuses with an organisation closely associated with the perpetrators. As the interview demonstrates, Chomsky's interventions serve his own agenda. When that requires, he draws attention away from the suffering of the vulnerable and attacks those who have sought to hold them to account.
--Letter to Amnesty International UK from Owen Beith.
Chomsky's classification of Trnopolje as a refugee camp people were free to leave (footnotes follow this section) :
(a) Denies reality of Trnopolje described in Dr Merdzanic's evidence given to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia1 and ITN libel hearing2, which Chomsky has no excuse to ignore if commenting on the case.
(b) Willfully ignores role of Trnopolje in Prijedor system of concentration camps3,4 (amply covered in ICTY Tadic; Bassiouni Commission Prijedor Report).
(c) Willfully ignores more prominent reporting of Omarska in same ITN news broadcast.
Dismissive "thin man" reference (Knightley himself uses "emaciated," though suggests Alic is exceptional):
(a) Willfully ignores Merdzanic's evidence of the group of prisoners having arrived from Omarska and Keraterm and even Deichmann's reference in the LM article to arrival from Keraterm, allowing him to ignore ICTY evidence of Omarska and Keraterm conditions, including reference3,5 (ICTY Tadic, Kvocka) to some prisoners having lost 20 to 30 kg weight, some more.
(b) Willfully ignores ITN Omarska footage of gaunt prisoners and reference to food.
(c) Willfully ignores other Trnopolje images in Marshall and Williams footage - there are at least four other obviously emaciated individuals in the sequence with Fikret Alic at the fence (even though none appear in quite as extreme a condition as Alic), and there is no "fat man" in the group. Trnopolje was not simply a transit camp, and it was also not simply a death camp - it was both. There were people who did go there because it seemed safer than hiding in the woods or in their homes in that region. And there were people who came and went from that camp - but there were also people who were raped there, and others who were killed. And people were released from there in exchanges and under international pressure. When Omarska was discovered and was closed, people were moved to Trnopolje - including malnourished captives.
David Campbell has done a thorough job of exposing Chomsky's misguided statements on the Serbian concentration camps and Chomsky's exuberant support for Diana Johnstone's work. Read his detailed discussion here (scroll to "What Chomsky has said on the photographs of the Bosnian camps" ).
In response to Chomsky's claim that Diana Johnstone's book has been favorably reviewed, Marko Hoare writes: The essence of what Chomsky is saying is that Johnstone received a positive review in a respectable scholarly journal, therefore her book must be good. There are, first of all, a number of distortions in Chomsky's claim: International Affairs is the journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, not of the 'Royal Academy' [which is an arts organization]; the RIIA is a para-governmental think tank, not a scholarly institution, therefore it makes no sense to describe International Affairs as 'Britain's leading scholarly foreign affairs journal'; the reviewer was Richard, not Robert Caplan; and his review of Johnstone's book was far from being as positive as Chomsky suggests. Caplan wrote: 'Diana Johnstone has written a revisionist and highly contentious account of Western policy and the dissolution of Yugoslavia... Yet for all of the book's constructive correctives, it is often difficult to recognize the world that Johnstone describes…The book also contains numerous errors of fact, on which Johnstone however relies to strengthen her case... Johnstone herself is very selective.' Indeed, Caplan was overly polite in his criticisms of what is, in reality, an extremely poor book, one that is little more than a polemic in defence of the Serb-nationalist record during the wars of the 1990s - and an ill-informed one at that. Johnstone is not an investigative journalist who spent time in the former Yugoslavia doing fieldwork on the front-lines, like Ed Vulliamy, David Rohde or Roy Gutman. Nor is she a qualified academic who has done extensive research with Serbo-Croat primary sources, like Noel Malcolm or Norman Cigar. Indeed, she appears not to read Serbo-Croat, and her sources are mostly English-language, with a smattering of French and German. In short, she is an armchair Balkan amateur-enthusiast, and her book is of the sort that could be written from any office in Western Europe with access to the Internet. Oliver Kamm adds: Chomsky scarcely gives a reliable account of Caplan’s review. Caplan does give credit to Johnstone for stressing that atrocities were committed not only by the Serbs, and for that reason describes the book as ‘well worth reading’. But Caplan states baldly: "The book also contains numerous errors of fact on which Johnstone, however, relies to strengthen her case. For instance, the 1996 SIPRI yearbook (an 'authoritative source'), which she invokes in support of her claim that the number of people killed in the Bosnian war has been exaggerated, actually offers the higher estimate (250,000) that she challenges (p. 55). … Johnstone herself is very selective. She omits any discussion of Milosevic's own assault on the constitutional order (by abolishing Vojvodina's and Kosovo's autonomy); of the irregular if not extra-legal means he employed to remove the political leadership of Vojvodina, Montenegro and Kosovo; or of the extensive materiel and other support he provided to some of the most vicious Serb militias in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina."
...
Chomsky’s manipulative use of source material is one of the principal charges made against him by academic historians and other critics.... Chomsky describes as ‘a very favourable review’ a sceptical article, written in the diplomatic language of Chatham House, that faults Johnstone for precisely the charge that Emma Brockes raised in her interview with Chomsky: downplaying Serb culpability for the horrors of the Bosnian war.
Regarding Chomsky's comment on Ed Vulliamy's report on the concentration camps being "probably not true," see: Poison in the well of history B y Ed Vulliamy, The Guardian, March 15, 2000. Living Marxism magazine (LM), in denying reports on a Serbian-run concentration camp, accused a British TV station of distorting the truth about Bosnia. Mr. Vulliamy, who filed the first reports on the horrors of the Trnopolje camp, explains why these Serb apologists had to be defeated in court. Incidentally, "putting LM out of business" is misleading. LM refused to withdraw the libel when asked, and after losing the case went bankrupt to avoid paying costs and damages, but nevertheless emerged almost immediately as Spiked Online.
See also: David Campbell's Atrocity, memory, photography: imaging the concentration camps of Bosnia – the case of ITN versus Living Marxism, Part 1 and Part 2, PDF
Oliver Kamm's comments
The Prijedor Report Description of concentration camps of Omarska, Keraterm, and Trnopolje. United Nations Commission of Experts, December 28, 2004
More documents
Book: Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell (Simon & Schuster, 1994)
2. Srebrenica Extensive evidence demonstrates that about 8000 Bosniaks were killed by Serbian forces when they overran Srebrenica in July 1995. Chomsky has made statements that minimize the significance of Srebrenica and suggest that it was not a calculated Serbian campaign of murder. Chomsky:
Srebrenica, the Bosnian town besieged for three years by Serbian forces: "was being used as a base for attacking nearby Serb villages."
Chomsky: Interview with Left Hook magazine Chomsky: [Comparing Srebrenica with the US invasion of Fallujah, Iraq] Which incidentally is very much like Srebrenica - which is universally condemned as genocide -- Srebrenica was an enclave, lightly protected by UN forces, which was being used as a base for attacking nearby Serb villages. It was known that there's going to be retaliation. When there was a retaliation, it was vicious. They trucked out all the women and children, they kept the men inside, and apparently slaughtered them. The estimates are thousands of people slaughtered. Civilization versus Barbarism? Noam Chomsky interviewed by M. Junaid Alam Left Hook, December 17, 2004
Comment: The key words here are "retaliation," "apparently," and "estimates"; the slaughter "apparently" took place; the thousands killed were mere "estimates"; they were, in any case, simply "retaliation" for earlier Muslim crimes. While Chomsky raises doubts about the fact and scale of the killings, he is absolutely categorical that they were retribution for earlier Muslim crimes - the slaughter apparently took place, but if it did, then it was definitely retaliation. See Marko Hoare's discussion of the Guardian interview and Chomsky's position on Srebrenica, Chomsky’s Genocidal Denial, November 21, 2005
Chomsky: Comments posted on Swedish website Swedes who display their outrage over these examples of Serbian genocide clearly have the duty of informing us of their far more bitter condemnations of the [East Timor] massacres (again with decisive US-UK backing) through 1999, leaving maybe 5-6000 civilian corpses, according to the Church in East Timor and the leading Western historian of Timor, the British scholar John Taylor --- all BEFORE the paroxysm of terror in late August 1999, after which the US and UK (and for all I know, Sweden) continued to support the Indonesian murderers who were already responsible for the death of about 1/3 of the population in pure aggression decisively supported by the US and UK (and when it came time to make some profit from it, Sweden). Perhaps they have issued bitter condemnations of their Western allies (and Sweden). If so, they have a right to use the term "genocide" in the case of the terrible but much lesser crimes of Racak and Srebrenica.
Marko Hoare writes: In the year 1999, the Indonesian army and its East Timorese auxiliaries killed 1,400–1,500 East Timorese civilians according to the CAVR survey, a figure apparently supported by a study carried out by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and cited in the CAVR survey. In 1995, the RDC’s figures confirm that Serb forces massacred over 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica. Chomsky is on record as describing the Srebrenica massacre as ‘much lesser’ in scale than the Indonesian massacres in East Timor in 1999. He achieves this by using high estimates for East Timorese losses – high estimates of the kind that Chomskyites regularly cite as proof of ‘exaggeration’ and of ‘pro-war propaganda’ when made for Bosnian or |
Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts. Human spoken language is fundamentally combinatorial. Speech sounds combine to form words, and words combine to form phrases and sentences. The flexibility of these combinations, transforms our limited-precision motor and perceptual systems into an unbounded system of thought and communication. Wilhelm von Humboldt characterized this as ‘making infinite use of finite means’ [].
2 Hockett C.F. Logical considerations in the study of animal communication. Linguists tradtionally separate the combinatorial nature of language, into two levels, each operating on a different time-scale []. At the shorter phonological level, meaningless sounds are combined to form meaningful words (e.g., /k/+/æ/+/t/ = ‘cat’). At the longer syntactic level, words are combined to form sentences (‘cats purr’). Research on animal communication often makes use of such linguistic terminology, characterizing systems as primarily phonological or primarily syntactic, sometimes drawing parallels between specific elements of animal vocalization and particular linguistic concepts.
3 Engesser S.
et al. Experimental Evidence for Phonemic Contrasts in a Nonhuman Vocal System. Box 1 Definition of Terms Phones and Phonemes: Linguists define a phone as the smallest perceptually distinguishable segment of sound in a stream of speech (e.g., the /c/ in ‘the cat meowed’). The concept of a phoneme was initially motivated by a desire to understand patterns of organization among the tremendous diversity of phones heard in languages. The traditional method of demonstrating phonemes is to find word pairs (e.g., ‘pat/bat’), where a minimal change in the phone results in a different meaning. If it does, the sounds (/p/ versus /b/) are considered to be phonemes. If it doesn’t, the new sound is considered an allophonic variant or allophone [ 4 Crystal D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. 9 Crystal D. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Linguists define a phone as the smallest perceptually distinguishable segment of sound in a stream of speech (e.g., the /c/ in ‘the cat meowed’). The concept of a phoneme was initially motivated by a desire to understand patterns of organization among the tremendous diversity of phones heard in languages. The traditional method of demonstrating phonemes is to find word pairs (e.g., ‘pat/bat’), where a minimal change in the phone results in a different meaning. If it does, the sounds (/p/ versus /b/) are considered to be phonemes. If it doesn’t, the new sound is considered an allophonic variant or allophone []. Combinatoriality and Compositionality: Combinatoriality is a property by which new compounds are built out of smaller parts. This definition is independent of meaning. Many animal communication systems are clearly combinatorial. Compositionality is a property of human language whereby semantic units (like words) are combined into larger compounds (phrases and sentences) whose composite meanings are functions of, but not wholly determined by, the independent units. By present knowledge, no animal communication system has this property. The eminent birdsong biologist Peter Marler addressed this issue with his distinction between phonological syntax, which is combinatorial, and lexical syntax, which is combinatorial and compositional [ 10 Marler P. Origins of music and speech: insights from animals. Combinatoriality is a property by which new compounds are built out of smaller parts. This definition is independent of meaning. Many animal communication systems are clearly combinatorial. Compositionality is a property of human language whereby semantic units (like words) are combined into larger compounds (phrases and sentences) whose composite meanings are functions of, but not wholly determined by, the independent units. By present knowledge, no animal communication system has this property. The eminent birdsong biologist Peter Marler addressed this issue with his distinction between phonological syntax, which is combinatorial, and lexical syntax, which is combinatorial and compositional []. A new paper by Engesser and colleagues [] provides an interesting example: they propose that certain elements of chestnut-crowned babbler (Pomatostomus ruficeps) vocalizations behave like human phonemes ( Box 1 ). They focus on two tonal call elements, ‘A’ and ‘B’, differentiated by pitch contour. These elements occur naturally as part of behavior associated with flight (in the sequence ‘AB’) and prompting begging during nestling provisioning (in the sequence ‘BAB’). Using playback experiments with captured wild birds, the authors demonstrate that the prompt call sequence BAB stimulates changes in listener behavior that are not observed in response to the B element alone or in response to the flight call sequence AB. Accordingly, they argue that the addition of the B element to the sequence AB changes the meaning of the call, just as an additional phoneme changes the meaning of a word (e.g., /b/+ ‘it’ = ‘bit’).
This is an intriguing demonstration of a novel form of combinatoriality in animal communication. However, several key differences between the elements of babbler vocalization and human phonemes suggest that a parallel is incomplete. First, the babbler system is not very generative. Neither A nor B occurs in the babbler repertoire outside of flight and prompt calls, whereas human phonemes are widely distributed throughout a language. Second, A and B are acoustically isolated (separated by silences), whereas most human phonemes are fused together into unbroken syllables. Third, the difference between AB and BAB is a case of presence or absence (like ‘cat’ versus ‘at’), whereas human phonemic contrasts are typically discriminative (like ‘cat’ vs ‘bat’).
4 Crystal D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. While these superficial issues might be argued to represent matters of degree rather than kind, a deeper issue arises when the term ‘phoneme’ is applied outside human language. In linguistics, a phoneme is defined as the smallest unit in the sound system of a language that serves to distinguish meaning []. Because this definition relies on ‘meaning’ – a subjectively informed concept that currently defies neurobiological analysis – it cannot be transparently applied to other species. Attempts to shoehorn elements of animal communication into the phoneme concept quickly lead to questions that do not allow empirical analysis, such as what do babbler vocalizations mean. In human language, the same phoneme string can be uttered with myriad different intonations and flourishes, conveying subtly different emotional and pragmatic intentions (e.g., saying ‘no’ can convey displeasure, sarcasm, sincerity, uncertainty, etc.). The lack of an objective definition for meaning renders parallels between animals and humans problematic, if not theoretically misleading. Similar issues arise when other linguistic concepts are applied to animal communication. For example, the distinction between phonology and syntax is also dependent on meaning. Given that our access to meaning in animal communication is fundamentally limited to what we can infer from behavioral observation’ – we have no introspective access as for human language – characterizing certain levels of organization as phonological and others as syntactic risks anthropomorphically obscuring rather than clarifying how animal communication systems work.
3 Engesser S.
et al. Experimental Evidence for Phonemic Contrasts in a Nonhuman Vocal System. 5 Ouattara K.
et al. Campbell's monkeys use affixation to alter call meaning. 6 Ouattara K.
et al. Campbell's monkeys concatenate vocalizations into context-specific call sequences. 7 Templeton C.N.
et al. Allometry of alarm calls: black-capped chickadees encode information about predator size. These issues aside, Engesser et al.’s [] experimental results provide new evidence that nonhuman animals, can combine acoustically differentiable elements productively, and that different sequences can affect listener behavior in different ways. Similar abilities have been reported in mammals and other birds. For example, field studies with Campbell's monkeys (Cercopithecus campbelli) have shown that boom calls are associated with group cohesion and movement, and krak-oo calls with nonspecific predator activity, but sequences of booms followed by sequences of krak-oos occur almost exclusively with falling trees or branches []. Among birds, black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) have been shown to alter the number of trailing dee elements in their eponymous chick-a-dee alarm calls as a function of predator size, responding with more dees to more dangerous predators []. Thus, call sequences appear to be a level of organization worthy of further attention in animal communication and playback studies, which have typically focused mostly on single calls: This is true regardless of whether we label elements as phonemes, or categorize systems as phonology or syntax.
8 Yip M.J. The search for phonology in other species. Finally, this new work on babblers marks what we hope will be a promising resurgence of interest in ‘phonological’ aspects of animal communication which, after a flurry of interest in the 1970s, has largely languished (cf. []). Research in animal communication focusing on issues of syntax or meaning often neglects equally fascinating questions about combinatoric power at the level of acoustically differentiable units. Some of the most complex and generative animal communication systems known to science are traditionally termed ‘song’ (e.g., birdsong or humpback whale song), suggesting that parallels with music (which lacks propositional meaning) may be more profitable than parallels with language. Accordingly, these systems may provide a richer source of insight for understanding how combinatoric communication systems can evolve than do such ‘meaningful’ calls as alarm or food calls. Thus, parallels between animal communication and music or phonology may ultimately prove more useful for understanding the evolution of communication than parallels with syntax or semantics.
Article Info Publication History Identification DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.08.011 Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ScienceDirect Access this article on ScienceDirectThe Twelfth (also called the Glorious Twelfth or Orangemen's Day)[1] is an Ulster Protestant celebration held on 12 July. It began during the late 18th century in Ulster. It celebrates the Glorious Revolution (1688) and victory of Protestant king William of Orange over Catholic king James II at the Battle of the Boyne (1690), which began the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. On and around the Twelfth, large parades are held by the Orange Order and Ulster loyalist marching bands, streets are bedecked with British flags and bunting, and large towering bonfires are lit. Today the Twelfth is mainly celebrated in Northern Ireland (where it is a public holiday), but smaller celebrations are held in other parts of the world where Orange lodges have been set up. The Twelfth involves thousands of participants and spectators.
In Ulster, where about half the population is from a Protestant background and half from a Catholic background, the Twelfth has been accompanied by violence since its beginning. Many Catholics and Irish nationalists see the Orange Order and its marches as sectarian, triumphalist and supremacist. The Order is also politically a unionist/loyalist organisation. Violence related to the Twelfth in Northern Ireland worsened during the 30-year ethno-political conflict known as the Troubles. The Drumcree conflict is the most well-known dispute involving Orange marches. Attempts have recently been made to downplay the political aspects of the marches and present the Twelfth as a cultural, family-friendly event at which tourists are welcome. Although most events pass off peacefully, some continue to result in violence.
When 12 July falls on a Sunday, the parades are held on the 13th instead.
Origins [ edit ]
The Shankill Road decorated with flags and bunting for The Twelfth
Orangemen commemorated several events dating from the 17th century onwards, celebrating the continued dominance of Protestantism in Ireland after the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and triumph in the Williamite War in Ireland (1689–91). Early celebrations were 23 October, the anniversary of the 1641 rebellion (an attempted coup d'état by Catholic gentry who tried to seize control of the English administration in Ireland), and 4 November, the birthday of William of Orange, Protestant victor of the Williamite war in the 1690s. Both of these anniversaries faded in popularity by the end of the 18th century.
The Twelfth itself originated as a celebration of the Battle of Aughrim, which took place on 12 July 1691 in the Julian calendar then in use. Aughrim was the decisive battle of the Williamite war, in which the predominantly Irish Catholic Jacobite army was destroyed and the remainder capitulated at Limerick. The Twelfth in the early 18th century was a popular commemoration of this battle, featuring bonfires and parades. The Battle of the Boyne (fought on 1 July 1690) was commemorated with smaller parades on 1 July. However, the two events were combined in the late 18th century.[2] The first reason for this was the British switch to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, which re-positioned the date of the Battle of the Boyne to 11 July New Style, nominally the eve of the Battle of Aughrim, on 12 July Old Style (23 July N.S.). The second reason was the foundation of the Orange Order in 1795. The Order preferred the Boyne, due to William of Orange's presence there. It has also been suggested that in the 1790s (a time of Roman Catholic resurgence) the Boyne, where the Jacobites were routed, was more appealing to the Order than Aughrim, where they had fought hard and died in great numbers.[3]
The Order's first ever marches took place on 12 July 1796 in Portadown, Lurgan and Waringstown.[4] The Twelfth parades of the early 19th century often led to public disorder, so much so that the Orange Order and the Twelfth were banned in the 1830s and 40s (see below).
Events [ edit ]
An "Orange Arch" and bunting raised over a road in Annalong (see here for more pictures)
Lead-up to the Twelfth [ edit ]
In the weeks leading up to the Twelfth, Orange Order and other Ulster loyalist marching bands hold numerous parades in Northern Ireland. The most common of these are lodge parades, in which one Orange lodge marches with one band. Others, such as the "mini-Twelfth" at the start of July, involve several lodges.
From June to August, Protestant, unionist areas of Northern Ireland are bedecked with flags and bunting, which are usually flown from lamp-posts and houses. The most common flags flown are the Union Jack and Ulster Banner. Kerbstones may be painted red, white and blue and murals may be made. Steel or wooden arches, bedecked with flags and Orange symbolism, are raised over certain streets.[5] These 'Orange arches' are inspired by triumphal arches.
As well as the Union Jack and Ulster Banner, the flags of illegal loyalist paramilitary groups—such as the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA)—are flown in some areas. The raising of these flags near Catholic/Irish nationalist neighbourhoods, or in "neutral" areas, often leads to tension and sometimes violence. It is seen as deliberately provocative and intimidating.[6]
Eleventh Night [ edit ]
A bonfire prepared for the 11th night in Newtownabbey
On the night before The Twelfth—the "Eleventh Night"—huge towering bonfires are lit in many Protestant unionist neighbourhoods in Northern Ireland. In many of these areas the bonfires are family-friendly community celebrations. However, not all Protestants attend the bonfires and most Catholics avoid them. They have been condemned for displays of sectarian and ethnic hatred, anti-social behaviour, and for the damage and pollution caused by the fires.[7] The flag of the Republic of Ireland, Irish nationalist symbols, Catholic symbols, and effigies, are usually burnt on the fires.[8] More recently, symbols of the large Polish immigrant community have been burnt on the fires, which the Polish Association of Northern Ireland has described as "racist intimidation".[9] Loyalist paramilitaries have also used the event to hold "shows of strength", in which masked gunmen fire volleys of shots into the air[8] and petrol bombs used to light the bonfire. However, in recent years, there have been attempts to make the bonfires more family-friendly and environmentally-friendly.[10]
Main events [ edit ]
Orangemen and supporting bands parading in Omagh on 12 July 2008
The main way in which the Twelfth is celebrated is through large parades involving Orangemen and supporting bands. Most of the parades are in Northern Ireland, although Orange lodges elsewhere often hold parades too. The parade usually begins at an Orange Hall, proceeds through the town or city and out to a large park or field where the marchers, their friends and family, and the general public gather to eat, drink and listen to speeches by clergymen, politicians and senior members of the Order. In the past the Twelfth has been a major venue for discussion of political issues. A church service will also be held and sometimes band prizes will be awarded.[11] Within Northern Ireland, each District Lodge usually organises its own parade. In rural districts the parade will rotate around various towns, sometimes favouring those in which there is less likely to be trouble, but in other years choosing those in which it is felt the 'right to march' needs to be defended.
Orangemen in full regalia on 12 July 2011 in Belfast
In Northern Ireland, there is a long tradition of Protestant and loyalist marching bands, which can be found in most towns. The Orangemen hire these bands to march with them on the Twelfth. An instrument almost unique to these marches is the Lambeg drum. Popular songs include "The Sash" and "Derry's Walls". Explicitly violent songs such as "Billy Boys" may also be played.
The vast majority of marchers are men, but there are some all-women bands and a few mixed bands. Some all-male bands have female flag or banner carriers. There are also some Women's Orange Lodges which take part in the parades. Orangewomen have paraded on the Twelfth in some rural areas since at least the mid-20th century, but were banned from the Belfast parades until the 1990s.
Orangemen returning from the field less formally
Orangemen on parade typically wear a dark suit, an Orange sash, white gloves and a bowler hat.[10] Certain Orangemen carry a ceremonial sword. In hot weather, many lodges will parade in short-sleeved shirts. Orangewomen have not developed a standard dress code, but usually dress formally. The supporting bands each have their own uniforms and colours. Both the Orangemen and bands carry elaborate banners depicting Orange heroes, historic or Biblical scenes, and/or political symbols and slogans. The most popular image is that of King William of Orange crossing the River Boyne during the famous battle there.[12]
At the field, some lodges and bands don humorous outfits or accessories and make the return journey in them, and the mood is generally more mellow, although in times of tension it can also be more aggressive.[citation needed]
The Northern Ireland parades are given extensive local TV and press coverage and the BBC programme The Twelfth is the longest running outside broadcast programme in Northern Ireland.
Controversies and violence [ edit ]
In Northern Ireland, where almost half the population is from an Irish Catholic background, The Twelfth is a tense time. Orange marches through Irish Catholic and Irish nationalist neighbourhoods are usually met with opposition from residents, and this sometimes leads to violence. Many people see these marches as sectarian, triumphalist,[13][14][15][16] supremacist,[16][17][18][19] and an assertion of British and Ulster Protestant dominance. The political aspects[20][21][22] have caused further tension. Marchers insist that they have the right to celebrate their culture and walk on public streets, particularly along their 'traditional routes'.[23][24] In a 2011 survey of Orangemen throughout Northern Ireland, 58% of Orangemen said they should be allowed to march through Catholic or Irish nationalist areas with no restrictions; 20% said they should negotiate with residents first.[25] Some have argued that members of both communities once participated in the event;[26] although it has always been a Protestant affair and many Catholics opposed the marches.[27]
A depiction of 12 July 1871 riot in New York City
Violence has accompanied Twelfth marches since their beginning.
During the Troubles (late 1960s to late 1990s), the Twelfth was often accompanied by riots and paramilitary violence.[citation needed] In 1972, three people were shot dead on the Twelfth in Portadown and two people were killed in Belfast. Of the five in total, two were killed by Republican groups and three were killed by Loyalist groups.[35] On the Twelfth in 1998, during the Drumcree conflict, three young boys were killed when loyalists firebombed their house in Ballymoney. The boys' mother was a Catholic, and their home was in a mainly Protestant housing estate. The killings provoked widespread anger from both Catholics and Protestants.
The Shankill Protestant Boys on 12 July 2011 in Belfast
Since the Troubles began, some bands hired to appear at Twelfth marches have openly shown support for loyalist paramilitary groups, either by carrying paramilitary flags and banners or sporting paramilitary names and emblems.[36][37][38] A number of prominent loyalist militants were Orangemen and took part in their marches. In February 1992, the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) shot dead five Catholic civilians in a betting shop in Belfast. When Orangemen marched past the shop that 12 July, some marchers held up five fingers in mockery of the five dead. The Secretary of State, Patrick Mayhew, said that they "would have disgraced a tribe of cannibals".[39]
Every Twelfth between 1970 and 2005, British Army soldiers were deployed in Belfast to help police the parades.[7] Due to improved policing, dialogue between marchers and residents, and the Northern Ireland peace process, parades have been generally more peaceful since the 2000s. The Parades Commission was set up in 1998 to deal with contentious parades.
During the Troubles some Irish Catholic and nationalist areas organised festivals to keep their children away from the parades, where they might come into conflict with Protestant children, and to make the Twelfth more enjoyable for their communities.
The Twelfth outside Northern Ireland [ edit ]
Although mostly a Northern Irish event, the Twelfth is also celebrated in other countries with strong links to Ulster or a history of settlement by Irish Protestants. Outside of Northern Ireland, there are commemorations of The Twelfth in Scotland – particularly in and around Glasgow, where most Irish immigrants settled. In England and Wales, Orange marches aren't common and Orange Order membership is found primarily in the Merseyside region, although numbers are still small.[40] Marches here tend to be held a week or so before the Twelfth, due to the number of bands and lodges who travel to Northern Ireland to march there. The Liverpool lodges parade both in the city and in the seaside resort of Southport on 12 July.
There are also Twelfth marches in Canada and Australia. As the longest consecutively held parade in North America (starting in 1821), the Twelfth March was the largest parade in Toronto[41] when thousands of Orangemen would march in front of tens of thousands of spectators, until the 1970s.[42] At the time, the Orange Order held such sway that membership in the Order was an unspoken prerequisite for holding civic office.[43] However, the march's popularity has drastically diminished in recent years, as only about 500 people participate in modern Orange parades.[41]'Orangemen's Day' is still a significant holiday in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, where it is an official provincial paid holiday.[44] An increase in membership in recent years has seen a revival of the Order in Australia and an annual Twelfth of July parade is currently held in Adelaide.[45] Parades were also formerly held in New Zealand on the Twelfth.[46]
Until the partition of Ireland, the Twelfth was celebrated by Protestants in many parts of Ireland, but the reduction of Protestant political influence in what is now the Republic of Ireland has meant the only remaining yearly parade is in Rossnowlagh, which was held on the Twelfth until the 1970s, when it was moved to the weekend before.[47]
In July 2010, former Tánaiste Michael McDowell said that the Twelfth should be made a national holiday in the Republic of Ireland as well as in Northern Ireland.[48].
See also [ edit ]When you are Gene Krupa and you’re the drummer for Benny Goodman’s band in 1936, it’s important that your drum kit is the best. And if you’re Gene Krupa and you’re from Chicago, who do you turn to for a well made set of drums? That would be the Slingerland Banjo & Drum Company. But, you ask, what does that have to do with Schaumburg?
It begins with Walter Robert Slingerland who was born in Manistee, Michigan on March 30, 1889 to Samuel and Amalia Slingerland. One of eleven children, he left the farm and his family and moved to Chicago where he went to work for Armour & Co., the big meatpacking firm. Eventually, he was transferred to South Bend, IN and later, Detroit. On June 5, 1917 he registered for the World War I draft and was called for enlistment almost a year later on April 26, 1918. He served with the 85th division U.S. Army and was released the same year on November 27.
He went back to work for Armour and, while working there, his oldest brother Henry convinced him to move back to Chicago. Once there, he joined him at the Slingerland Correspondence School of Music, where they offered a free, Slingerland-manufactured ukelele and twelve lessons. As stated in The Slingerland Book by Rob Cook, “H.H. was considered the money man while W.R. was in production and day-to-day operations.” They eventually moved into producing banjos and guitars and were well on their way with drums in 1929 by the time their second drum catalog came out.
On January 12, 1924 Walter married Helen Rittenhouse of Hillsboro, Ohio in Chicago. They had their first child, Robert, in 1925 followed by Walter Jr. in 1927. The family lived on Belden Avenue on Chicago’s northwest side but, like his older brother, Henry, Walter was eager to get back to his farming roots. According to a 1959 article in the Daily Herald, “in 1941 they [Walter and Helen] purchased the 160 acres on Schaumburg Road where they still make their home.” This land (where the Schaumburg village offices are today) was originally purchased from the government by Conrad Salge in 1847 and eventually sold to a group of investors in the 1920s who created a golf course on the property. According to Wayne Nebel, one of our oral historians, the Slinglerlands converted the property back to its farming roots and paid tenant farmers to work the land.
In 1945, during the final war year, their son Walter Jr. joined the Navy. According to the same Daily Herald article mentioned above, the Slingerlands moved their household to Schaumburg Township the following year and lived in “the house which was built over 100 years ago [and] was remodeled by Walter and Helen soon after they bought the property.” It was a pivotal year for Walter Slingerland because, not only did he move his family but his brother Henry died on March 13. Walter subsequently became president of the company that was now simply called the Slingerland Drum Company and commuted into the city for work.
In 1951 Walter Jr. married his own Helen who was part of the Siems family of Roselle. The elder Slingerlands gave a parcel of land to the young couple on the edge of Schaumburg Road. This is the building permit from Cook County that was signed on December 11, 1950 by Walter Slingerland Sr. who owned the property. It appears Walter split his 160 acres and denoted this as an 80 acre farm/tenant parcel. Note that a fair amount of the fees were for the septic field that would be added to the property.
Walter and Helen then built and moved into this ranch house in the same year they married. The ranch was designed by Elmer Gylleck, Architect of Elgin, Illinois.
You’ll notice that the breezeway was closed in at some point and a second garage was added. A third bedroom was also added on in the back of the house in the 1970s.
Three years later, in 1954, Walter Sr retired from the Slingerland Drum Company. Having lived in rural Schaumburg Township for eight years, it must have been apparent to Walter that change was coming. Given the small population, his business background and his farm’s prominent location on Schaumburg Road, he was familiar with others who were just as concerned about the coming growth. As a result, Mr. Slingerland was placed on the ballot for village trustee in 1956. He was successfully elected as one of the village’s first six trustees and served in that position for twelve years until 1969.
During those years he served primarily as Building Commissioner. This was a position that oversaw the entire building process from permit to construction to signing off on the completed structure. The village now has multiple people to handle this process so we can imagine how, in the early years, Mr. Slingerland’s personal involvement was so crucial. Below is a sample building permit that Mr. Slingerland signed with a stamp of his signature.
He also served on the Zoning Board of Appeals, the Plan Commission, in the Public Works Department, twice on the Township’s Quadrennial Land Assessment Committee which evaluated land values, and was the trustee who pushed to change the village’s name from Schaumburg Center to Schaumburg. In addition, his wife Helen served as the village’s first treasurer and was a charter member of the Schaumburg Historical Society. Their involvement was key at such a dynamic period in village history.
Prior to his retirement, the Slingerlands sold their property in 1962 and built a new ranch home at 400 Columbine Drive in Lexington Fields. They sold their portion of the farm to William Lambert who intended to develop a large scale, high density apartment complex in the area. He also planned to donate 40 acres of the property to the Village of Schaumburg with the intent that it would be the site of a civic/culture center. The Heritage Center complex never did get built but the village opened their Municipal Center in 1974 on the lovely spot we find it today.
Amazingly enough, the old home that the Slingerlands bought in 1941 survived the development. During construction of the Municipal Center in 1973 or 1974, the home was moved across the street to the St. Peter Lutheran Church property and can still be found there.
If the dates are correct, this makes that home one of the oldest structures in the village. As you can see in the 1978 photo above, the home was a bit worse for wear but new siding was added around 1982. Thirty years later in 2012, the house was resided once again and remains in good condition.
When the elder Slingerlands sold their property, the younger Slingerlands opted not to sell and remained in their ranch home. They were very active at St. Peter Lutheran Church and Walter served as one of the first presidents of Schaumburg High School’s parent group, the VIP’s. As the village property grew to include the Prairie Arts Center for the Arts, the Slingerlands sold their house to the Village in 1989. They worked out an agreement that allowed them to stay in their home until a time when they were ready to move. The home would then revert to the village. This happened in 1994 when the Slingerlands moved from the area.
The house was remodeled and the Nursing and Senior Services Division of the village opened in 1995. This past summer, in 2017, the village board voted to move the Division out of the house and into the Market Square shopping center at Plum Grove and Schaumburg Road. This paved the way for future destruction of the house which will occur sometime after the move in July or August of 2018.
We are fortunate that we still have the original house on the St. Peter property, close to the final resting place of Walter and Helen Slingerland Jr. at St. Peter Lutheran Cemetery. Both generations of Slingerlands definitely left their mark on the area, whether it was their houses or their time. In commemoration of all they gave, Slingerland Park in the Pheasant Walk subdivision and Slingerland Drive off of Weathersfield are named for the family. Do take a moment and think of them the next time you are there.
Jane Rozek
Local History Librarian
Schaumburg Township District Library
jrozek@stdl.org
Many thanks to Mary Helen Slingerland Owens, daughter of Walter and Helen Slingerland, for discussing details in this blog posting. She was most gracious with her quick responses and also passed on the building permit and architectural sketch of her parents’ home.
Details for this blog posting were derived from the obituaries of the Slingerlands, war records on Ancestry.com, various articles from the Herald and The Slingerland Book which the library owns.
The photo of the Slingerland Drum Company comes from coopersvintagedrums.com We thank them for the photo.2020
Acura TLX: Look for a hybrid or plug-in hybrid version of the TLX in 2020, when it joins the Accord and others on Honda's modular platform.
Audi A6/S6: Expect the redesigned sedans to arrive in 2020 with Audi's e-tron plug-in hybrid global powertrain available in the U.S.
Audi A7/S7/RS 7: A new generation of Audi's fastback sedan will arrive in 2020 with e-tron plug-in hybrid models to follow.
BMW i3: A redesign of the i3 is expected in 2020.
BMW X3: An electric version of BMW's small crossover will arrive in 2020.
Chevrolet Bolt EV: Chevy will look to update the Bolt, which offers an estimated 238-mile range per battery charge, in about three years.
Chrysler Pacifica: The well-regarded minivan, which comes in a plug-in hybrid version with a battery range of 33 miles, will be freshened in 2020.
Genesis GV70: The compact crossover bows in 2020 and should become Genesis' volume seller. Hybrid or plug-in hybrid versions are possible.
Maserati Alfieri: The concept two-seat coupe debuted at the 2014 Geneva auto show and was to arrive in 2016, followed immediately by a convertible. Now it looks like the Alfieri hardtop won't arrive until at least 2020, and it's rumored to be undergoing a redesign as an EV.
Mercedes-Benz E class: A plug-in version of the E-class sedan already is sold outside the U.S. but likely won't come here until after a 2020 freshening of the vehicle line.
Mercedes-Benz EQA: A production version of the EQA concept, a compact hatchback shown in Frankfurt, is expected to go to market around 2020.
Mini Countryman: Mini's largest nameplate, which gained a plug-in variant with this year's redesign, will be freshened in 2020.
Mitsubishi EV: With the electric i-MiEV getting the ax, Mitsubishi's replacement EV likely will come in the form of a rebadged or reconfigured second-gen Nissan Leaf. The body style remains unknown; it could be a crossover. Look for this to debut around 2020 with a range of more than 200 miles on a charge.
Tesla Model S: After giving its flagship sedan a new nose in April 2016, Tesla is expected to redesign the Model S in 2020.
Tesla Model X: Given the compact crossover's delayed launch, a redesign is unlikely until 2024 or 2025. The falcon-wing doors have proved to be a manufacturing headache for the automaker, and will probably stay for the short term to make the most of Tesla's investment. A mild freshening — such as the grille change the Model S received in 2016 — could come in 2020.
Porsche sedan EV: A production version of the 600-hp Mission E concept will go on sale in the U.S. in late 2019 or, more likely, early 2020, though with a different name. It's expected to have a higher level of autonomous driving features than Porsche has put in its vehicles to date and multiple variants with different levels of power. Porsche is targeting annual sales of about 20,000 vehicles.
Volkswagen EV: VW will launch the first EV based on its new MEB EV platform architecture in the U.S. in 2020. It is expected to be based on the I.D. Crozz crossover concept the brand showed at the Shanghai auto show.
Volkswagen e-Golf: A redesign of the Golf and e-Golf has been moved up a year to 2020.While the repeal of Denmark's "largely outdated" blasphemy law was hailed as a move cementing the country's profile as a bastion of freedom of speech, it is also feared to have severe security implications.
© AP Photo / John McConnico Go Forth and Blaspheme! Denmark Revokes Profanity Law for Freedom of Speech
The reason is that some people could possibly perceive the abolition of the blasphemy law as a green light for anyone hoping to incite religious tension by setting fire to symbols of faith. The change in legislation has already resulted in a notorious case against a Danish Quran burner being thrown out of court. Before this landmark decision, anyone deriding, insulting or ridiculing other people's religious beliefs risked being fined or imprisoned for up to four months.
However, the blasphemy clause was applied somewhat arbitrarily, as the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, which kindled anti-D |
be activists than rock stars.
Similar: Graceful Is All Talk
Actress:
Journalist:
[Optional] Do you think they make a good couple?It appears the Senate may be moving closer to a final vote on the late Mauril Belanger's private member's bill that, if passed, would change the lyrics of O Canada to make them gender neutral.
Today, at third reading for bill C-210, the Senate voted down an amendment moved by Conservative Senator Don Plett, and passed by a Senate committee, that would have likely doomed the bill.
The late Liberal MP Mauril Bélanger's bill will replace "in all thy sons command" with "in all of us command" in the English version of the anthem.
Plett said he did not feel comfortable altering the song and suggested a compromise to change the lyrics to "thou dost in us command" instead — reverting to the original wording of the song penned by Judge Robert Stanley Weir in 1908.
And while Plett's intervention kept the language gender neutral, had the amendment passed, it would have required the bill to be sent back to the House of Commons for another vote.
Because Bélanger has died — he passed away last summer from ALS — MPs would have to unanimously agree for another MP to act as sponsor of the bill to oppose the amendment, something that is unlikely.
With Plett's amendment being defeated in the Senate Thrusday by a vote of 41 against, 18 for and nine abstentions, it is possible now for Senators to pass the bill and send it on to the Governor General for royal assent in time for Canada Day.
A final vote on the bill can, however, still be delayed. Any member of the Senate can adjourn debate in their name, punting a vote or delaying further discussion indefinitely.MPs took the chance to slam the government over its plans to stop local authority boycotts of Israeli goods at a Westminster debate yesterday.
The debate was the first opportunity MPs had had to discuss the procurement policy note since it was announced in Israel in February by Cabinet Office Minister, Matthew Hancock.
MPs wanted to know why the government had made the announcement in Tel Aviv and not in Parliament, where it could have been subjected to proper scrutiny.
They also raised the issue of the new Cabinet Office guidelines contradicting existing Foreign Office guidelines, which warn of the “clear risks related to economic and financial activities in the settlements”.
“Indeed, the Foreign Office guidance is very clear, whereas the procurement policy note is very unclear”, Andy Slaughter, MP, told the debate.
He added “that may be intentional” and asked if “the actual aim is not to change the law, but to discourage and blackmail local authorities into not taking steps that may be perfectly legitimate and that the Foreign Office is encouraging them to take?”
Simon Danczuk, MP, said: “There is no doubt that there is confusion, because, in January, the Government said they were opposed to the development of settlements in the West Bank. In one breath, the Government condemns the illegal settlements, and in another they say that local authorities will face severe consequences should they chose to avoid investing in them. The entire advice needs to be cleared up.”
Sara Apps, interim Director of Palestine Solidarity Campaign, welcomed the debate.
She said: “Yesterday, MPs made clear their belief that local councils are acting legitimately if they refuse to do business with companies involved in the Israeli occupation.
“The government was put on the spot yesterday, but continued in its attempts to muddy the waters over ethical procurement. We echo MPs’ concerns that the government is refusing to act with clarity over this very important issue, and add our voice to calls for clear and transparent guidance.
“In the meantime, we will continue to work to make local councils aware that their right to make ethical decisions in procurement and investment has not been removed by these guidelines.”The data come ahead of Friday's closely watched July jobs report, which is expected to show 85,000 nonfarm payrolls and a 9.2 percent unemployment rate.
It is further bad news for the U.S., which teetered on the brink of defaulting on its debt repayments before finally rubberstamping a deal to raise the debt ceilingand cut public spending by more than $1 trillion.
The pace of private sector job growth slowed in July with employers adding 114,000 positions, a report by a payrolls processor showed.
Economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast the ADP National Employment Report would show a gain of 100,000 jobs. June's private payrolls were revised down to an increase of 145,000 from the previously reported 157,000.
The report is jointly developed with Macroeconomic Advisers. Economists often refer to the report to fine-tune their expectations for the payrolls numbers, though it is not always accurate in predicting the outcome.
"This only adds fuel to the argument that the slowdown story is here in the U.S. I am fairly confident that people are going to be scaling back their estimates for nonfarm payrolls on Friday,'' said Tom Porcelli, chief U.S. economist at RBC Capital Markets in New York. "While it is a good thing that small and medium-sized companies are adding payrolls, there is no doubt that the pace has slowed.''
U.S. stock index futures added to gains immediately following the report, while Treasury prices slipped and the dollar rose against the Swiss franc.
Layoff Wave Lifts Job Cuts to 16-Month High
A separate report showed the number of planned layoffs at U.S. firms rose to a 16-month high in July, as sectors which had been seeing fairly few layoffs unexpectedly bled jobs.
Employers announced 66,414 planned job cuts last month, up 60.3 percent from 41,432 in June, according to a report from consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
The job cuts were up 60 percent from June, and 59 percent higher than the 41,676 layoffs recorded in July 2010. Its was the largest monthly total since March 2010, and the first month this year that the government was not the biggest job cutter.
"What may be most worrisome about the July surge is that the heaviest layoffs occurred in industries that, until now, have enjoyed relatively low job-cut levels," John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in a statement.
Layoffs in the pharmaceutical and retail sectors overtook nonprofit and government job cuts last month, accounting for 20.32 percent and 16.93 percent of announcements, respectively.
The cuts were the result of large layoffs by a handful of private-sector employers, including Merck, Borders, Cisco Systems, Lockheed Martin and Boston Scientific.The city of Portland, OR will empty a 38-million gallon reservoir after a teenager allegedly urinated in it, according to the Associated Press. It's the second time in three years that Portland is flushing its Mount Tabor reservoir after a urine-related incident.
The reservoir is open-air and sits exposed to all of nature, leading many parties to question how necessary a draining would be, or how polluted 38 million gallons of water can really be by a single man's urine.
David Shaff, Portland's water bureau administrator, reserves a special disgust specifically for human urine. In 2011, when Shaff drained the reservoir following a urination, he reasoned to the Portland Mercury, "Do you want to be drinking someone's pee?… There's probably no regulation that says I have to be doing it but, again, who wants to be drinking pee?" This time around, Shaff wrote in a statement, "Our customers have an expectation that their water is not deliberately contaminated."
A half-liter of urine dumped in a 143 million-liter reservoir would get a urea concentration of about 3 parts per billion, according to Slate. (We calculated it would be a 50 nanoMolar solution.) Meanwhile, the EPA allows concentrations of arsenic in drinking water up to 10 ppb. Salt water has a salt concentration of around 35,000,000 parts per billion, or 600 milliMolar.
In an interview with Vocativ, the teenager in question, Dallas Swonger, denied urinating in the reservoir at all, stating he actually hit a wall instead. "I leaned up against the wall and pissed on it," Swonger said. Swonger also contested the cleanliness of the reservoir prior to his actions: "I’ve seen dead birds in there. During the summer time I’ve see hella dead animals in there," Swonger told Vocativ. In 2011, Shaff told the Mercury that the reservoir is not shut down for nature's transgressions. "If we did that, we'd be shutting it off all the time. We fish out animals or things that have blown in all the time," Shaff said.
The reservoir will reportedly cost $36,000 to clean and had just had one of its twice-yearly cleanings three weeks ago.
Update: The cost cited refers to Portland's earlier incident, when Shaff reported the incident would cost the city $36,000. The price of draining and restoring the reservoir following the 2014 incident may differ, since the quantity of water is vastly larger.The Brock Star strikes again.
Brock Holt hit for the cycle Tuesday at Fenway Park, going 4 for 5 with two RBIs and two runs scored in the Boston Red Sox’s 9-4 win over the Atlanta Braves. It’s been a while since any Red Sox hit for the cycle, even though it was the 21st in franchise history.
Brock Holt is the first Red Sox to hit for the cycle since John Valentin on 6/6/96 against the White Sox. —
Jon Shestakofsky (@Shesta_Sox) June 16, 2015
Holt batted leadoff and played second base in place of Dustin Pedroia, who received a day off to rest a sore knee. Holt led off the game with a double in the first inning and scored the game’s first run on Mookie Betts’ two-bagger. Holt then hit a single in the fifth inning, a solo home run in the seventh and a triple in the eighth.
Check out videos of Holt’s historic accomplishment below. Your browser does not support iframes.
“As soon as barrel hit ball, I was like ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ because once it gets in the triangle, anything is possible,” Holt said, via WEEI.com.
Thumbnail photo via Twitter/@MLBToronto Maple Leafs supporters should send thank you cards to the Arizona Coyotes. At least Shane Doan thinks so.
Matthews' coming out party in his first NHL game Wednesday, when he scored four goals, has hockey folks out in Arizona walking with their heads a bit higher. The 18-year-old grew up in Scottsdale and attended Coyotes games as a child, which instilled in him a passion for the game.
"Hey, without the Coyotes playing here, Auston wouldn't be playing hockey," Arizona captain Doan told azcentral sports' Dan Bickley. "He'd be playing some other sports. But because the Coyotes were here, he wanted to play, he got the opportunity to play, and he's an amazing athlete."
Doan believes Matthews' profile is only going to be that much bigger because he now plays for the rebuilding Maple Leafs in Toronto. But that's a good thing, better for the sport, and better for grassroots hockey in Arizona.
"The center of hockey is in Toronto. They push it as hard as they can. If he played for us or in Florida and scored four goals, it would've been an incredible story. But to do it for Toronto? That's unbelievable, and it's a big boost to everything that's happening with hockey in Arizona."
Arizona has long been criticized as one of hockey's failed expansion ventures, but Doan believes a loyal fan base has developed in the desert over the years. And if one of the game's brightest stars is from Scottsdale, hockey's only going to grow in the area.The Kanawha County Prosecutor's Office has dropped a criminal charge against a reporter arrested in May after "yelling" questions at Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price in the West Virginia State Capitol.
Dan Heyman, a correspondent with the Public News Service, based in Charleston, W.Va., was briefly jailed and charged with "willful disruption of governmental processes" after trying to question Price, who was at the Capitol as part of a listening tour on the opioid epidemic.
Violation of the law carries up to six months' jail time.
Heyman says he was simply doing his job on May 9 when he asked Price "repeatedly" whether domestic violence would qualify as a pre-existing condition under the Republican health care bill, for a story he was working on.
"I was yelling out questions, and that was it," Heyman said at a news conference after his arrest. Price wasn't answering and Heyman says he persisted, using his phone as a recording device, "and I reached it out to him past his staffers."
Video published by The Washington Post shows Heyman being led away in handcuffs by two Capitol police officers but does not capture the questioning.
The criminal complaint accuses Heyman of "aggressively breaching the Secret Service agents to the point where the agents were forced to remove him a couple of times from the area" and "causing a disturbance by yelling questions."
Price defended the police who arrested Heyman, saying they "did what they felt was appropriate."
But on Wednesday the prosecutor's office said in a joint statement with Heyman's legal team that while his conduct "may have been aggressive journalism" it "was not unlawful and did not violate the law with which he was charged, that is, willfully disrupting a State governmental process or meeting."
The ACLU of West Virginia called Heyman's arrest "distressing," noting in a May blog post that Price is a member of President Trump's Cabinet and the president "has been attempting to undermine the press on a regular basis and resists transparency at every turn." The post goes on to say, "[t]hose who don't want transparency in the literal halls of government have no business putting themselves in the political spotlight."
"I've always felt like I didn't have that much at risk here," Heyman said Wednesday, noting that the crime he was charged with was a misdemeanor. "But it's always good to see that people really support a free press and the asking of questions of public officials."
"I am shocked that I was arrested in the first place but I'm glad I can put this behind me."
Heyman has previously worked for West Virginia Public Broadcasting and has filed reports for NPR.
Copyright NPR 2019.Toni Kroos is now a “Galactico” at Real Madrid having secured a big money move from Bayern Munich. From being a teenage prodigy, he is now regarded as one of the contemporary greats and has done his reputation no harm after a sumptuous World Cup campaign with Germany. Kroos was perhaps the stand-out player for Germany during the triumphant 2014 World Cup campaign. With midfielders around him getting injured at left, right and centre, Kroos had to take up the mantle of the leader in midfield only at the age of 24. If Xavi was the pass master for Spain in the 2010 World Cup then Kroos was Germany’s general in this one completing more passes than anyone during the tournament. He was proficient on the ball without being flamboyant; however his eagerness to press and win back the ball was the stand out feature. Ask Brazil and they will tell you how good he is at winning back the ball and making the most of it.
The Toni Kroos’ story started at his hometown club Greifswalder. According to his teachers and fellow students, Kroos was destined to become a footballer. “He knew what he wanted and was always a lot more focused than the rest,” said former teacher Sieglinde Heimann. At age 12 he joined the youth system of the Bundesliga outfit Hansa Rostock. His prodigious talent didn’t go unnoticed and in 2006 he was signed up by Bavarian giants and Germany’s most successful team, Bayern Munich. He temporarily became the youngest Bayern Munich player to play in the Bundesliga (17 years, eight months and 22 days) when he made his debut against Energie Cottbus in a 5-0 victory. His impact was immediate as he set up two goals for Miroslav Klose. Despite superlatives flying all over in Bavaria for the teenage prodigy, Kroos struggled to get in the first 11 and had to be loaned out to Bayer Leverkusen on an 18 month loan deal. During his first season with Leverkusen, Kroos managed 13 starts however in his 2nd season with the team he became a regular playing in 33 out of the 34 Bundesliga matches. Kroos notched up an impressive tally of 9 goals and 12 assists. His loan period with Bayer Leverkusen ended here and Jupp Heyncknes made it evident that Kroos was going to be a central figure in his Bayern Munich machine. He made his international debut for Germany in 2010 in a friendly against Argentina and was subsequently named in the 23 man squad for the 2010 FIFA WorldCup.
Even at the age of 17 when Kroos first burst on to the scene with Bayern, his maturity was beyond his years emphasized upon by the then Bayern coach, Hitzfeld saying, “He always takes the right decision on the pitch and you don’t have to tell him what to do.” Kroos has earned praise from all and sundry ranging from his managers to tactical analysts to journalists. In the words of tactical expert Jonathan Wilson, “Kroos is Perhaps the archetype of the modern attacking midfielder.” The biggest compliment perhaps came from the treble winning manager Jupp Heynckes comparing him to German Legends saying, “I see Toni Kroos as further developed than Wolfgang Overath and Gunter Netzer at the same age.” That is a comparison very few will ever be worthy of when you consider both Overath and Netzer were considered amongst the top 3-4 midfielders of their generation.
Kroos was a pivotal figure in Bayern Munich’s historic treble in 2012/13 under Heynckes until he suffered a knee injury against Juventus in the Champions League Quarter Final. During that season Kroos was phenomenal, playing both as the spearhead of the midfield and dropping back in a deep lying role. Kroos completed 89.7% of his passes in the Bundesliga and unlike Luis Gustavo and Dante who had a better percentage; most of his passes were made in the opposition half creating opportunities for his team mates. He was ranked 3rd in terms of through ball completion rate and 11th in terms of assists, even his precision with crosses attempted was staggering placing him at 6th in the Bundesliga in that regard. These stats clearly not only indicate the clichéd term “efficiency” but also versatility, Kroos is without doubt the complete package.
Kroos further developed under the tutelage of Pep Guardiola. With Bastian Schweinstieger and Thiago Alcantara out injured for most of the campaign and bearing in mind that Lahm had just started playing in midfield having shifted from his full back role, Kroos had to step up in a much more conscientious and creative role as he was the most recognized of the central midfielders at only the tender age of 23. Kroos demonstrated discipline, accuracy, leadership and elegance. For Pep he was the “Xavi” of Bayern Munich, dictating play in a more possession based system than previous boss Jupp Heynckes. If Ribery took most of the praise for the treble winning campaign the year before that, then this was Kroos’s season having flawlessly guided Bayern to a league victory in record time.
He arrived at Real Madrid with great expectation after an incredible performance in the World Cup. Much was expected of the German, however he was thrown into the deep end right away with the surprise departure of Xabi Alonso. Kroos had to take up a more pragmatic role in a deeper position to try and protect the back four. The start was anything but great, Real Madrid surrendered leads against both Real Sociadad and Atletico Madrid. Many wondered if Kroos could play in this new role, the Spanish media called him reactive not proactive. However, Kroos answered all his critics, after all he has succeeded in every football challenge thrown at him. Along with Luka Modric he has developed a midfield partnership second to none in European football. Real Madrid are not only banging in goals but are also not conceding many. The spaces in front of the back four seem to have been plugged and credit goes to Kroos in adjusting so quickly in a new system, in a new league and in a demanding role.
So what is it that makes Kroos special?
Mixed with his intelligence on the ball, he has a great work ethic, his willingness to track back despite being startlingly gifted on the ball makes him different from the likes of Deco or Wesley Sneijder. Gone are the days when the playmaker could dictate the game with the ball and be a nonchalant figure without it. Another aspect that sets Kroos apart is his versatility, from playing the role of a box to box midfielder to playing as the number 10 to becoming the midfield general, he can do it all without even getting noticed. His understanding of space is perhaps only second to his German team mate Tomas Muller. As Brazil will point out to their agony, Kroos can arrive late in the box and score with both feet. He has a terrific shot on him from long range added with great precision as Arsenal have discovered to their peril in recent years. Kroos may not dazzle you with party tricks such as nut megs, 360s or step overs but he has all the necessary tricks up his sleeves to become one of the greats of the game. Germany’s wonder boy is now Germany’s Man. He has the world at his feet at the moment and barring any serious injuries, Kroos will become one of the greatest midfielders by the time he hangs up his boots.After the stellar conclusion to the Halo World Championship, many Halo eSports enthusiasts became anxious to discover what would become of the Halo Championship Series. Luckily, 343 Industries announced the HCS Pro League to continue forth the competitive Halo 5 action. Today, 343 Industries and ESPN have unveiled the very first official HCS Pro League Information.
Below is all you need to know about the upcoming Pro and Challenger Divisions for the Halo Championship Series!
Pro League
The HCS Pro League is a first for Halo eSports. Each week, the Top 8 Halo Teams in North America, and Top 6 in Europe will duke it out online for many weeks over each season. The first season begins May 31 and ends July 28th.
Every week beginning in June, ESL will provide streams for North American and European competition – two days for NA, and one for Europe.
The 2016 Halo World Champions, Counter-Logic Gaming, will be automatically inducted into the Pro Division. Other teams will be qualifying through online qualifiers and two LAN qualifiers in April and May. The first HCS LAN event takes place April 24th and will include Evil Geniuses, OpTic Gaming, Enigma 6, and Team EnVyUs!
The PAX East Invitational LAN hosts the four teams featuring the members of the now disbanded Team Allegiance, who took second place at the Halo World Championship. The winner of PAX will claim a spot in the Pro League.
A 16-team Online Qualifier on April 30th will seed a second Invitational LAN (Top 8 out of the 16 teams) that will take place a week later on May 8th. The Top 4 finalists will claim their spots in the first season.
Finally, there will be a series of Open Online Qualifiers in May that will lead to the final conclusive Last Chance Qualifier, in which the final two teams will be invited to the league.
Challenger Division
The Challenger League for the HCS focuses on Halo’s grassroots, offering Amateur players a chance to be promoted to the Pro Division.
An open circuit will be ran for players to earn points for promotion into the Pro League. The Challenger teams with the most points at the end of the season will have the chance to defeat the two relegated Pro Teams in order to be inducted into the Pro League.
Recap
Top 8 North American Pro Teams
Top 6 European Pro Teams
ESL Streams Weekly
2017 Halo World Championship RETURNS w/ $1M Prize Pot and Crowdfunding
May 31st – July 28th
Top 4 Team Playoffs in LA ($250,000 Prize Pot)
Online and LAN Qualifier Events (April & May)
Bottom 2 Pro Teams Relegated to face Challengers
Are you excited for the upcoming HCS Pro League events? Discuss the Halo Championship Series on our forums!
Source | ESPN eSportsListen To Ingested’s New EP ‘Revered By No One, Feared By All’ Exclusively With Terrorizer
British slam death titans Ingested are all set to release their new EP ‘Revered By No One, Feared By All’ next Monday, but you can listen to the whole thing right here, right now, exclusively with Terrorizer…
The notorious quintet have gained quite a reputation for themselves over the years with their brutal, no holds barred approach to modern, slam-tastic death metal, and of course, their blistering, BPM pushing speed. ‘Revered By No One…’ is the first new material we’ve heard from the band since 2011’s sophomore album ‘The Surreption’.
Recorded by their long time producer Stu Mckay (Malevolence, Brutality Will Prevail) and mixed & mastered by Christian Donaldson (Cryptopsy, Beneath The Massacre), Ingested’s new offering could well be the band’s fastest, heaviest and most punishing material to date.
Check it out below…
‘Revered By No One, Feared By All’ is due to be released on December 16th via Siege Of Amida Records / Century Media.
You can find Ingested on Facebook.Bernie Sanders on Hillary Clinton: 'We're going to win this thing'
Hillary Clinton can be beaten in the Democratic primary, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said in an interview aired on the day he begins his bid for the White House.
“I think we’re going to have a surprise for you,” Sanders told ABC’s Jon Karl in an interview that aired Thursday on “Good Morning America.” “We’re going to win this thing.”
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Sanders said he thinks the American people have had enough of “establishment politics.”
“We are a looking at a system where our democracy is being owned by a handful of billionaires,” the self-described ‘democratic socialist‘ said. “That is wrong.”
Sanders confirmed that he will begin his presidential campaign on Thursday in an interview with The Associated Press published Wednesday night.
“People should not underestimate me,” the 73-year-old Vermont independent senator said. “I’ve run outside of the two-party system, defeating Democrats and Republicans, taking on big-money candidates and, you know, I think the message that has resonated in Vermont is a message that can resonate all over this country.”
Sanders also addressed President Barack Obama’s gibe about him at last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which Obama joked that “apparently some folks want to see a pot-smoking socialist in the White House.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m not a pot smoker,” Sanders said. “I have, admittedly, some 30 or 40 years ago.”Saudi Arabia started its bombing campaign more than two weeks ago, intending to roll back the Houthi-Saleh coalition and help restore Mr. Hadi to power. But that goal has grown increasingly remote. Mr. Hadi has fled the country, the Houthi-Saleh forces have continued to advance, and Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen has capitalized on the Saudi strikes to extend its own reach.
In Hadhramaut Province around Al Mukalla, the army’s handover of the oil fields to the tribal coalition — essentially for safekeeping — illustrated how the fight is degenerating into a contest among local armed groups filling the void left by the collapse of the Yemeni state.
“We tightened security around the fields and did not allow workers to leave with even a nail,” said Saleh bin Simrat, a spokesman for the coalition, known as the Hadhramaut Tribal Confederacy.
Qaeda fighters have seized the airport, government buildings and a refinery around Al Mukalla, establishing themselves as the most powerful local force. In an effort to win popular support, they have begun calling themselves the Sons of Hadhramaut and have promised to quickly return control of the city to local civilian leaders. When they seized a major army base outside of the city on Friday, they allowed the soldiers inside to leave unharmed, according to a local tribal leader.
Air assaults by the Saudi-led coalition struck Sana, Yemen’s capital, on Thursday night and Friday. People in Sana said the strikes were some of the heaviest to date. According to the United Nations, 18 of Yemen’s 22 provinces have now been hit by airstrikes.‘The logic of the Culture Wars has been exhausted. The metaphor has run its course.’ (1) So concluded historian Andrew Hartman in his magisterial study, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. When the book was published, in Spring 2015, it was not an unusual opinion. Others, too, argued that this decades-old conflict between imperiled social conservatives and emboldened progressives, between those who feared the dissolution of traditional family life, the degradation of Christian values and the undermining of the work ethic, and those who support abortion, sexual liberation and the ever-increasing panoply of so-called progressive causes, had well and truly run its course. The arguments had lost their force, the combatants their energy, the issues their pique. Who now, outside the batty fringes of evangelical Christianity and those clinging desperately to their guns, disagreed with the progressive consensus?, asked the victors. The Supreme Court decision in 2015 to legalise same-sex marriage across the US was merely the long-awaited coda to the Culture Wars, proof, if any were needed, that the progressives had vanquished their worn-out opponents.
No, culture wars are proliferating, entrenching, deepening, because, over the past half century, the cultural domain has been thoroughly politicised. And with culture now established as the main site of political conflict, what was once largely private is now unquestionably public. In other words, the different ways in which people live their lives, indeed express themselves – their consumption habits, their leisure pursuits, their intimate relationships, their idiolects – have become matters of public contestation, issues to be fought over and legislated on. The historical shift is marked. Political battles are no longer fought over people’s ability to buy food – they’re fought over what and how people eat; they’re no longer fought over equal rights – they’re fought over people’s ‘unwitting’ attitudes to difference; they’re no longer fought over the organisation of the economy – they’re fought over people’s economic behaviour, be it the greed of bankers or the avarice of businessmen. Political economy has been eclipsed by cultural politics.
But, today, that seems like a premature conclusion. And that’s not just because Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has gained popular traction among white working-class America, galvanising a socially conservative opposition to almost everything the Culture Wars’ supposed victors deem as progressive causes today. Nor is it a premature conclusion simply because it’s clear that culture wars are now being fought with equal zeal throughout Western society, from the working-class revolt of Brexit, rich as it was in profound cultural antagonism, to the simmering anti-establishment discontent now turning Europe into tribes of the ‘left behind’ vs their affluent, ostentatiously cosmopolitan, Brussels-leaning superiors.
The development of the idea of culture, its semantic revolution and expansion, sheds light on this shift. As Raymond Williams notes in Culture and Society (1958), prior to the Industrial Revolution, the word ‘culture’ meant little more than the ‘tending of natural growth’ and then, by analogy, human training. German Enlightenment thinkers developed a stronger version of this idea of self-cultivation, Bildung. But during the 19th century, initially in Romantic opposition to, and mainly as a legitimating complement to, emergent industrial capitalism, the meaning of culture broadened and deepened. It started to denote a body of art and literature in general, and, more importantly, it started to be treated as the repository of the humanity – the values and meaning – that the social relations and social activity in capitalist society, from Thomas Carlyle’s ‘cash nexus’ to Matthew Arnold’s ‘business concerns’, appeared to lack. As Arnold himself put it in Culture and Anarchy (1869): ‘Culture, which is the study of perfection [or, as Arnold famously puts it elsewhere, the study of “the best which has been thought and said in the world”: TB], leads us… to conceive of true human perfection, developing all sides of our humanity; and as a general perfection, developing all sides of our humanity; and as a general perfection, developing all parts of our society.’ (2)
Why has this happened? Why is politics today so completely culturalised? Why are conflicts that might once have been fought out in terms of economics, over, say, the distribution of the social product, now fought out in terms of culture, in terms, that is, of people’s beliefs and attitudes, their sense of who they are, their identities?
But the ability to articulate this ideal of culture, a universal process of cultivating everyone’s best self according to a common human inheritance, rests not only on the elite’s self-confidence, but on its correlate, too: a ruling consensus as to what is ‘the best which has been thought and said’ – what it is that society ought to value. It rests, in other words, on a strong sense of cultural and social authority, and its intellectual foundation in Enlightenment thought. And it’s precisely the slow, almost imperceptible, but no less profound decomposition of cultural and social authority, and the retreat from Enlightenment thought, during the latter half of the 19th century – with the spectre of socialism and communism proving all too haunting – that transforms the post-19th-century meaning of culture. Culture preserves its newly broadened sense as the process by which everyone is cultivated in a body of values, meanings and so on, but it ceases to be an idea of what is best, of what ought to give meaning to all people, a universal repository of value. Instead, it becomes descriptive, anthropological and plural, as just the set of meanings and values held by a particular group of people in a particular setting. Indeed, so value-free is ‘culture’ today that there’s little that we do that is not deemed cultural. Hence, while a few unabashed snobs still talk of ‘high culture’, many more talk of ‘black culture’, ‘trans culture’, even ‘office culture’.
The conceptual groundwork for this transformation was being laid at the same time as Culture and Anarchy was making an impact. In Primitive Culture (1871), EB Tylor began to purge culture of its normative dimension. Culture was less a principle and more a catch-all for a particular society’s way of life, or, as Tylor put it, the name given to a ‘complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, moral, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’. By the time of Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) – a study of three separate tribes of South American Indians – Benedict was comfortable asserting that which would have been anathema to Arnold, ‘the relativity of cultures’. Over the next few decades, the anthropologisation of culture continued apace, culminating in Clifford Geertz’s Interpretations of Cultures (1973), which defined cultures as ‘webs of significance’, ‘system[s] of symbols and meanings’, that people use to impose order on, and to give meaning to, the social world. Culture had long ceased to be a judgement on how people are in the name of how they ought to be, as it was in Arnold – it is just how people live.
In the development of the idea of culture, from a universal sphere of value to which all ought to aspire, to a particular way in which a particular community lives and interprets the world, one can clearly see the relativisation of culture, indeed cultures. It wasn’t one-way traffic, of course. Interwar poets and writers, such as TS Eliot or EM Forster, still worked with the Arnoldian ideal of culture, but this was largely a rearguard action. A sense of cultural loss, not confidence, marked the writers and, to use DH Lawrence’s pejorative, Kulturträger of the interwar years. As they saw it, the wasteland was upon them.
In a sense, many of the literary and artistic modernists of the interwar years were before their time. They were the canaries in the mine, the snobs in retreat. In their disillusionment, in their palpable sense of loss, they registered something profoundly important: the disintegration of social and cultural authority (albeit as a crisis of tradition). This is what was to explode across Western society during the Sixties, as a contest for cultural and social authority, a contest over the values and meanings that society ought to hold, a contest between the square 1950s and the counterculture, between the old politics and the New Left. And this is what is key about the relativisation of culture, its transformation into little more than anthropological shorthand for what certain people from a certain background in a certain place do and believe. Looked at as a relationship between different communities, different nations, different tribes, each with their culture, it’s possible to believe that this relativity of cultures results in live-and-let-live pluralism. But when those different cultures exist within a society, within a community, within a nation, the relativity starts to generate friction. That is, cultural relativism is in fact a cultural conflict, a conflict between, as Raymond Williams put it, whole ways of life. And it’s a conflict that has become more and more inflamed, not only in the absence of cultural and social authority, but in the subsequent battle for cultural and social authority, a battle to (re-)establish a particular way of life, a particular set of values, as dominant.
Pierre Bourdieu’s masterwork Distinction is important here. Published in 1979, it is, as he calls it, ‘a sort of ethnography of France’ based on fieldwork carried out during the mid-1960s. Its aim is to reveal not only the class bases for differences in ‘taste’, but to show how these differences in taste are part of a class-based struggle for status |
in front of the man and bird.
Oh? That’s a defensive skill… No, a counter skill.
The mirror shatters, and the fragments shoot into the Bitch’s body.
How convenient.
“GUHAAAAH!”
But immediately after that, the Bitch Goddess was cut by a sword identical to the one in her hand.
I see. It’s the sort of thing where what’s reflected in the mirror is reproduced…
That’s quite dangerous.
“High Class Covenant magic 『Meteor Fall』 activate!”
From the sky, meteorites…
“Think before you use that!”
Everyone takes refuge from the falling rocks.
Of course, the Goddess wasn’t one to take the attack upfront either.
Just like us, she tries to run.
「Dimension Whip Max」!
「KYUAAAAAAAA」!
『I can’t have you forgetting about us.』
「Rafu~」!
Taniko binds the Goddess’s feet with her whip, and Gaelion started breathing fire onto the Meteorites to increase their output. Fitoria changed to her tank carriage, and fired its cannon.
At the same time, Raph-chan started bombarding with his ship from above.
Right, I cast magic on everyone.
It’s not like it was only on Ren and the other legendary heroes.
I targeted my magic on everyone I recognized as an ally.
At the same time, Defense Link and Meteor Wall are also up.
The world is granting me power to slaughter this Goddess.
Well, from her point of view, I may be acting extremely unfair, but compared to all the things she’s perpetuated up until now, it’s on the pleasant side.
The fact that Trash’s arrived here means things have been cleaned up on his side.
“Did you deal with… your woman problem?” (Naofumi)
“… Yes.” (Trash)
“I see.” (Naofumi)
No matter the result, I left the Queen’s matter to Trash.
“I… truly am naught but sinful Trash! No matter what punishment Iwatani-dono gives me, I will not find regret in my decision!” (Trash)
Right… next to Trash, the Queen stood quietly.
I don’t see signs that she’s being controlled.
Should I just wrap this up as a miracle brought about by the Spirits?
Nah, that doesn’t seem fitting… could this be the fairy-tale ending where the Hero saves his beloved wife from crisis?
I’ll tease them about it later.
“While I was supposed to have departed from this world, I continued to cause trouble for the people. I am… also going to lend power for the World’s sake. With this life at stake!”
“You shall not! Because I’ve lost so much, made so many mistakes, and seen so many things, I can say this. I will not permit you to use up that life of yours!” (Trash)
“Yeah, even if you don’t, me and Raphtalia will definitely do something about it. You just have to do whatever you can.” (Naofumi)
“Aultcray, Iwatani-sama… For someone who was merely used by the enemy…”
Trash stands in front of the Queen, and starts chanting magic.
“Mirellia, it’s at times like this that… you need a little magic!” (Trash)
Fast!
Even if he has my support magic, he was able to complete his magic much quicker than Marin.
“High Class Covenant magic 『Ice Meteor』 Max! My wife… it’s your special… Watch me hit her with a synthesis of Fire and Ice!” (Trash)
“I won’t lose either!”
Melty started playing an instrument that looked like a violin.
「Magic Amplification Max」!
A barrier-like thing is deployed, and the area is filled with highly concentrated magic.
This is… the world informs me.
It’s a double-edged skill that raises the potency of magic by several times for everyone.
Well, as long as I’m here, we won’t have any casualties among my comrades.
“You insolent rabble! Unhand me!”
The Bitch Goddess tries to sever the whip binding her legs.
As if I’d let that happen.
Before I could signal her to move, Raphtalia jumped into action.
「Gravity Hammer」!
A large gravity-magic-imbued hammer comes down on the Goddess from above.
The direct damage it inflicted wasn’t great, but it restricted her movement to as great an extent as possible.
“Gununu…”
Crushed by Raphtalia’s binding skill, the goddess is smashed into the floor.
But still, one step, two steps. She continues to walk forward to perpetrate her escape. But it’s too late.
The two giant meteorites hit her directly, and the area is covered in explosions.
Trash and Marin deploy magic barriers simultaneously, containing the explosive shockwave around her.
I also strengthen the Meteor Wall as not to have anyone injured.
With this, the Goddess should have taken major damage.
Those were magics chanted with The X0 weapons.
“___!!”
“As expected of the King of Wisdom…”
The Queen quietly whispers to herself.
Oh right, she’s supposedly head over heels for the man.
“Uuu…”
The Bitch Goddess, with her conscious faint, and tears streaming from her face, looks towards Trash.
“Why… why is Papa putting me through something like this?”
Uwah! She still thinks that’ll get through?
There’s a limit to not knowing when to give up.
“You are no daughter of mine! You dropped people into despair, and laughed at them with scorn. You’re just… a devil pretending to be of my own flesh and blood!” (Trash)
Trash directs strong words of rejection to The Bitch Goddess, who had changed her face to reflect Witch’s.
“Everyone! Attack at once! This is the moment of truth!” (Trash)
Trash doesn’t fall for her words in the slightest.
Even if they’re father and child, she’s long passed the limit to what could be forgiven.
It’ll be best for him if he can let out his feelings here.
“Damn! It’s too late for regrets!”
Around Trash, Melty and Marin, the allied army participates in Choral Magic.
For the soldiers, approaching the Bitch is a bit to heavy a task.
They participate in an attack at her like this.
“Naofumi-san!”
“I’ve kept you waiting, Iwatani-dono!”
Rishia and Female Knight ran over.
And…
“I have also… come!”
Having been freed from the goddess’s control, her body that was but a lump of muscle has returned to normal.
I see. So Rishia and Female Knight saved her.
This really is… an unnerving succession of miracles.
I’m being driven to shout out, ‘Is this supposed to be the last chapter of an axed manga or something!?’
No, I won’t say it, but…
“DIIIIIIIIE!”
With an angry look like that of the devil, the Goddess takes her shimmering blade, and swings it horizontally.
With so much force emanating from the edge of her sword, we… were not sent flying.
My Meteor Wall prevents that.
In the space before the next magic hit, Rishia and Female Knight ran at the Bitch Goddess.
「Brave Blade Mist Cross Max」!
A cross shaped gash emerges on the Goddess’s body, and to follow up, Rishia lunged forward.
「Dritte Slash! Throwing Max」!
She slashed at her, and after retreating a distance, her knife came flying at her.
“Hengen Musou Style Special Move: New Moon!”
From the Granny’s arm, a black sphere of Chi is shot.
The three’s attacks stop the Goddess’s legs.
“You keep emerging one after the other like flies! Do you really want to end my life so badly!?” (Medea)
The Bitch Goddess saves up power.
Originally, if she was at her full powered state, I don’t think it would take any time for her to activate an attack.
“Ku… How utterly annoying! I’ll blow away this petty power that binds me all at once!” (Medea)
She points her sword downwards, and uses power to try and purify my defensive membrans.
“I guess it’s time for the Oneesans to step in.”
“That’s right, Sadina-oneechan!”
“It would be troublesome if you were to forget me.”
Sadina, Kiel and Glass came running they activate their skills.
「The Great White Whale’s Heroic Charge Max」!
When Sadina uses her skill, a giant whale made out of water manifests in the air, and crashes into the Bitch Goddess at the same instant Sadina threw her spear.
「Dark Soul Mist Dispersal Max」!
But even before Sadina’s attack could land, with erratic steps, Kielberus disappears, and materializes behind the Bitch Goddess. She slashes multiple times with her Scythe that emits a black aura.
「Kenbu Kyoku: Mu Max」!
(TL: Sword Dance of the Strongest: Null)
Matching Kiel’s dancing movements, Glass swings her fan at the Goddess consecutively.
“Gu…uu… dammmit! Quite it already!”
The moment before Sadina’s attack landed, Glass and Kiel retreated.
Sea foam splashes onto me as her skill rained down on the goddess, and after giving off the sparkle of a X0 weapon, the harpoon returned to Sadina’s hand.
“Gu… without fail, you guys… even your souls will be tormented for eternity. I have no further need to care about what happens in the future. Everything, even my memories of this shitty world… I’ll erase them all.”
After all this smacking, it’s amazing that she’s still alive.
“High Class Covenant magic 『Sunlight』 Max!”
Trash and Marin, as well as all of the soldiers participating in this fight, merge magic… It becomes a flare as brilliant as the sun, and hits the Bitch Goddess.
Well, originally, their allies would have been dragged into it as well, but because of my influence, they aren’t taking any damage.
And in order to ensure it hit, the other Heroes cast a few binding spells on her.
“Just how far will you insects go to tick me off!?”
Just where does her unwavering fighting spirit come from?
That’s the only point I give a high evaluation to. Witch was similar, though.
“Naofumi-sama.” (Raphtalia)
“Naofumi-sama.” (Atlas)
“Yeah.”
A Half-transparent Atlas pops out of the Shield, and nods.
Raphtalia looks to me for her next action as well.
That’s right… I’ll have to decide our next move.
『Oh Spirits. Oh World. The Proxy of this world orders, and requests for power. I wish for a world without gods, and for that I exercise your power. Pillars that bind the world, power unto me』!
In Raphtalia’s hand, a stake made out of light appears, and she uses her hammer to drive it in.
“Single Shot special! 「Infinity Bunker」!”
A heavy impact occurs, as Raphtalia’s stake bores into the Bitch Goddess.
At the same time, a bright flash of light was sent out.
“GUAAAAAAAAAAAH!”
The light gets visibly stronger, and I can feel it through my skin that the Bitch Goddess’s power is dispersing.
With this… It would be nice if she were to die.
Raphtalia finishes her attack, and lands back by my side.
“Fu… fufu… for small fries, you did well coming this far.” (Medea)
… What a tough one she is.
“I’m just about sick of seeing all of your faces. Now let me brush away all your makeshift powers, and watch you as you wallow in regret, having even your souls burned away!” (Medea)
I feel the lynchpins I called down get pulled out, and the Goddess raises her speed even further.
The only ones who can keep up with her speed are Me, Raphtalia and Atlas.
“I’m done. Now that you’ve made a fool of me to this extent, I have no need to hold back.” (Medea)
Hold Back… for her to still display such leisure while being beaten to a pulp, I seriously question where this overflowing tenacity comes from.
I wonder just how much time it will take to defeat her.
But…
I break out into a smile.
The Bitch Goddess amasses power greater than ever before.
Her whole body shines, and a sinister magic manefests itself into wings on her back.
“Let me bring an end to all of this!” (Medea)
I hold my Shield out front, and prepare myself.
“100% Deadly Aim, 100% Death, 『Infinity Destroyer』. All that awaits you all is death. The past, present, future, parallel worlds, divergent worlds, the law of cause and effect. Not a single thing in the world will be able to stop it; you will merely perish! Infinity, eternity, speed of light won’t be enough. Now go die already!”
I perceive her targets. It’s everybody here, and every chain binding her to this world.
And… the Laws of this world that preside over them.
She has enough power output to reduce them all to nothingness.
It’s completely different than any attack she’s displayed before.
It’s a single blow that will use up all of her being.
It’s power deserving of the title of God.
This absolute power even transcends time, and after she repeatedly condenses it, she releases it.
I couldn’t even see it before, but now I can follow it.
Red, and black.
Threads… each and every one links to death. They’re imbued with a concept to bring an end to all possibilities.
And those threads, just how many hundreds, thousands, millions… She has an amount there beyond my counting prowess.
The past, present, future, parallel worlds, divergent worlds, the law of cause and effects, an attack to rob all of those away from me.
That attack…
“… I was waiting for it!” (Lord Geno… I mean Naofumi)
I… deploy my powers as a God, and from the Bitch Goddess’s conceptual attack, I protect everyone. I take it all into myself.
The threads of death entangle around me, and send me through all time, all worlds, all possibilities…
“Aha, ahahahaha. Who are you trying to protect? With this, you’re dead. And with the next shot, it’ll be my win.” (Medea)
“Sorry, there won’t be a next one.”
The Shield absorbs all of the Bitch Goddesses Infinity destroyer, or whatever she called it, and absorbed it into a single point.
“I’ve had enough of your childish exchange. As a God Killer, I’ll show you the greatest of counterattacks.” (Naofumi)
This attack doesn’t have a name.
But… In order to wait for her to use her skill, I had Raphtalia and the others work together.
There’s wars of attrition, even in a battle between Gods.
But if two beings who won’t die combat each other, then when will they reach an agreement… or when will they find an end?
Yes, in the end, one side is the loser.
To childish logic like that… I reached a single conclusion.
“Atlas.” (Naofumi)
“Yes, Naofumi-sama.” (Atlas)
“Raphtalia.” (Naofumi)
“Yes, with this, it’s over.” (Raphtalia)
I nodded.
An end will come to everything
「– Positive Feedback Reflection」!
I changed the nature of the interweaving threads of death.
The red and the black change to green and white.
And I redirect them in the direction of the single person trying to destroy everything.
The altered power is amplified several times, and sent right back.
“You just sent back my Infinity Destroyer as is? How unfortunate. There’s no way the attack I used myself would have any effect on myself!” (Medea)
“Were you not listening? I’m sure I included a positive feedback in there. I amplified your power, and sent it back.” (Naofumi)
“Gu…” (Medea)
The conceptual attack flies towards her.
Ironically, it’s the same scene as when I hit back Witch’s magic on Cal Mira.
While the firepower is completely different this time, the essence is the same.
In the end, the trivial battles between me and this woman are something like this.
“This cannot be! But with an attack of this level, I won’t even get a scratch, and I can dodge.” (Witch)
“Hey, are you getting forgetful about your own attacks? Your attack was 100% Deadly Aim, 100% Death. Past, present, future, parallel worlds, divergent worlds, the law of cause and effect. Not a single thing in the world will be able to stop it; you will merely perish! Infinity, eternity, speed of light won’t be enough, wasn’t it?” (Naofumi)
“Hmph. I have the ability to avoid such an attack, so there’s no way it–” (Medea)
“Then try it. I don’t plan to join you in your childish dialogue.” (Naofumi)
“Even if you defeat me, the true incarnation of me is still in the outside world, so–” (Medea)
“Forgetting things again? Parallel worlds, divergent worlds, the law of cause and effect. Not a single thing in the world will be able to stop it, you said. All fragments and the main body will be killed at once, of course. The attack you launched against everything… wasn’t it supposed to invite absolute death?” (Naofumi)
“Something like that won’t work on–” (Medea)
“100% Deadly Aim, 100% Death, right? What’s more, I added on Positive feedback. It’s your attack, and not mine. If you can dodge it, then show me the results. Well, that only goes if you survive it.” (Naofumi)
Justice Punch! Barrier! Justice Punch can go through barriers! This is a Barrier that Justice Punch can’t go through! Then Justice Punch that can go through the barrier that Justice Punch can’t…
It’s like that sort of endless dialogue.
I’m not going to keep her company for that.
It’s just that there’s a definite result in this one.
Will it work? Will it not? That’s it.
“Ku, my power has the ability to render an attack like this usele–”
“Do whatever you want. And if you manage to withstand it, I’ll play with you.” (Naofumi)
“Gu… an even more powerful infinite energy is… kuaaaaa…”
The Bitch Goddess’s scream echoes.
When her words entered my ears, I remembered something.
“… Ah, right. Witch, you kept thinking the Hero of the Shield was weak, and that he had fallen behind in strengthening methods, so let me tell you.”
She’s not in a position where she can hear me, but I turn my back to her and continue speaking.
“The Hero of the Shield’s Strengthening method is trusting people… It’s the earning of their trust.”
When you think about it, it’s self-evident.
For the Hero who can do nothing but protect others, he has to depend on others to live.
He believes in those that fight by his side, and they believe in him as well.
Like that, the Hero of the Shield finally gets stronger.
And even going about their lives without knowing it, this method was transferred to Ren, Motoyasu and Itsuki as well.
To hate someone, to wound someone… for us, who continued to take on meaningless quarrels with one another, it may sound presumptuous.
But that’s why we can believe in those by our side.
Raphtalia and Atlas, and everyone’s gaze.
They give the Shield its power.
From now on, I’ll probably still be tricked and betrayed by others.
And when that comes, pwerhaps I’ll be driven by fear to hurt others.
But now, in this moment… I feel that my heart that trusts others is real.
And the fact that I can think this is only because I was hurt a lot, and had those wounds healed.
On that day, at that time—I was alone in the world… Because Raphtalia believed in me, I could get all the way here.
“If you have even the slightest understanding of that, then you probably won’t die here.”
Well, I don’t think she can do that, though.
“As… as if something as stupid as that could— sto, GYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”
Eventually, the Bitch Goddess started a battle with her own power… I wonder just how fast time has been sped up.
And… It was the attack she had made herself, and from my amplification, it should usher in death. In all times. In Parallel, and divergent worlds. Even the law of Cause and Effect won’t be able to effect it, and all that was left for her was to perish.
The remains of her enormous power flowed into me, and through using it for the disappearing world, I used it all up.
“Fuu…”
“So it’s finally over.”
Raphtalia said as such.
“That’s right.”
Atlas responded with a slight feeling of amazement.
I mean she’s justified.
After playing out this farce, in the end, she fell by her own hand.
I’m sick to death of her stupidity, and her childish ways of attacking.
But I know there are many out there who would do things like her.
She was merely the tip of the iceberg.
“Even so, when I first got to this world, I thought I would partake in a glorious story of adventure… or something stupid like that, but I wonder how things turned out like this.” (Naofumi)
“So you were thinking things like that?” (Raphtalia)
“No, I mean when I had just gotten summoned here, you know.” (Naofumi)
“Naofumi-sama is always glorious, be it now or back then.” (Atlas)
“No, that’s kinda undesirable in itself…” (Naofumi)
We exchanged such idle banter, as we stop the accelerated state, and return time to original rate of the people here.
“D-did you do it?”
“Yeah, but that phrasing raises a, ‘Final Form’ Flag, so please don’t.” (Naofumi)
Those were the words I returned when Ren stepped forward as s representative of the rest.
I don’t ever want to fight something like that again.
Well, when they came to it, the Bitch Goddess was gone. I can understand their surprise.
While she was supposed to be erased from the Laws of the World, the power she left behind made her remain in everyone’s memories.
The Lynchpin had worked from the start, and most of it still remained.
Or else perhaps my own existence would vanish.
Along with the worlds’ legend of the four heroes.
“That Bitch Goddess disappeared without leaving anything behind. It’s our… victory.” (Naofumi)
On my declaration, I hear cheers of joy.
The people smile, and let loose tears of joy, as they raise their voices.
And the Spirits sparkled like stars, offering us their blessing.
“UWOOOOOOOOOOOOOH!”
An oppressing presence had left the world.
Perhaps all life on this world had sensed it.
Our long battle ended, and all the lifeforms in the world looked forward to a brighter tomorrow.Apparently, voters hate fiscal deficits, associate them with squander and want them to be cut, so that nations can live within their means. Any attempt to run foul of that essential wisdom will come to grief. So all you ‘left’ types – yes, those in the British Labour Party that means you – forget your little grass roots rebellion and confirm to the austerity norm. The UK Guardian article (August 4, 2015) – Anti-austerity message will not win over UK voters, poll shows – reports on a poll conducted internally by the British Labour Party that allegedly “shows Britain’s voters do not back an anti-austerity message but instead believe the country must live within its means and make cutting the deficit its top priority.” If you believe that you would believe anything.
The poll was commissioned by a Labour MP Jon Cruddas who is undertaking the internal review of the disastrous election loss earlier this year. This is a character who is upset that British Labour Party member dare to boo Tony Blair when he shows up at Labour party conferences.
He is also a member of the so-called Blue Labour, which is a curious populist niche within the Party that promotes social conservatism and anti-immigration. It is thus a sop to the various (outrageous) right-wing parties that battle for the votes of the ignorant and the xenophobic.
The Guardian claims the results:
… are likely to make difficult reading for those that say Labour’s path to electoral recovery lies in the party adopting a stronger anti-austerity stance than in the run-up to this year’s election.
They don’t make difficult reading at all. They confirm what we know about the impact of neo-liberal framing, about the use of language, about the way Groupthink patterns behaviour and how populations get trapped by cognitive dissonance.
No surprises there.
The poll results apparently were:
1. 56 per cent agreed that “We must live within our means, so cutting the deficit is the top priority”. Only 16 per cent disagreed.
2. Conservative voters – 84 per cent agreed.
3. Labour voters – 32 per cent agreed, while 34 per cent disagreed.
4. Ukip and Democrat voters – 63 per cent and 58 per cent agreed, respectively.
The company that devised this incredibly loaded poll question claim that “the unpalatable truth for the left is that the Tories did not win despite austerity, but because of it” thereby attempting to not only justify its poor polling strategy but also perpetuate the myth that people like austerity..
Cruddas told the media that:
On the basis of this data, the public appear to think anti-austerity is a vote loser. We cannot ignore that. We can seek to change the views of the public, but it’s best not to ignore them … Voters did not reject Labour because they saw it as austerity-lite. Voters rejected Labour because they perceived the party as anti-austerity lite.
They appear to think along these lines because all sides of politics have for the last two or more decades been hammering them with erroneous ideas about how the monetary system operates, scaring the b-jesus out of people about what would happen if fiscal deficits increased, and continuously reinforcing the frame that the government will run out of money if it doesn’t cut the deficit.
Further, they have been conditioned to believe that there is no relationship between government fiscal stances and mass unemployment, the latter, largely being some alien individual problem arising from personal sloth or desire.
The public has also been indoctrinated to believe that millions of workers idle through unemployment or underemployment do not constitute a nation’s resources – its ‘means’ – and so leaving them idle doesn’t constitute wastage. Apparently, the only ‘means’ that matter is the money the government itself issues and the doleful British public seems to think that is in short supply.
I wonder whether they would agree to abandoning the Trent Bridge cricket test this week after day one because the scorers had run out of ‘runs’ to post on the scoreboard!
I am sure the cricket-knowing public would immediately retort: “what nonsense, how can a scoreboard run out of runs to post!”.
I also onder what the poll would have delivered if the question, for example, if there was some information given prior to the question being asked (perhaps explaining how government deficits stimulate sales of goods and services and help generate higher levels of income which allow us to save more without compromising our consumption plans) or whether a different question, such as “When public employment is growing in line with the overall economy, more people have incomes to spend which helps all of us” was asked.
Political scientists and psychologists have long studied the phenomenon where populations appear to adopt opinions and preferences that are not only detrimental to their own well-being but are denied as being so. This is the field of cognitive disssonance and has a bearing on how ‘democracies’ work or don’t work, depending on the perspective one adopts.
The idea that a particular set of public preferences should become a bulwark against which the policy agenda has to be set for the next 5 years is depressing to say the least. But it is also a defeatist view reflecting a lack of understanding of how public opinion is formed and can respond to different methods of communication, careful use of language and education.
In other words, political leadership is more than giving the people what they think they want because it is clearly the case that public opinion operates in cloud of misinformation and ignorance.
Progressive political leadership should really be about setting in place an evidence base to support the value systems that define the movement and using language and education skilfully to redress the framing that the conservative side of politics has entrenched and lead to poll results such as this.
People generally don’t know much about fiscal deficits at all. They have been bombarded into thinking they are bad. It doesn’t take long in a controlled environment to demonstrate to people who hold these views that deficits are neither good nor bad but their necessity or otherwise depends on the circumstances.
It is true that we get trapped in these metaphorical concepts (deficits are bad). But the way in which we perceive phenomena can, however, change and develop.
In a cognitive framework, there are many possible ways to view a particular situation or thing. This is the area of ‘construal’. A change in perception from one way of viewing something to another is described through the process of ‘construal’.
Ronald Langacker, a cognitive linguist, shows that meaning depends on a range of factors including background knowledge, an awareness of social and linguistic contexts, imaginative capacities like metaphor, and the construal that is imposed on the linguistic content.
He says that:
Construal is our ability to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways. Every lexical and grammatical element incorporates, as an inherent aspect of its meaning, a certain way of construing the conceptual content evoked.
In his 1991 book, Langacker says:
A speaker who accurately observes the spatial distribution of certain stars can describe them in many distinct fashions: as a constellation, as a cluster of stars, as specks of light in the sky, etc. Such expressions are semantically distinct; they reflect the speaker’s alternate construals of the scene, each compatible with its objectively given properties.
They also draw on other “frames of knowledge” to add meaning. For example, in the case of a cluster of stars, this implies knowledge that we share about the way the sky is structured.
So different construals can be achieved by drawing on different conceptualisations and knowledge structures. Deficits are bad draws on a particular experience and frame.
But the concept of a fiscal deficit could be recast entirely as a investment vehicle for advancing well-being, with a totally different construal then possible.
This means that we can deploy the flexibility in language to promote alternative representations or construals of things. Using one conceptualisation about A might invoke one response (for example, deficits are bad) but an alternative construal of A can easily invoke the opposite response (deficits are desirable sometimes).
Policy opportunities arising from a more complete understanding of macroeconomic terms need to be communicated in a way that exploits our capacity to construe the same information in different ways.
The progressive challenge is to reframe macroeconomics to ensure that the neo-liberal myths are exposed. But it must begin, not with discussions about ‘facts’ and ‘logic’, but rather broader outlines of the the social purpose of government policy..
This broad vision is in sharp contrast with the neo-liberal view of the economy as a natural entity, separated from us, which gets sick if government attempts to alter its natural course.
Deficits are seen as a risk factor in this vision rather than a way of ensuring the economy works better for us.
The social purpose of government policy should be articulated and narrated in ways that will resonate with and activate the frames in our brains that constrain the way we interpret information.
So we might start by talking about ‘full employment’. But these mission statements cannot be a reflection of general goals that have almost universal desirability but no associated concrete actions.
The debate between conservatives and progressives is not about whether there should be full employment but what that means in action. For example, does full employment mean 5 per cent unemployment or 2 per cent? Who is responsible for its attainment? How should it be attained?
So progressives have to go beyond statements such as ‘Jobs for all that want to work’, which is clearly a desirable purpose. Almost everyone would agree on that.
But progressives have to relate this generality to a policy action – aggregate demand has to rise by x per cent and y million jobs have to be created.
Progressives have to invoke event-causation structures to force the debate to move beyond generalities such as ‘free markets will grow the economy and create jobs’. They have to clearly articulate why mass unemployment occurs and how it will not naturally cure itself.
Further, by implicating the government as part of the solution they have to counter such claims that governments do not create jobs by detailing public employment initiatives that clearly create productive work.
The progressive challenge in thus in two parts: (a) a need to better educate the public regarding macroeconomic matters in ways that our learning skills can absorb; (b) develop language that appeals to our intrinsic frames, which foster concern and action (such as economic justice/rights) and connect people with the economy rather than reinforce the idea that the economy is a natural construct that we should fear.
So rather than talk about the desirability of full employment, our narrative would deploy the primary metaphor Purposes Are Destinations, which relates to the subjective judgement that we want to achieve purposes and we succeed when we reach a destination.
So full employment is about the ‘zero waste of people’ and this destination is reached not when the fiscal deficit is x per cent but rather when unemployment is 2 per cent and zero underemployment.
Rather than complain about high unemployment, we must always specify the desired destination, which links with the Purposes are Desired Objects metaphor. Accordingly, debating financial ratios such as the size of deficits merely reinforce the conservative frames about sacrifice, solvency, rectitude, and drunken sailors. We must always focus on the desired objects that relate directly to the intrinsic frames.
The supportive language then might be that The government deficit rose and generated higher levels of wealth for households and firms after running an information campaign to show how the deficit links actions which result in a desired destination.
This exploits the More is Up metaphor in reverse by linking the government deficit to its non-government manifestation – the rising net financial assets that a deficit provides.
How many people who say deficits should be cut realise and relate that to the identical outcome – non-government wealth (their wealth) will fall $-for-$ as the deficit is cut?
Progressives have to reinforce those relationships to generate different construals.
This type of language more aggressively invokes the Event-Structure metaphor, which constructs in the words of Lakoff and Johnson (1999) “purposes as destinations to be reached”/
The destination must be prominent in the narrative and then we must specify the causal chains through which the purposes are achieved.
Causation is linked to concepts of forced movement where, for example, we might say that the government deficit is the application of a force (the injection of net financial assets), which causes a change of state (higher income, employment, or wealth).
We understand the concept of forced movement as being that something would not have ‘moved’ (occurred) without some force being applied. That is intrinsic to the way we conceptualise realities.
If we frame the economy as a economy is a construct rather than a natural equilibrating system which lies beyond us then we can easily appreciate that the improvement in national income or employment was the direct result of some cause (the government stimulus).
People respond to the logic where Causes are Forces and Causation is Forced Movement. In the ‘economy as a natural system or deity’ approach, government regulations and interventions are unnecessary and damaging.
In the progressive alternative, the same actions force movement towards our desired destinations and without the force the current state does not change and the goals are thus not achieved.
We want government to act on our behalf to move us from State A (less desirable) to State B (closer to our purpose). It is important to note that the economy has no goals. They are our goals and we use, manage, and control the economy to achieve our goals.
Progressives would thus frame the concept of fiscal space in terms of the idle real resources that can be brought into productive use via higher government spending and/or lower taxation.
The idle resources signal that the government deficit is too low or the surplus is too large. The desired destination is zero waste and the required action is a larger deficit.
There is much more I could say here. But there is plenty of scope for a progressive party to work over a number of years to change construal with respect to fiscal deficits.
In the 1960s, people did not hold the same views about government fiscal policy as they do now. Neo-liberal framing led to the change. It takes time. But the capacity of construal means that nothing is fixed in stone. Meaning and understanding can change.
It just needs leadership and good messages with strong facts to support.
There was an interesting literature around 2005 on the difficulties in changing political misperceptions (search for Nyhan and Reifler, University of Michigan, for example).
The literature helps us understand why just providing better empirical argument (fact-based rejections etc) to counter spurious reasoning may not be enough.
Ignorance by definition is a lack of knowledge. But it is not as simple as that. The reason is that superior provision of facts may not alter our misperceptions at all but, rather, can more deeply entrench us in the mire of ignorance.
In one interesting paper – When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions (published 2006) – we learn of an innovative research program designed to test whether “false or unsubstantiated beliefs” can be “corrected”.
It is clear that from a macroeconomic perspective it is a false belief that fiscal deficits should be always eliminated. For those who hold that view who would also endure the resulting rise in unemployment as austerity is imposed it is doubly ridiculous to hold such views.
Austerity is generally bad but for the victims of it especially so.
The 2006 Study (cited above) builds on a literature that shows that our “policy preferences” are often based on false, misleading, or unsubstantiated information that they believe to be true” and that “such misinformation is related to one’s political preferences”.
Note the different levels of agreement above in the poll for Conservative versus Labour voters.
Earlier research has shown that these erroneous preferences can, in fact, be corrected.
For example, a US study on the welfare issues found that respondents had “highly inaccurate beliefs about |
Michael Mulcahy says he knew nothing of Kayla Jimenez's history when he asked for one of her paintings. He just loved the art. (Published Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2016)
For someone who has been on this earth for 21 trips around the sun, Kayla Jimenez has had an awfully small orbit.
In her bedroom of her family's Willow Glen home, painting and drawing, is where she has spent a considerable amount of her life.
Jimenez says there just aren't many other places where she feels comfortable.
"Well, having disabilities, I think I'm different," Jimenez said.
Jimenez's disabilities (learning disabilities, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Cerebral Palsy in her legs) can be traced to her premature birth with twin brother Chris Jimenez.
"Chris had a 50-50 chance of being born alive," Kayla's mother, Shelly Jimenez said. "Kayla had a zero percent chance."
In spite of those odds, it is Chris Jimenez who is the more disabled of the two. Caring for him, Shelly says, is why the family spends most of their time at home. "24/7 pretty much," she said.
About the only time Kayla would venture away from home is to walk along Lincoln Avenue in Downtown Willow Glen. On her strolls, though, she would rarely talk or interact with anyone else.
"I’ve never really had friends," Kayla said.
Which explains all that time doing art in her room. Enough time, in fact, Kayla got really good at it, although no one outside her family knew it.
Then, one day, during one of those walks downtown she stopped to sketch the iconic Garden Theater. A family member was so impressed with the piece she suggested Shelly email a picture of it to Pierluigi Oliverio, Councilmember for San Jose's 6th District which includes Willow Glen.
"I didn't think I'd hear anything about it," Shelly said.
But Oliverio forwarded the artwork on to Michael Mulcahy, the owner of the Garden Theater. Mulcahy loved the sketch and sent an email asking if he could hang it in the lobby of the building. He had no idea about Kayla's history and disabilities.
"I just loved the art," Mulcahy said.
"I wanted to cry," Kalya said. "A stranger wanted my art. At the time, it was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me."
The biggest, that is, until others noticed the artwork and wanted to meet the artist.
Bob Paez, the owner of the Garden Theater Barber Shop, asked Kayla to paint a couple of pieces for his store.
Mulcahy came back and asked Kayla if she would paint a picture of The Table, a restaurant down the street in a building he also owned.
When Kayla now walks down Lincoln avenue she can not only see her works displayed, she has friendly faces she can stop and talk with.
"I'm so glad I got to know Kayla," Mulcahy said.
Shelly says it is her family that is truly grateful to those who have taken an interest in their daughter's talents and, by consequence, have expanded her horizons.
"They will never know how much this means to my family," Shelly said.Mathematicians are pretty obsessed with prime numbers - those elusive integers that can only be divided by one and themselves. If they're not creating cool artworks with them or finding them in nature, they're using computers to discover increasingly larger primes.
But now a group of researchers has found a strange property of primes that's never been seen before, and it violates one of the fundamental assumptions about how they behave - the idea that, for the most part, they occur totally randomly across integers.
The pattern isn't actually found within the primes themselves, but rather the final digit of the prime number that comes directly after them - which the mathematicians have shown isn't as random as you'd expect, and that's a pretty big deal for mathematicians.
"We’ve been studying primes for a long time, and no one spotted this before," Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the University of Montreal who wasn't involved in the study, told Quanta magazine. "It’s crazy."
So what are we talking about here? Our current understanding of primes suggests that, over a big enough sample, they should occur randomly, and shouldn't be influenced by the prime number that comes before or after them.
But that's not what Kannan Soundararajan and Robert Lemke Oliver from Stanford University in California found.
They performed a randomness check on the first 100 million primes and found that a prime ending in 1 was followed by another prime ending in 1 only 18.5 percent of the time - a far cry from the 25 percent you'd expect given that primes greater than five can only end in one of four digits: 1, 3, 7, or 9.
Furthermore, the chance of a prime ending in 1 being followed by a prime ending in 3 or 7 was roughly 30 percent, but for 9 it was only 22 percent.
In other words, the primes "really hate to repeat themselves", said Lemke Oliver.
The obvious explanation for this is the fact that numbers have to cycle through all the other digits before they get back to the same ending. "For example, 43 is followed by 47, 49, and 51 before it hits 53, and one of those numbers, 47, is prime," writes Jacob Aron for New Scientist.
But this doesn't explain the magnitude of the bias the team found, or why primes ending in 3 seemed to like being followed by primes ending in 9 more than 1 or 7. Even when they expanded their sample and examined the first few trillion prime numbers, the mathematicians found that - even though the bias gradually falls more in line with randomness - it still persists.
"I was very surprised," James Maynard from the University of Oxford told New Scientist. "I somehow needed to see it for myself to really believe it," he says, admitting that he ran back to his office and performed the calculations himself after hearing about the work.
So what's going on?
According to Soundararajan and Lemke Oliver, the pattern can be explained by something called the k-tuple conjecture - an old but unproven idea that describes how often pairs, triples, and larger sets of primes will make an appearance, and how close together these should occur.
Essentially, the k-tuple conjecture proposes that groups of primes don't appear all that randomly, and Soundararajan and Lemke Oliver showed that this prediction could accurately explain the last-digit pattern they found.
Maynard agrees with this outcome, which has been published on pre-press site ArXiv.org, and hopes that it'll be further evidence that primes do contain patterns, even if we can't always see them.
"Mathematicians go around assuming primes are random, and 99 percent of the time this is correct, but you need to remember the 1 percent of the time it isn’t," said Maynard. "If anything, I view this result as even more confirmation of the k-tuple conjecture."
Despite the fact that it's pretty exciting work, the newly spotted pattern doesn't really provide many practical answers for number theorists - for example, there's still the twin-prime conjecture and the Riemann hypothesis that need to be resolved.
The study also hasn't been peer reviewed as yet, so we need to take it with a grain of salt, but it's been placed on ArXiv so that other mathematicians can look over the work and add their own ideas and suggestions.
According to Granville, the discovery takes us one step closer to properly understanding the enigmatic primes. "Every little bit helps... I can’t believe anyone in the world would have guessed this," he told New Scientist. "You could wonder, what else have we missed about the primes?"Dana Milbank had a provocative column this morning arguing that on the debt ceiling, Dems have become the new party of Ronald Reagan, and that Republicans only honor their alleged hero Reagan in the breach and not the observance. After all, Reagan presided over 18 debt ceiling hikes as President. But for a large swath of today’s House conservatives, the drive to prevent the debt ceiling from being hiked has replaced the now-forgotten push to repeal Obamacare as their number one ideological cause celebre.
Now House liberals have hit on a fun new way of emphasizing this point: They are sending a letter today to every House Republican asking them to raise the debt limit. Only the letter wasn’t written by House liberals. It was written by Reagan himself.
Here’s the text of the letter Reagan wrote to then-Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker in 1983, a copy of which is being hand delivered from the Congressional Progressive Caucus to every House Republican this afternoon:
Dear Howard:
This letter is to ask for your help and support, and that of your colleagues, in the passage of an increase in the limit on the public debt.
As Secretary Regan has told you, the Treasury’s cash balances have reached a dangerously low point. Henceforth, the Treasury Department cannot guarantee that the Federal Government will have sufficient cash on any one day to meet all of its mandated expenses, and thus the United States could be forced to default on its obligations for the first time in its history.
This country now possesses the strongest credit in the world. The full consequences of a default or even the serious prospect of default by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and on the value of the dollar in exchange markets. The Nation can ill afford to allow such a result. The risks, the cost, the disruptions, and the incalculable damage lead me to but one conclusion: the Senate must pass this legislation before the Congress adjourns.
I want to thank you for your immediate attention to this urgent problem and for your assistance in passing an extension of the debt ceiling.
Sincerely,
Ronald Reagan
Call this a gimmick if you must, but it’s in keeping with the Dems’ broader strategy: Appropriating Reagan’s legacy in the debt limit fight as their own. Dems recently released audio of a 1987 radio address in which Reagan urged a debt ceiling hike. ”The United States has a special obligation to itself and the world to meet its obligations,” Reagan says in the address. For good measure, Reagan even cast avoiding default as key to — wait for it — American exceptionalism.
I don’t imagine that House Dems actually think the words of Reagan will sway some of today’s Tea-infused House conservatives. But they are hoping that the specter of Reagan repeatedly urging a debt ceiling hike for the good of America will emphasize to everyone else just how extreme and ideologically rigid the House conservative position has become.
UPDATE: Baker’s title fixed.Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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As if to prove that the one thing the Washington establishment fears more than war is peace, Senate Armed Services chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and ranking member James Inhofe (R-OK) published an op-ed in The Washington Post on Monday calling for the United States government to arm Ukraine. The first indication that the primary aim of their article is to further destabilize US-Russian relations is its timing, coming as it does only a week after Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held what was generally seen to be a relatively constructive meeting in Paris. The last thing the denizens of Capitol Hill want right now is any sort of rapprochement with Putin’s Russia, especially not in the run-up to the midterm elections. Putin is, after all, America’s villain du jour. Ad Policy
Yet while the Senators’ op-ed is tendentious in the extreme, it is actually fairly representative of the prevailing view among Washington’s foreign policy cognoscenti and therefore merits some scrutiny. The senators pile on one dubious claim after another. Readers are told at the outset that “now is the time to add defensive military aid, including weapons, to our support of Ukraine.” Exactly why the senators feel “now” is the right moment to do so is left unexplained. Surely funneling ever greater quantities of weapons into Ukraine is exactly the wrong thing to do, given that the September 5 cease-fire barely continues to hold in and around Donetsk. It would be tantamount to adding oxygen to a fire.
The Post’s more discerning readers will also note that calling the proposed military aid “defensive” is merely an attempt to obscure the nature of what we would actually be doing: becoming a party to the conflict. The qualifier “defensive” is meant to give the impression of a difference—between so-called “offensive” and “defensive” weapons—where none exists. It is simply a distinction that hinges on intent. Are we seriously to believe that the United States has the power to discern in advance how Kiev actually intends to use the weapons? According to the Senators “these weapons are lethal, but not provocative” because of their defensive nature. Surely Moscow wouldn’t dare argue with that kind of ironclad logic.
Readers are then asked to believe that a shipment of American arms into what is still a conflict zone is justified because “supporting Ukraine’s desire for peace, freedom, territorial integrity and democracy supports values Americans hold dear.” In other words, the senators are simply calling for the Obama administration to put into practice what some of the more sanguinary neoconservative activists have been calling for since 9/11: that America, per Max Boot’s infamous formulation, should “impose the rule of law, property rights, and other guarantees, at gunpoint if need be.”
Then there is the usual boilerplate with regard to the threat Putin’s Russia poses to “all of Europe”—as if the Kremlin has been covertly planning to snatch large swaths of eastern Ukraine, to say nothing of the former holdings of the pre-1917 Russian empire in Poland and the Baltics, all along. Absent from the Levin-Inhofe narrative is any mention the role that NATO’s continuous advance towards Russia’s borders over the past twenty years may have played in stoking the conflict. In Washington, NATO expansion is always proclaimed to be “defensive” and thus perfectly benign.
The senators go on to tell us that supplying arms to Kiev also makes eminent sense because “as we saw with the downing of the Malaysian jetliner, reportedly by Russian-supported forces, the impact of Putin’s reckless aggression is global.” Mentioning the MH17 tragedy is, for the senators’ argument anyway, an unfortunate misstep, because it only serves to bolster the arguments against supplying military assistance to Kiev. Over the weekend, it was reported that the German intelligence service (BND) has obtained evidence that the missile that the Ukrainian rebels used to shoot down the Malaysian jet was a BUK captured from a Ukrainian military base. The missile in question was not, as was repeatedly charged by the US Department of State, provided to the separatists by Russia.
If the BND is correct, then this calls the Levin-Inhofe plan even further into question. It becomes imperative to ask: How much control does Kiev really have over its own stockpile of munitions? Here we might do well to recall our recent experience in the Middle East in arming the so-called “moderate” forces. American weapons that had been intended to be used in the fight against ISIS quite suddenly turned into weapons that are now being used by ISIS. The senators suffer from what I would call the illusion of control: that providing military aid to a given party to a conflict somehow grants the United States a measure of control over the outcome. History shows otherwise.
In the final analysis, the Levin-Inhofe plan will only put the United States, Ukraine and Russia further along down the road to war and will do nothing to promote a peaceful and lasting settlement.Leo Villareal's "Multiverse." Image: The Q Speaks/Flickr
The notion that our universe may be just one in a series of endless parallel universes—some very similar, some wildly different—has captivated the hearts and minds of many science fiction fans. A branching multiverse, objects that exist in two places at once, light that behaves as both particles and waves—these are but a few of the weird facets of reality brought to us by quantum mechanics.
But parallel universes hold a special place in this list. They may, in fact, be the root of all quantum weirdness. In a paper published last week in the journal Physical Review X, quantum physicist Howard Wiseman and colleagues lay the groundwork for their new, "many interacting worlds" theory.
In this novel approach to quantum physics, each individual world is ruled by classical Newtonian mechanics. All that quantum behavior? Actually the result of different worlds smashing into each other.
This approach is in stark contrast to the traditional "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, which goes something like this: There are a bunch of parallel realities out there, and any time an event is observed in any of them, that universe branches to spawn a whole slew of new realities, one for each possible outcome of the observation. This process of universes birthing universes repeats itself ad infinitum.
all other worlds are as real as our world, and they've all been around since the beginning of time
Several aspects of the many worlds theory are troubling. For one, it doesn't precisely define when an observation occurs, making it impossible to say how many worlds actually exist. Secondly, different observational "outcomes" have different probabilities: All worlds are real, but some worlds are more real than others. If this sounds confusing to you, rest assured you're in good company.
"The problem with the many worlds interpretation is that it's fuzzy," said Wiseman. "Simply put, we cannot count the number of worlds that exist at any point in time. This makes the whole notion very hard to reconcile with the claim that these worlds are real."
Instead, "many interacting worlds" proposes a fixed, although gargantuan, number of universes.
"In our theory, all other worlds are as real as our world, and they've all been around since the beginning of time," Wiseman said. "The only mystery is what particular world we occupy."
Some of these universes are our cosmic neighbors—they're nearly identical to ours in the position of every single particle. According to Wiseman's theory, it's a sort of repulsive force between these neighbors that's responsible for all quantum phenomena.
This talk discusses a bit of the ramifications of universes bumping into each other.
"Quantum mechanics has always been a puzzle because of the subtle but deep ways it deviates from Newtonian mechanics," Wiseman wrote last week. "That these deviations could be due to a delicate interaction of essentially Newtonian worlds with 'nearby' parallel worlds is an entirely new solution to the quantum puzzle."
If that's not enough to keep you up at night, add to it that the interactive force between universes is like nothing physicists have ever known. Most forces in our experience occur between two discrete bodies: The gravitational interaction between the Earth and the Moon, for instance. But in Wiseman's theory, forces exist between clusters of universes, and they cannot be decomposed into individual, two-body interactions.
"This force only exists when universes are close together in…well, whatever space parallel universes exist in," Wiseman told me.
If correct, the theory would mean that the onerous "wave function"—a complex mathematical formulation that quantum physicists developed to describe how tiny particles interacts—is not a fundamental component of reality. (In an interesting, related development, researchers at Brown recently shattered a quantum wave function.)
The idea of interactions with other universes is no longer pure fantasy
If the team's theory rings true, it would also mean that widely-accepted conclusions based on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle—that a particle's speed and position can never be simultaneously known—have a fatal flaw.
"Operationally, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle still holds true in our theory. We can never know a particle's speed and position at the same time," Wiseman said. "But it's the deduction from there, that particles don't have definite positions and velocities, that's incorrect."
We just can't measure those definite positions and velocities, because lots of other universes are constantly bumping up against our own. Jerks.
There are many competing interpretations for quantum mechanics, and this new one is sure to elicit opposition from other factions in the scientific community. But Wiseman is optimistic that others can be convinced to take his team's concept seriously. And for good reason: Many interacting worlds has already been able to reproduce standard features of quantum mechanics, including the double slit experiment, which is usually taken to demonstrates that light can behave as either a wave or a particle.
So, the question that's actually on everyone's mind: If parallel universes are not so parallel after all, will we macroscopic beings one day be able to interact with the other universes in our neighborhood?
"It's not a part of our theory," said Wiseman. "But, if a force does exist between parallel worlds, you can start to wonder, what if that force is not exactly how we've written it down. The idea of interactions with other universes is no longer pure fantasy."
It opens up doors, so to speak.Posted 19 August 2013 - 07:37 AM
[color=cyan]
Been using Phranken Camo
On my Blue Cicada
For oh so lo-ong
Now it's time to go
He tears an orange gash
Runs off with a flash
For oh so lo-ong
Now it's time to go
The current paint scheme for my CDA-2A has been great, but I think it's time for a change. I'll be painting my 2B with my old scheme, and will use the new on my 2A, and so on.
So what is going on here?
You guys reply with suggestions (from in game) of the paint scheme. If you can't do that, the concept Cicada art with ingame colours/camo.
I will pick my favourite three, and then you guys will vote your favourite there!
Thanks guys, and good luck![/color]This article is about the comedy film. For films made before the advent of sound, see Silent film
Silent Movie is a 1976 American satirical comedy film co-written, directed by, and starring Mel Brooks, and released by 20th Century Fox on June 17, 1976. The ensemble cast includes Dom DeLuise, Marty Feldman, Bernadette Peters, and Sid Caesar, with appearances by Anne Bancroft, Liza Minnelli, Burt Reynolds, James Caan, Marcel Marceau, and Paul Newman playing themselves. While indeed silent (except for one word, music, and numerous sound effects), the film is a parody of the silent film genre, particularly the slapstick comedies of Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett, and Buster Keaton. Among the film's most famous gags is the fact that the only audible word in the film is spoken by Marcel Marceau, a noted mime. Sound is a big factor in the film's humor, as when a scene that shows the New York City skyline begins with the song "San Francisco", only to have it come to a sudden stop as if the musicians realize they are playing the wrong music. They then go into "I'll Take Manhattan" instead. A play on the current trend of large corporations buying up film studios is parodied by the attempt of the Engulf and Devour Corporation to take control of a studio (a thinly veiled reference to Gulf+Western's takeover of Paramount Pictures).
Plot [ edit ]
In Hollywood, Los Angeles,[4][5] Mel Funn (Mel Brooks), a great film director, is now recovering from a drinking problem and down on his luck. He sets out to Big Picture Studios to pitch a new script to the Chief, aided by his ever-present sidekicks Dom Bell (Dom DeLuise) and Marty Eggs (Marty Feldman). His big idea: the first silent motion picture in forty years. At first the Chief (Sid Caesar), who is in danger of losing the studio to the (literally) rabid and greedy New York conglomerate Engulf & Devour (Harold Gould and Ron Carey), rejects the idea, but Funn convinces him that if he can get Hollywood's biggest stars to be in the film, he could save the studio.
Funn, Eggs, and Bell proceed to recruit various people for the film. Their first target is Burt Reynolds, whom they first surprise in his shower. This does not go well, but they are able to sign him on by appearing at his house in disguise (and almost getting him killed by a steamroller). They recruit James Caan despite a disastrous lunch in his broken trailer, and then torture Liza Minnelli at the studio commissary (fortunately for them, she already badly wanted to be in the movie). They then disguise themselves as Flamenco dancers to get close to Anne Bancroft at a nightclub, and sign her on as well after a comical dance sequence. News breaks out that the Chief has taken ill and is in the hospital. While there, Mel phones Marcel Marceau in Paris who apparently declines the offer, saying audibly, in French: "Non!" When asked by the others what Marceau said, Funn explains he doesn't understand French. Paul Newman is seen on the hospital grounds. After leading them on a wild Hollywood-style chase in electric wheelchairs, he asks to be in the film. Funn and company reply with the typical Hollywood-esque "We'll get back to you." A newspaper ad indicates that they "ink" Newman to do the movie.
In the process of their search for stars, the trio have a number of brief but funny misadventures, including a mixup between two German Shepherds (one trained as a seeing-eye dog, the other most assuredly not), a flying blueberry pie, and several (mostly unsuccessful) efforts by Marty Eggs to seduce various women. Their most notable encounter involves a Coca-Cola machine that dispenses cans by launching them like grenades.
Engulf and Devour, meanwhile, worry that Funn will save Big Picture Studios and they will be unable to buy it. They attempt to "stop Funn with sex" by sending voluptuous nightclub sensation Vilma Kaplan (Bernadette Peters) to seduce Funn and pretend to be in love with him. Funn falls head over heels, but when Eggs and Bell reveal the truth to him on the day before filming begins, the director returns to drinking. Moments after this turn of events, Vilma is seen calling Mr. Engulf with the news that she is quitting: she has fallen for Funn for real. Mel stops by a liquor store and buys what first appears to be an advertising prop in the store's window, but is actually a giant bottle of liquor. After a misadventure involving a Skid Row hotel room and a murphy bed, Funn ends up in an alley where he dispenses booze from his giant bottle and is proclaimed "King of the Winos". After a few hours of hitting the local gin mills, Vilma and Funn's associates find the would-be "King" passed out in a pile of his "subjects", but several hundred cups of coffee sober him up. Funn's silent movie is completed in record time. However, the only copy of it is stolen from the theater by Engulf & Devour just before its big premiere.
Vilma volunteers to stall the movie theater's audience with her nightclub act while Funn and his associates go out to steal back their film. They succeed, but are chased by Engulf and Devour's thuggish executives. They are eventually cornered, but they are near the violent Coke machine, which they use against their foes. Most of the executives, including Mr. Devour, are disabled by the exploding cans of Coke, allowing Funn, Eggs, and Bell to escape. They hurry the film to the theater, where it is shown for the first time. In the meantime, Eggs has gotten himself tangled up in the film and he is immediately rushed up to the projection booth with the film wrapped around him.
After the movie is over, the audience applauds wildly and leaps to its feet while balloons and streamers fill the air. "They seem to like it," Funn says. The jubilant audience files out of the theater past Funn, Eggs, Bell, Vilma, and the recovered studio chief.
Cast [ edit ]
Analysis [ edit ]
Mel Brooks enjoyed success with the release of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein in 1974, both being parody films spoofing entire genres. He followed this success with Silent Movie, an affectionate parody of the slapstick films of the silent film era. The film feels like a throwback to this earlier era, despite using color and other up to date techniques.[4] As a film about filmmaking, Silent Movie also parodies "Hollywood deal-making".[4] Co-writer Ron Clark was previously the producer of The Tim Conway Comedy Hour (1970), while Rudy De Luca and Barry Levinson were writers for The Carol Burnett Show (1967–1978). Unsurprisingly the humor of Silent Movie would not be out of place in a sketch comedy.[4] Henry Jenkins points out that for Brooks the decision to make a silent comedy represents an allusion to an earlier era of his career. He used to be a writer for Your Show of Shows (1950–1954), a show which included pantomime segments and parodies of silent films. Television audiences of the 1950s were familiar with the silents through their broadcast on late night television.[6]
The film features an unflattering portrayal of the film industry. Big Picture Studios' front gate sign boasts of the multimillion-dollar scope of their films, never mentioning their quality. The film project is green-lit not on the merits of its script, but solely on the drawing power of the movie stars attached. Executives cannot tell good film footage apart from bad, while the 'Current Studio Chief' is one box office bomb away from losing his position. The studio itself is under threat of a takeover by a "soulless" conglomerate. The movie stars are portrayed as vain figures who flaunt their wealth. The film audience is portrayed as fickle and unpredictable.[4]
The villainous conglomerate 'Engulf & Devour' is a parody of real-life conglomerate Gulf+Western Industries, which had acquired Paramount Pictures.[4] The film also parodies corporate executives as essentially interchangeable yes-men, following the whims of their boss.[4]
The logo of Big Picture Studios is a parody of the MGM lion. It depicts the Studio Chief (Sid Caesar) as a braying donkey.[4] Liza Minnelli features in a scene which makes no use of her dancing talents. Robert Alan Crick points out that the part could be easily played by any well-known actress of the 1970s, with no apparent difference.[4] The film was the first notable acting role for Brooks, who was previously limited to off-screen voiceovers and short cameos.[4]
One joke makes use of the difference between the expressive gestures of silent cinema and those used in guessing games, such as charades. A secretary attempts to explain to the Studio Chief that Funn has a drinking problem, by pantomiming an uplifted bottle. Her boss misunderstands, figuring that Funn sucks his thumb.[6] Another scene with the Boss pays homage to slapstick. The boss proclaims slapstick to be dead. Then he flips his chair backwards, and goes sliding across the room. He slams his head, with the sound of a bell ringing. The humor of the scene derives from the combination of the image and the unlikely sound.[6] Many of the gags of the film actually depend on careful synchronizations of sound and image. For example, a sequence has Feldman tossed about between elevator doors. It is set to the sounds of a pinball machine.[6]
Other gags are delivered through intertitles. For example, in a meeting of 'Engulf & Devour', an underling whispers something in the ears of his boss. The intertitles report: "whisper...whisper...whisper". The boss fails to understand, forcing the man to shout. In response the intertitle is written in all caps: "YOUR FLY IS OPEN".[6]
Marcel Marceau reprises his "walking into the wind" routine while trying to lift a phone. He then shouts the only spoken word of the film: "non". Mel Funn does not apparently understand the reply, since he does not speak French.[6]
Production notes [ edit ]
Brooks initially envisioned the film without even a musical soundtrack. But the idea made 20th Century Fox executives nervous, so Brooks added John Morris's score, "like a rug from beginning to end, just to be on the safe side."
Even though the film was shot without sound, Brooks was initially frustrated when he could not get the film crew to laugh, as they were afraid their laughter would spoil a take.
Brooks biographer James Robert Parish says that Brooks based the Eggs and Bell characters on his relationship with his three brothers.
This was Brooks's first starring role in a film; referring to himself as actor-director, Brooks said, "I'm not going to tell myself how much I like me or I'll ask for more money."
The pregnant woman in the first scene is Dom DeLuise's real-life wife, Carol Arthur.
Reynolds later described how his cameo came about:
Mel is one of the first directors in town who said, "God, you're funny." Originally I was going to do another segment in the film, but at the time I had this house up on the hill. I had gotten a big "R" from Republic Studios and put it on the gate. The décor was Early Gauche. I had my initials everywhere - "BR" on the rugs, the ashtrays, everywhere. It was a joke; it made me laugh; it made people who came there laugh. It's the kind of joke I like to play on myself. At parties I used to put lights around the "R." Mel took that and ran with it for the part I played.[7]
Reception [ edit ]
Silent Movie currently holds an 82% 'Fresh' rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 22 reviews.[8]
Roger Ebert gave the film a four-star review and called it "not only funny, but fun." He cited as positive elements the ability of Brooks to do anything for a laugh and the world of his films where everything is possible. He stated that Brooks took "a considerable stylistic risk" which he managed to pull off "triumphantly". He considered the film equal in comedic ability to Blazing Saddles (1974), superior to Young Frankenstein (1974), and inferior to The Producers (1968).[5] He also praised the film for offering an encyclopedia-worth of visual gags, both old and new.[5] Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that the film can be enjoyed as "a virtually uninterrupted series of smiles" but "doesn't contain a single moment that ever seriously threatens to split the sides."[9] Variety wrote, "Considering the pitfalls, the brisk 86-minute pic works surprisingly well."[10] Gene Siskel gave the film three stars out of four and wrote that it offered "a number of laughs" and unbilled cameos "refreshing as they are brief."[11] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "Some of the bits and pieces work better than others, but so many work so clownishly, zanily, idiotically well that 'Silent Movie' is certain to have the year's noisiest audiences."[12] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post called the film "a misbegotten but tolerably amusing novelty item."[13]
It earned North American rentals of $21,240,000.[14]
Awards & Nominations [ edit ]
Home media [ edit ]
The DVD contains audio tracks in English, Spanish, and French, even though the film's only spoken line, "Non" (French for "No"), sounds almost identical in all three languages. The DVD also includes English subtitles.
Sources [ edit ]UPDATE Fall 2015: The beautiful upper swimming hole on the Jiajiuliao Stream was destroyed by huge amounts of silt and rock brought down by a typhoon in the summer of 2015. The Jiajiuliao Stream is still traceable, but as very different place from what it was pre-August 2015. RiP much-missed swimming hole!
Just when I think I’ve found my favorite ever Taipei-area summer hideaway (and I have a couple; my previous fave, Yuemeikang Waterfall, has sadly been well-and-truly discovered this year, although it’s still a marvellous sight), along comes a ‘new’ place that blows the competition away with its stunningly pristine, remote position. Tricky enough to reach to ensure it’s unlikely to become popular anytime soon, this magnificent swimming hole is the biggest and certainly the finest I know of in the Taipei area.
Actually I’d heard rumors of another, much bigger swimming hole in the area a long time ago (the natural swimming hole and water slide above Red River Gorge has long been a favorite summer spot with swimmers, fishermen and river-tracers alike; it’s described in both Taipei Day Trips 2 (page 200) and Taipei Escapes 2 (page 156) in case you don’t know it yet!). It wasn’t however, until a boiling hot Saturday in late August, amid record-breaking temperatures in the Taipei area (37 degrees C!) that fourteen of us actually followed up on those rumors, armed with a description |
After my last post on the expression problem, I thought that I would explore ways to solve it in the next post and that I would write that post shortly after. I knew how the solution worked in Haskell and that solutions existed for OO languages, so that post should not have been terribly hard to write. Well, here we are five months later and I am finally getting around to writing the post ;).
Expression Problem Recap
The term Expression Problem was coined by Philip Waldler in a mail to the Java Generics mailing list. The goal is to be able to define datatypes by cases and functions over these datatypes in a way that is extensible: one should be able to add both new cases and new functions without touching or recompiling old code and while maintaining static type safety.
As an example I'll reuse the simple expression language from the last post. To represent such an expression language we will have a number of variants to capture the different types of expressions, for example literal integers, addition, and multiplication. To work with this representation we will have different functions to transform such expressions, for example evaluating or pretty-printing them.
Once we have defined the cases and functions how difficult will it be to add new cases and new functions? Statically type-checked functional languages make it easy to add new functions (see last post) while the object oriented languages make it easy to add new cases. The
default approach in both languages does not make it easy^[Easy here means that no code needs to be changed / dublicated and type-safety is maintained.] to either add new cases or new functions. That means that the default approach in both languages does not solve the Expression Problem. However, it turns out that solutions are possible in both types of languages. This post will describe a possible solution in both Haskell and Java.
A Haskell Solution
The key to solving the Expression Problem in Haskell is to define typeclasses for the desired functions and make the datatypes instances of these typeclasses. We also define the different variants as their own datatypes, though this is not strictly necessary yet. For our expression language the setup looks as follows:
data Lit = Lit Int data Add l r = Add l r class Eval x where eval :: x -> Int instance Eval Lit where eval (Lit x) = x instance (Eval l, Eval r) => Eval ( Add l r) where eval ( Add l r) = eval l + eval r
The extension that is typically easy in functional languages is to add a new function over the datatype. With the setup as above, we now add a new typeclass which contains the function as a method and add instances for each of our datatypes. Compared to the standard approach in functional languages, this requires slightly more code, but is still fairly clear:
class PPrint x where pprint :: x -> String instance PPrint Lit where pprint (Lit x) = show x instance (PPrint l, PPrint r) => PPrint ( Add l r) where pprint ( Add l r) = "(" ++ pprint l ++ " + " ++ pprint r ++ ")"
OK, so adding new functions is still easy, how about adding new cases? Adding a new case is the interesting part, because this is the side of the Expression Problem which the standard approach in Haskell can't handle. However, with the setup we have introduced above this becomes quite easy: we just add a new datatype and then add instances for each of our typeclasses:
data Mult l r = Mult l r instance (Eval l, Eval r) => Eval (Mult l r) where eval (Mult l r) = eval l * eval r instance (PPrint l, PPrint r) => PPrint (Mult l r) where pprint (Mult l r) = pprint l ++ " * " ++ pprint r
OK, so this approach lets us indeed add new cases and new functions without having to modify existing code. Note that we also have type safety: in the code below both eval and pprint can be called on both threePlus5 and threePlus5Times7 because these operations are
defined on each of the datatypes. Had we forgotten to derive a typeclass instance for one of the cases Lit, Add or Mult the compiler would bark. The full code is available at this gist.
threePlus5 = Add (Lit 3) (Lit 5) threePlus5Times7 = Mult threePlus5 (Lit 7) main = do putStrLn $ pprint threePlus5 ++ " = " ++ show (eval threePlus5) putStrLn $ pprint threePlus5Times7 ++ " = " ++ show (eval threePlus5Times7)
A Java Solution
Solving the Expression Problem in classical (statically typed) OO languages is a bit more difficult. The solution I'll present here is taken from the paper Extensibility for the masses (PDF) which has won the ECOOP 2012 best paper award. The idea is to use object algebras which implement so-called algebraic signatures. We will use the same example as above. The algebraic signature for the expression language looks as follows:^[Note the similarity to type classes!]
signature E lit: Int -> E add: E x E -> E
The general idea is this: we will represent the above signature as an interface which is parameterized over E. To actually use objects created with this interface we'll instantiate E to a concrete interface, for example to Eval and call the operations provided by this interface ( eval() ). However, code creating objects with the above interface does not need to know what E is and can thus be completely generic.
In case this is a bit confusing (it certainly was to me), let's look at a piece of code which will hopefully make this idea somwhat clearer:
interface Alg1 < E > { E lit ( int x) ; E add (E l, E r) ; } class Impl1 < E > { public static <E> E make3Plus5 (Alg1<E> f) { return f.add(f.lit( 3 ), f.lit( 5 )); } } interface Eval { int eval () ; } class ELit implements Eval { private int x; public ELit ( int x) { this.x = x; } public int eval () { return x; } } class EAdd implements Eval { private Eval l, r; public EAdd (Eval l, Eval r) { this.l = l; this.r = r; } public int eval () { return l.eval() + r.eval(); } } class Alg1EvalFactory implements Alg1 < Eval > { public Eval lit ( int x) { return new ELit(x); } public Eval add (Eval l, Eval r) { return new EAdd(l, r); } } class Impl2 { static int eval3Plus5 () { return Impl1.make3Plus5( new Alg1EvalFactory()).eval(); } }
So we first define a generic interface called Alg1 which represents the algebraic signature above.^[The paper calls such interfaces object algebras and goes a bit into the category theoretical motivations for these terms which I'm ignoring here.] Programs such as make3Plus5 can use this interface completely generically without needing to know what E acutally is.
Only when we acutally want to use the objects created from the Alg1 interface do we need to define a concrete interface such as Eval and classes that implement it. We also need a class that implements Alg1<E>, in the code above this is Alg1EvalFactory. An instance of this factory is passed to the generic program make3Plus5 which then produces an object which implements Eval so that we can call the eval() method on it.
Comparing this approach to the Haskell one there are some similarities: The interface Eval here plays the role of the typeclass Eval in the Haskell version and the classes ELit and EAdd correspond to the instance declarations. The piece that is missing from the Haskell version is the Alg1 interface and its implementation, but I think there are some similarities to what the Haskell compiler does behind the scenes.^[Clearly the Haskell code is considerably easier to understand and - I would argue - also more elegant, but let's not get into that.]
Now let's check if we can extend this setup with both new functions and new variants. First, adding new functions is fairly easy: The interface Alg1 can stay unchanged, we merely need to create a new interface PPrint which will take the place of Eval and corresponding classes PLit and PAdd that implement this interface. To actually make use of Alg1 instantiated to this new interface we also need a new factory.
interface PPrint { public String pprint () ; } class PLit implements PPrint { private int x; public PLit ( int x) { this.x = x; } public String pprint () { return Integer.valueOf(x).toString(); } } class PAdd implements PPrint { private PPrint l, r; public PAdd (PPrint l, PPrint r) { this.l = l; this.r = r; } public String pprint () { return "(" + l.pprint() + " + " + r.pprint() + ")" ; } } class Alg1PPrintFactory implements Alg1 < PPrint > { public PPrint lit ( int x) { return new PLit(x); } public PPrint add (PPrint l, PPrint r) { return new PAdd(l, r); } } class Impl3 { static String pprint3Plus5 () { return Impl1.make3Plus5( new Alg1PPrintFactory()).pprint(); } }
This may look like a lot of code, but again, this roughly corresponds to the Haskell version. We did not need to duplicate any code (apart from the usual boilerplate that is required by Java). Also note that we were able to reuse make3Plus5 from above even though we're now using a new operation on its result!
So we can add new functions over the datatype cases. To add new cases we need to extend the signature Alg1 to Alg2 to accomodate the new case. We then need to add classes that implement the concrete interfaces Eval and PPrint for this new cases. Furthermore, we also need new factories which implement the interface Alg2<Eval> and Alg2<PPrint>. Again, this is slightly more code than one would love to write, but it is completely extensible (note for example that we are reusing make3Plus5 unchanged with a factory that implements Alg2<E> ):
interface Alg2 < E > extends Alg1 < E > { E mult (E l, E r) ; } class EMult implements Eval { private Eval l, r; public EMult (Eval l, Eval r) { this.l = l; this.r = r; } public int eval () { return l.eval() * r.eval(); } } class PMult implements PPrint { private PPrint l, r; public PMult (PPrint l, PPrint r) { this.l = l; this.r = r; } public String pprint () { return l.pprint() + " * " + r.pprint(); } } class Alg2EvalFactory extends Alg1EvalFactory implements Alg2 < Eval > { public Eval mult (Eval l, Eval r) { return new EMult(l, r); } } class Alg2PPrintFactory extends Alg1PPrintFactory implements Alg2 < PPrint > { public PPrint mult (PPrint l, PPrint r) { return new PMult(l, r); } } class Impl4 < E > { public static <E> E make3Plus5Times7 (Alg2<E> f) { return f.mult(Impl1.make3Plus5(f), f.lit( 7 )); } public static int eval3Plus5Times7 () { return make3Plus5Times7( new Alg2EvalFactory()).eval(); } public static String pprint3Plus5Times7 () { return make3Plus5Times7( new Alg2PPrintFactory()).pprint(); } }
For completeness, here is a main method which uses the above and gives the same output as the Haskell version. The full code can be found at this gist.
public class Main { public static void main ( String[] args ) { System. out.println(Impl3.pprint3Plus5() + " = " + Integer.valueOf(Impl2.eval3Plus5()).toString()); System. out.println(Impl4.pprint3Plus5Times7() + " = " + Integer.valueOf(Impl4.eval3Plus5Times7()).toString()); } }
Conclusion
So this post gave a quick demonstration of how the Expression Problem can be solved both in Haskell and Java. I think it is pretty cool that the Expression Problem is actually solvable in a language like Java because I first thought that that wasn't the case. On the one hand the Java version seems pretty heavyweight in terms of additional complexity. I therefore doubt that I would reach for this solution in practice unless I was certain in advance that solving the Expression Problem is important for a particular application and that it would justify the conceptual overhead. On the other hand this solution doesn't feel conceptually much heavier than the visitor pattern and this solution solves both sides of the Expression Problem while the visitor pattern only solves one.
In the end I just wish I could use Haskell ;).
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DisqusThe excitement around Halo 5: Forge has been a little bit muted, you might say, because it's really more of an editor for Halo 5: Guardians on the Xbox One than it is a full-blown game. But NeoGAF user Stinkles, aka Halo franchise development director Frank O'Connor, dropped a bombshell today when he revealed that it will (at some point after launch) include a custom game browser, essentially turning it into a full-blown, free online shooter.
The comment came in this NeoGAF thread, in which O'Connor remarked on his improving mouse/keyboard skills and then added, “Once the custom game browser is available I think the community might get crazy legit.” In a follow-up, he added, “Won't be there at launch. But it's comin'.”
That's a big bit of news (and kind of an odd thing to just drop casually on GAF), because the presence of a game browser takes Forge from a “make stuff for our real audience” tool to a real and proper game in its own right: A free online shooter with potentially unlimited maps and modes. We don't know exactly how it will work yet, but a 343 Industries spokesperson confirmed that the post on GAF is legit.
“Yes, a join-in-progress custom games browser is currently in development for Halo 5: Forge (Win10) and Halo 5: Guardians (Xbox One) and is planned for release in a future content update,” the rep said.
That changes things, doesn't it? Halo 5: Forge will be out on September 8. The system requirements were revealed last week.CSKA: 'Better offers for Honda'
By Football Italia staff
CKSA Moscow slammed Milan for their Keisuke Honda bid. “We’ve had better offers and they can’t treat us like losers.”
Japanese international Honda’s contract is up on December 31, so he will be able to join the Rossoneri as a free agent in January.
Milan are eager to sign him now, but CSKA Moscow have baulked at the €2m proposal.
“We’ve had better offers for Honda compared to the Milan one. Certainly more interesting and economically viable,” said President Yevgeny Giner.
He spoke after Honda scored with a sensational free kick in today’s 2-1 win over Lokomotiv Moscow.
“The issue regards both the sum payable to CSKA and the player’s wages. Milan are an important club and Adriano Galliani is an excellent director.
“However, they have to understand in Italy that they can’t treat us like losers, nor will we let ourselves be conditioned by the newspapers.
“Honda has not lost any motivation. He is a CSKA player and has a contract with CSKA.”The man who served as the director of the National Security Agency under former President George W. Bush said Wednesday that President Barack Obama has been more transparent about top secret surveillance programs than his predecessor.
Gen. Michael Hayden, former NSA director, praised Obama for resuming those programs.
“We should just take a sense of satisfaction that what we were doing, once candidate Obama became President Obama, he saw that these were of great value and frankly, were being very carefully done,” Hayden told CNN. “National security looks a little different from the Oval Office than it does from a hotel room in Iowa.”
Hayden applauded Obama for making the details of the NSA’s data collection available to members of Congress.
“Frankly, the Obama administration was more transparent about this effort than we were in the Bush administration,” Hayden said. “I mean, they made this meta data collection activity available to all the members of Congress. Not just all the members of the intelligence committees.”
There has been disagreement on Capitol Hill over how much lawmakers knew about the NSA programs. Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) said Wednesday that he didn’t know about the programs because he isn’t on the Intelligence Committee and was grateful that NSA leaker Edward Snowden had made the classified information public. But a day before Tester’s remarks, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) insisted that lawmakers had only themselves to blame if they weren’t cognizant of the surveillance programs.Reno Police have released the names of two people found dead in the aftermath of an apartment fire in northwest Reno.
The Washoe County Medical Examiner's Office says smoke inhalation likely contributed to the deaths of 45-year-old Paul Therrien and 58-year-old Cathy Costodio, residents of the burned apartment, but determination regarding the exact causes of death is pending toxicology results.
Reno Fire investigators have concluded the fire, in the early morning hours of December 14, 2017 at 1301 Stardust Street, likely started in one of the bedrooms of the 3rd floor apartment. The exact cause has still not been determined, but the Reno Fire Department has not been able to rule out various accidental heat sources, including a space heater and discarded cigarettes. Investigators say they have uncovered no obvious evidence of arson or other crimes that may have contributed to the fire or the deaths.
The room where the fire started did not have a working fire alarm.
Since there were deaths involved in the fire, Reno Police are leading the investigation.
Reno Fire first received the report of two people trapped on the 3rd floor balcony of the Stardust Apartments around 1:40 a.m. By the time crews arrived, one apartment was fully engulfed.
A pet was also killed.
Crews describe the fire as "hard and heavy." Seven engines, 2 trucks, 1 Squad, 1 Rescue, 3 Battalion Chiefs, fire investigators and a Fire Chaplain were called to the scene. The flames were contained around 2:45 a.m.
Crews say the fire made its way into the attic, but was contained to the one apartment and surrounding area. Ten apartments were evacuated. The American Red Cross assisted 16 people and 20 pets displaced by the fire.
Fire crews say the third floor of the apartment building is now uninhabitable and there is damage to surrounding apartments.
In a release from RPD:
The Reno Fire and Police Departments would like to remind the Reno community that half of all home heating fires are reported during the months of December, January, and February. When using portable heaters please follow these safety tips:
- Keep all combustibles at least three feet from heating equipment.
- Portable electric heaters should be UL listed and plugged directly into an outlet. Never use an extension cord on a heater.
- Never use portable fuel burning heaters (like a kerosene heater) inside.
- Remember to turn portable heaters off when leaving the room or going to bed.
If you smoke please follow these safety tips:
- Smoke outside. Most deaths result from fires that started in living rooms, family rooms or in bedrooms.
- Never smoke in bed or around medical oxygen.
- Keep cigarettes, lighters, matches, and other smoking materials up high out of the reach of children, in a locked cabinet.
- Use a deep, sturdy non-combustible ashtray. Place it away from anything that can burn. Do not discard cigarettes in vegetation such as mulch, potted plants, or in plastic containers.
- Before you throw away butts and ashes, make sure they are out, and dousing in water or sand is the best way to do that.
Lastly, always make sure you have a working smoke alarm in every sleeping room and every hallway outside the sleeping room. Test the alarm and check batteries regularly, and have an escape plan if they go off.(JTA) — If a Polish ultranationalist student intended to delegitimize his university’s main Hanukkah event, his plan seems to have backfired.
On Monday, on the Facebook invitation for a Hanukkah event at the University of Warsaw, Konrad Smuniewski inveighed against “Jew communists” and called Judaism a “criminal ideology” of “racism, xenophobia and hatred.”
His posts, however, generated a backlash that propelled the normally modest Hanukkah party at the university’s Judaic Department into the spotlight — garnering coverage in the Polish media that was highly critical of Smuniewski’s remarks and leading to a doubling in attendance at the event the following day.
“I cannot accept this sort of behavior, which I do not understand,” said Asia Bakon, 19, who is studying the history of arts and Hebrew, though she is not Jewish.
Bakon said she and approximately 40 other non-Jewish students came to the Hanukkah party for the first time this year “mainly out of solidarity over these hateful comments” by Smuniewski.
In a country where many left-wing liberals are accusing the rightist government of mainstreaming xenophobia since its rise to power last year, the anti-Semitic views expressed by Smuniewski — a devout Catholic and Donald Trump fan who studies history at the university — were particularly shocking to some of his critics because he couched them in pseudo-academic language.
“The phrase ‘Jew communists‘ is a scientific term. What’s offensive about it?” Smuniewski told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, which many consider Poland’s daily of record, in a 600-word article on the incident published Wednesday.
Radio Zet, Warsaw’s first private radio station — its share of the national listenership is approximately 16 percent — also reported on the controversy.
In a statement on its website, the university said that a disciplinary committee is reviewing Smuniewski’s remarks following complaints.
To Bakon, Smuniewski’s decision to publish hate speech under his own name, and to then defend it in the national media, is typical of what she described as how rising nationalism in Poland is emboldening racists.
“I’m afraid this is connected to how nationalism has grown in Poland over the past four, five years,” she told JTA. “I see it as connected to events in Poland and around the world.”
Wojciech Karpieszuk, a journalist who covered the story for the left-leaning Gazeta Wyborcza, concurred.
“In my opinion this is related. The right-wing populism is on the rise in Poland now,” he told JTA. “And right-wing populists are more open to share with their views.”
Karpieszuk also said the incident touched a nerve at Warsaw University because of anti-Semitism there in the 1930s and during Poland’s communist years.
The incident is unusual because it involves Poland’s top-ranked university, but it comes amid a string of racist incidents in recent months, including the burning of a haredi Orthodox Jew effigy at an anti-immigration protest last year in the city of Wroclaw.
In its October report on hate crimes in Poland last year, the European Tolerance Center reported a decline in the prevalence of anti-Semitic discourse in Poland. Yet Poland’s Never Again Association, which tracks racist and xenophobic incidents in the country, revealed in September that it was getting reports of 10 racism incidents daily, whereas this used to be the weekly tally less than two years ago.
Amid rising tensions over immigration into the European Union by Muslims and fear over Russian expansionism, racist incidents recorded this year in Poland included the beating of a Syrian man on a Warsaw street; the barring of a black child from a playground in a town southeast of the capital and the formation of vigilante patrol groups to guard against possible illegal immigrants in Lodz, according to the Financial Times.
Government data show that 962 hate crimes were investigated in Poland last year — a 38 percent increase over 2014, the Financial Times reported in September.
“All too often we are disappointed by the lack of reaction to anti-Semitism,” said Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, who also attended the Hanukkah event at the university. “This time the reaction was quick and very clear in its condemnation of anti-Semitism. I am moved by the reactions of the university and of the students. All of Europe can learn from this response on how you can and must fight react against anti-Semitism and all forms of hatred.”
In Poland, there are some who connect the country’s hate crime problem with the political rhetoric of several of its leading politicians.
“Everything started with the electoral campaign” last year, Adam Bodnar, Poland’s commissioner for human rights, told the Financial Times. He was referring to the 2015 elections that ended with an upset victory for the nationalist conservative Law and Justice party under President Andrzej Duda.
“At that time those were not only statements but also demonstrations, hate speech, increase of hate on the internet,” Bodnar said.
These included remarks by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a former prime minister and leader of Duda’s party, who warned that accepting Muslim refugees would “threaten Poland’s security.” This was a refined version of his remarks from before last year’s elections — that immigrants could bring “parasites” and “diseases.”
Zbigniew Ziobro, the country’s justice minister, meanwhile has said the Law and Justice party is the only defense against “Islamic districts in Poland.”
In July, Duda said at the commemoration of the Kielce pogrom, an outbreak of violence against Poland’s Jewish community in 1946, that in Poland “there is no place for any kind of prejudice, no place for racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism.” Also last year, he said anti-Semites are “an insult” to non-Jews who risked their lives in Poland to save Jews from the Holocaust — a group also known as Righteous Among the Nations.
His government is responsible for directing unprecedented attention and honors for thousands of righteous gentiles, of which Poland has the highest number of any other country. Under Duda, Poland and Israel have pursued even friendlier ties.
But also under Duda, Holocaust revisionism has taken root in some of the country’s highest offices.
Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz, whom the Anti-Defamation League last year said demonstrated “profound and virulent anti-Semitism” by defending the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” forgery, claimed in July that Russians were responsible for the killings of Jews that mainstream historians attribute to Poles and Ukrainians.
And Jaroslaw Szarek, the president of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, said over the summer that the perpetrators of the Jedwabne massacre of Jews, which has been widely accepted as having been perpetrated by Poles, “were the Germans, who used in their own machine of terror a group of Poles.”
Meanwhile, Jan Gross, the Polish-American Jewish historian, is under a criminal investigation opened against him this year for saying that Poles killed more Jews during the Holocaust than Poles killed Germans. The probe was opened following complaints against Gross that alleged he broke a law that criminalizes insulting “the honor of the Polish Nation.”
Yet despite all these issues, “Poland is one of the best – if not the best – nations in Europe in which to be Jewish today,” Matthew Tyrmand, a columnist and son of the well-known Polish-Jewish writer Leopold Tyrmand, wrote in a recent op-ed, which the Warsaw Point published in April.
“In today’s Poland, violent anti-Semitic acts are few and far between,” he noted, adding: “In most large Polish cities there are now active synagogues, nonsectarian Friday night Sabbaths, lectures and the wearing of Jewish symbols such as the Star of David have become de rigueur.”Homebrew is arguably the best package manager for OSX around. It’s a great project, I’ve been using it for years, and it’s doing what it’s supposed to in a very clean manner. Unfortunately, the team decided to track the behaviour of its users via Google Analytics.
This is bad.
Open Source is about trust. Trust is underminded by things like tracking. Do not track your users. In the rare case you really need anonymous data, ask your users first. Never use Google products (or any other “big data” company that relies on making money out of the data you provide) to track your users. Using Google’s tracking and then calling it “anonymous” is a lie. Google collects tons of information of its users and even non-users. There’s no way to know what data Google will relate internally. Even if you don’t get to see all of the collected information, Google still has them. Opt-out is never an excuse. It always excludes most users (which either don’t care, or have more severe things to care about than protecting their privacy in every random app they’re using).
Read on to lean howto fix the issue for at least yourself.
Edit: I’ve been contacted by a Homebrew maintainer and have been asked to remove the link to the Github issue. His arguments about keeping the issue to the topic convinced me, and I was sad to hear that he apparently received tons of personally insulting emails. When I asked for a more appropriate way to provide feedback, he didn’t give any and stated that they won’t make the tracking procedure opt-in. They also have removed all comments regarding complaints about their tracking from the issue. I wrote a final comment in the comment section, which was deleted immediately. For completeness, I’m quoting it here:
While I can understand you want to keep this Issue productive, I find it disturbing how Homebrew deals with massive complaints from an open-source-loving community (see HN, Reddit, etc. discussions). Don’t just delete this away and hope everybody just forgets about this. I know this will probably be deleted in a minute and you guys will probably ban me, but I’m still writing this so people get notified via email/ etc. There are people out there for whom this is a serious issue. I beg you do not take this lightly. I want to tell people “Homebrew is good, use it” and not “Homebrew is kinda good, but before you use it make sure to paste this-and-this in your terminal and also block this and that, otherwise you’ll be tracked”.
Fixing the issue
Homebrew ships with an option to opt-out of the tracking.
Set the environment variable HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1
Or run git config --file="$(brew --repository)/.git/config" --replace-all homebrew.analyticsdisabled true
A more general approach (as there are other programs out there, which are less nice than Homebrew) is to block known tracking hosts. This can be either done using something like Little Snitch, or by setting up an adblocking /etc/hosts file. The latter option is free and pretty straightforward. You can use the following script to collect well-known tracking services and tell your computer to not resolve them.
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 #!/bin/sh # # This code is GPLv3 HOSTSFILE = hosts TMPFILE = /tmp/aosp-hosts-file echo "Updating adblocking hosts file..." curl "http://hosts-file.net/download/hosts.txt" > $TMPFILE curl "http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt" >> $TMPFILE curl "http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?mimetype=plaintext&hostformat=hosts" >> $TMPFILE curl "http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts" >> $TMPFILE echo "# This is a generated hostfile for adblocking. # Sources: # - http://hosts-file.net/download/hosts.txt # - http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt # - http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?mimetype=plaintext&hostformat=hosts # - http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts # Localhost entries 127.0.0.1 localhost ::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback fe00::0 ip6-localnet ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix ff02::1 ip6-allnodes ff02::2 ip6-allrouters ff02::3 ip6-allhosts " > $HOSTSFILE # Streamline all entries to use 0.0.0.0 gsed -i's/127\.0\.0\.1/0\.0\.0\.0/' $TMPFILE # Remove other localhost entries gsed -i '/localhost/d' $TMPFILE # Remove comments gsed -i's/#.*$//g' $TMPFILE # Replace tabs with spaces gsed -i's/\t/ /g' $TMPFILE # Also block ipv6 gsed -i's/\(0\.0\.0\.0\)\(.*\)/\1\2
::0\2/' $TMPFILE # Sort and remove duplicates and empty lines sort -u $TMPFILE |grep -v '^\s*$' >> $HOSTSFILE dos2unix $HOSTSFILE rm $TMPFILE
This script will download known tracking services or other malicious domains from three different sources, removes duplicates and makes sure both ipv4 and ipv6 addresses are blocked. Save it as get-hosts.sh and you can use it like so:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 # Install dependencies, but make sure tracking is disabled export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS = 1 brew install dos2unix brew install gnu-sed # Generate hosts file chmod +x get-hosts.sh./get-hosts.sh # Inspect the hosts file if your paranoid, then deploy it sudo mv hosts /etc/hosts
What Homebrew should doCan you imagine what it would be like if there weren’t noisy cars everywhere spewing out smelly exhaust? Sounds nice, right? Well, apparently, there is a place that is just like that, and even located within the US — Mackinac Island, located in Lake Huron, has been car-free since all the way back in 1898.
While most people nowadays are used to the presence of cars — and all the noise and pollution that accompanies them — when they first came on the scene more than a hundred years ago, there was actually quite a lot of opposition to them. They were even completely banned within some cities/towns. Over time, of course, priorities have shifted and those in power have relaxed the restrictions, but not everywhere.
Mackinac Island — located offshore of mainland Michigan, in Lake Huron — never rescinded the ban on automobiles, or as one resident at the time called them, “mechanical monsters.” The residents at the time apparently objected to the noise and exhaust — in short, they wanted a cleaner, healthier, quieter environment. Pretty easy to relate to, no?
While the city now serves primarily just as a vacation spot during the summer months, it does give us a glimpse into what life would be like if gas-powered automobiles were completely phased out and replaced with bicycles, electric vehicles, or some other option — and it certainly seems nice….
“The air is cleaner and injuries are fewer,” writes Jeff Potter, of Bikede. “Island residents are healthier due to the exercise. There’s a cherished egalitarianism: everyone gets around the same way. They also save a tremendous amount of money that would normally go to commuting by cars.”
Although the small island is home to only around 500 people, in the summer, that number swells to 15,000 during tourism season; aside from a couple of emergency vehicles, there’s nary a car to be seen. Transportation on Mackinac is limited to walking, horse-drawn carriages, and bicycling — a pleasant departure from the car-centric society that exists beyond its borders. Still, getting around on the island is a breeze. Mackinac is home to the nation’s only carless highway, the M-185, offering easy access to its 8.3 miles of coastline, uncluttered by parking lots or gas stations. Visitors to the island have described the experience as like going back in time to a bygone era, one before the constant din of traffic and vehicle exhaust became a part of daily life in America. But more than just being a remnant of the past, perhaps Mackinac Island offers instead a glimpse of an alternate history, diverted from our own more than a century ago — before the mechanical monsters had us so thoroughly tamed.
Sounds like a big improvement to me….
I’m disappointed to say that I actually hadn’t heard of Mackinac Island until only very recently — and now I can hardly stop myself from heading there right now.
Have any of our readers been there before? Any thoughts?Home Daily News State troopers get booted, arrest the parking…
Constitutional Law
State troopers get booted, arrest the parking attendant and remove boot themselves, suit says
Two Louisiana state troopers who returned from an apparent meal break, found that their unmarked, unlawfully parked pickup truck had gotten the boot and demanded that a parking attendant remove it.
Then, when he refused to do so without getting paid the required $90 fee, they arrested the attendant, took his keys off his belt, illegally searched his truck and removed the boot from their Dodge Ram themselves, according to a federal civil rights suit and an attorney representing the attendant, Brandon Hardeway.
Filed earlier this month in New Orleans by Premier Parking Enforcement, the suit says the troopers claimed Hardeway was interfering with their official duties and cuffed him and put him in the back of a police vehicle, reports the Advocate.
He was released after several hours without being charged. The suit says a New Orleans police officer came to the scene but declined to jail Hardeway when he heard what had happened.
Attorney Isaac Soileau Jr. represents Hardeway and says most of the April 2014 incident was captured on a body camera the attendant was wearing.
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convinced that there was a campaign directed from the highest levels of power in Moscow to seek to influence the outcome of the U.S. election? And you’re speaking to us of course from Moscow right now.
ES: Right, right, right. If the feed gets cut short, you guys know why. (laughter) You know this is one of those things where it’s frustrating because there’s so much smoke, and nobody’s willing to point to fire. And I come from the NSA, right? My last position, I was working counter-cyber, finding exactly the kind of hackers that are being sort of alleged in this current moment, but for China rather than for Russia. And I got to tell you, it wasn’t real hard to find these guys.
So we had this report that came from the DNI and basically three agencies: I think it was the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA. And they said in their finding that they had you know confidence that that was the assessment, but there were some really weird things this is led to this sort of ongoing drama that everybody’s focused on and it’s consuming nation with kind of a passion where we can focus on anything else. Because we’re elevating Russia to a position where they can sort of control our political outcomes. And I think that’s actually giving Russia too much credit. I don’t think Russia is that strong, right?
But when we look at this report, and we think about, obviously, Russia would have interest, any country would have interest in changing electoral outcomes in other countries, I mean we do it, why wouldn’t the Russians. But the main thing here is the FBI and the CIA both said we have high confidence in this assessment, basically the Russians did, and the NSA, who is best positioned to actually make this judgment, so they had medium confidence in this assessment. But why discrepancy there?
And the only reason that I can think about, and again I don’t know this. This the problem when we speak about these things we need evidence. You can track sort of these, let’s call them hacking attempts, from where they’re launched, even if the hackers are trying to hide their footsteps, when you have the powers of the NSA —
JS: You’re going out there, Ed. The feed actually has become choppy now that you’re getting into the details. [Audience laughs] As you were, Ed.
ES: To simplify things, and to sort of tie up the point here, when they were looking at the hacking into the DNC’s servers. This is a high value target. Whether we’re talking about the United States, whether we’re talking China, whether we’re talking Russia, everybody is targeting these institutions, if they have the resources, if they have the people, that’s their job.
And former director of the NSA and CIA. Michael Hayden says this — he’s actually described this as honorable espionage, which I think is a bit much, but that’s his perspective, right? This is what intelligence agencies do. And the problem with this is so the DNC didn’t actually provide their service to the FBI. They contracted this third party company that’s basically paid to provide an explanation that goes, look this matches these attack indicators, right? Fair enough. We’ve seen these before. They’re attributed to the Russians, we think Russian —
But that’s all that they provide. The reality here is if the NSA didn’t have the same level of confidence, it’s very likely it’s because there are more people on the system, right? There could be multiple actors there. We can have the French, we can have the Chinese, we can have the Israelis, we can have the Germans all on the same system. And this happens all of the time, it happens so frequently that in NSA we have an actual term of art for this. Instead of hacking somebody, we’ll just watch what the hackers who already hacked them are taking, and then we just save a copy of that. It is called fourth-party collection.
And because there was so much traffic on this, they couldn’t really de-conflict it. But this raises the big question of, “Ok, well if the Russians didn’t do it, who did it, right?” And I think this is where it gets dicey— and where I start to think alright is probably Russians —
JS: Hold on a bit, Ed. You said the word ‘Russia’ again, and it started to go choppy. [Audience laughs] Either that or someone — someone’s downloading porn here.
ES: Right. Right. Right. So we’ll tie this off then, because it’s going on for a while. There is this allegation, right, that Vladimir Putin and Hillary Clinton basically hate each other, like they’re mortal enemies, right? And he wouldn’t want to see this. So when you start seeing a qui bono, you know maybe it’s possible. But here’s the central problem with everything we’ve discussed right now: it’s entirely speculation. Absolutely none of it is reliable. And previously when the United States government has seen hacking efforts that they considered threats to national security, they released evidence.
This is what’s missing. The NSA is spying on everyone, everywhere, all of the time. That’s how mass surveillance works. So why is it that we aren’t getting evidence about what is arguably the most important public policy question, when it comes to sort of foreign intelligence efforts in recent history?
JS: Ed, we only have a few moments left and I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about this Equifax breach, but it’s also emblematic of the powder keg that is all of this private data about us that is held by so many private corporations. And what’s particularly, you know, insane about the Equifax situation is that these are the people that can like prevent you from ever buying a house because you didn’t pay your credit card bill once, and it’s like they can’t even fucking keep our Social Security numbers safe. You know it’s like, who are they to tell anyone that they shouldn’t be eligible for a car loan ever again?
But it, but it reveals something I think, you know, that I think should be of deep concern to all of us. So many people have willingly given enormous quantities of private personal information to a variety of corporations and government entities, if you look at what’s happening with our healthcare system in the digitization of our medical records. But also unwittingly huge corporations have developed enormous dossiers on all of us that are lying there waiting to be exploited someday, or a breach happens and it ends up out in the open.
But in this whole landscape and the data breaches, what is your assessment of that and what can people do, what should people do to try to confront what is this unprecedented amassing of information about all of us and our private lives?
ES: Well first. there’s two parts to this question. there’s the specific case and there’s the general case. When we talk about Equifax, right, the last count that I saw was the records of 143 million Americans were lost. There’s no way that this doesn’t happen without negligence, because the volume of data that has been moved from a system that should not be pushing that much data, right, is very trivially detectable.
Imagine you have a hose, leading out of your house, right? And somebody can have a hose turned on and water flows out of the house, but it takes a long time right to create thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars of water charges. Now imagine, somebody snuck in your house when you were, you were sleeping and they increased the water pressure on that system so that you have a stream of water shooting out of that hose that’s so powerful, it actually rips your house off the foundations, pushes it down the block. And you just go out of your house in the morning and drive to work, don’t notice it, you don’t tell anybody about it, you just go and you drive back at the end of the day and go, “My house isn’t there!” [Audience laughs.]
That’s what happened, right? It is ridiculous that this could occur at a company that is so powerful, so influential, so rich. It’s naked negligence. But then there’s the larger general case here. We are living through the greatest crisis in computer security that we have ever seen. This is the atomic moment for computer science as we had for nuclear physics in the last century, the last generation where people who had developed a science, a technology for the empowerment of humanity found only a few short years later, people began mastering this technology to use it to subjugate people, rather than to lift them up, to press them down. Right? And you have to care about this.
Yes, we should be angry with the hackers, right? But we should think about how the ecosystem got to this point. We should think about the fact that there are liability laws for every other sector of the American economy. If you build and sell a car, that car has to meet some minimum safety standards. If you develop and sell a new medicine, it has to meet certain minimum safety standards. If you sell a burrito on the street, it’s got to meet minimum safety standards. But if you create a credit monitoring system that impacts the lives of basically everyone with a credit card in the United States, there are no minimum safety standards that they’re having to deal with.
And this goes double for the people who actually write software in the first place. Now I don’t know where to set the law. I don’t know how to change these things. I’m not going to pretend to be the guy with the magic wand in the policy prescription here. But I think we can all recognize that if industry will not regulate itself here, someone else is going to have to do it for them. [Audience claps.]
JS: That was NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. I talked to him on Monday in an interview that I did at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
[Musical interlude]
JS: Coming up on the show we’re going to talk to activist and columnist Shaun King about the boycott that he’s leading against the NFL, as well as his crusade to catch the neo-Nazis, who gang beat an African-American man in the parking garage of the Charlottesville police station. We will also hear from the art-rap artist Open Mike Eagle. This is Intercepted. Stay with us.
JS: Hey everyone. This is the time of the show where there would normally be an ad for some mattress or mail order food or a razor that your face just has to feel. Well, not anymore. On the show, Intercepted is going ad-free. Instead, we’re going to ask our listeners to help support this show and keep it available to everyone. We’re going to be launching a community fundraising effort soon and we hope that you’ll consider chipping in if you’re able to. We’re also going to announce some cool thank you gifts for our supporters. Oh, and we just launched a new Facebook group for listeners who still use Facebook. It’s simply called Intercepted Listeners. Ok, now I’m gonna shut up. Back to the show.
[Musical interlude]
JS: Ok. We are back here on Intercepted, and the NFL season is now underway. There’s a lot of discussion about the political stance that a handful of athletes have begun taking, namely protesting during the national anthem. Some players have raised a black gloved fist. Others have sat or knelt during the national anthem, and several of the players who have chosen to protest have said that they’re doing it in response to racism and police brutality.
One of the players engaging in protest is the Seattle Seahawks star defensive back Michael Bennett. He explained his motivation last month on CNN.
Michael Bennett: I won’t stand until everything’s equal. I won’t stand until everybody has justice. I won’t stand until everybody has freedom. The things that America has built on, I think protesting the national anthem begins a conversation about the truth of America. I’m not protecting the flag. I’m actually trying to honor what we’re supposed to be honoring: the freedom of America, the equality of America, the justice for all, and the liberty. Those are things that I’m trying to remind people that we all fought for.
JS: Just days after that interview, Michael Bennet was attending a boxing match in Las Vegas. And after the match there was an incident in a casino where Las Vegas police responded to what they say they thought was a shooting incident. And in their response, they went after Michael Bennett. They pointed a gun at him. They ordered him to the ground. And they handcuffed him as he protested that he had done nothing wrong. And parts of this were caught on video tape.
After the incident, Bennett released a statement saying that an officer told him that if he moved, the officer would, “blow my fucking head off.” Bennett said that the excessive use of force was unbearable and he wrote in a statement that he released, “I felt helpless as I lay there on the ground, handcuffed, facing the real-life threat of being killed. All I could think of was: I’m going to die for no other reason than I am black and my skin color is somehow a threat.”
After Bennett went public with this story, the Las Vegas police attempted to get the NFL to punish Bennett, saying that he had unfairly accused them of racism. The league said it wasn’t going to do that. Bennett’s teammate, NFL star Richard Sherman, spoke to reporters about the incident.
Richard Sherman: Mike is literally, you know, sitting, taking a stand, protesting, and doing everything he can to combat the exact thing that he experienced. And people are so worried about him sitting down during the national anthem that they that completely missed that message a lot of times. They want to be more angry at the action than the message, and that’s an important part in part of the world we live in nowadays. I wish that people would take it for what it is and make a difference and go out there and try to combat against racism, fascism, unnecessary violence.
JS: The current media discussion of athletes daring to engage in protest seems to completely ignore several crucial points. First, NFL games are already dripping with politics and militarism, and they encourage a worship of the military and weapons of war as the one true form of patriotism. Second, they ignore the historical roots of athletes protesting. The black fist raised at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Muhammad Ali’s resistance to the war in Vietnam, and on, and on. And third, these commentaries act as though the First Amendment has some secret clause that says athletes cannot engage in nonviolent protest. Like, like they’re supposed to surrender their humanity or their principles when they put on their helmet and uniform.
This debate isn’t new but it’s flared up over the past year because of an action that was taken last year by then San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. He refused to stand for the national anthem and then had the audacity to speak out about racism and other systemic injustices when asked why he did it.
Here’s Colin Kaepernick explaining his motives last year.
Colin Kaepernick: Yes, I’ll continue to sit. I’m going to continue to stand with the people that have been oppressed. To me this is something that has to change and when there’s significant change and I feel like that flag represents who is supposed to represent and this country is representing people the way they’re supposed to, I’ll stand.
Kaepernick’s action sparked reaction from pundits, celebrities, President Obama, and of course Donald Trump.
DJT: But there was an article today that was reported that NFL owners don’t want to pick him up, because they don’t want to get a nasty tweet from Donald Trump. Do you believe that? I said if I remember that one, I’m going to report it to the people of Kentucky, because they like it when people actually stand for the American flag, right?
JS: Trump was also joined by his ally and apparently rising GOP political star Kid Rock, in attacking Kaepernick at a concert.
Kid Rock: Man, fuck Colin Kaepernick!
JS: Now, Colin Kaepernick was a highly ranked quarterback in the NFL, yet he no longer has a team. In fact, he wasn’t even invited to training camp. His critics say it’s because he had a bad season last year, which is debatable: the 49ers were terrible, but Kaepernick’s stats were pretty solid. But others say it’s because he is a liability because of his politics. Here’s an example of how all of this was discussed recently on Fox News, on its show The Five.
Jesse Waters: The guy’s a loser on the field, he’s a loser off the field, bottom line.
Juan Williams: How are you going to call him a loser off the field?
Kimberly Guilfoyle: I know, it’s John Madden over here.
Jesse Waters: Everybody hates him.
Greg Gutfeld: I feel like this is another arena where identity politics invades and divides, because it creates a prism that only allows for one perspective. It’s got to be racist, if they do this, you’ve got to you have to hate this person because of their skin color, that’s what identity politics does.
JS: Supporters of Kaepernick, including the NAACP, have alleged that the reason the Colin Kaepernick is not currently on an NFL team’s roster is because of racism.
This past weekend, activist and columnist Shaun King issued a public call for a boycott of the NFL, and he spent NFL Sunday hanging out with Colin Kaepernick. Shaun King joins me now.
JS: Shaun, welcome to Intercepted.
Shaun King: I’m glad to be here, man.
JS: Explain why you’re calling for a boycott of the NFL.
SK: Well I decided several months ago that I wasn’t going to watch any of the games, in huge part because I’ve become friends with Colin. and it was just painful personally for me to see what I thought was a grave injustice happening to him. It was really like a friend seeing a friend lose, not just his job, but his dream. This is something he’s fought for his whole life, he’s in the prime of his career, he’s 29 years old. And he took this peaceful stand against injustice, which I encouraged him to take, not thinking that he would be blacklisted from the league. Like I thought it might change his reputation. I thought he might get a cold shoulder.
But my thought was he’s too big to fail in a sense. Surely they won’t do this to Colin. Quarterback is the most in-demand position. He’s solid. He’s smart. He has great character. And even though I knew there was a possibility that he might struggle to find a job, I didn’t think it would come to this. And when I saw over and over again teams kind of strangely contorting themselves to justify not giving him a job even though they desperately needed a quarterback, I made a personal decision in June, like, “Ok, I can’t watch this. This is, I don’t support how they’ve done it. I don’t support how they’re treating him.”
And I had other issues with the league, be it CTE, or how they were would constantly give other guys a pass for genuinely horrendous behaviors. And so I made the decision but I wasn’t really ready to ask other people to follow me. And there was a part of me that thought from June until September that, that he would get a job. And I think it’s the foolish optimist in me that thought people would be able to look past his protest and the few things that he said to the media, and look at their need as a team. Be it the Jets, or twenty different teams in a league that at least need a strong backup quarterback.
Here we are in September and he didn’t have a position and it looked like he’s not going to get one. And I literally made the decision at the last minute, just maybe three or four days ago, that I wanted to encourage people to take this stand with me. And while there are many reasons, for me it’s very personal. And it’s that we live in a time where a man very quietly, peacefully, and intelligently just stated his problems with police brutality and injustice in America, and had his career taken from him because of it.
JS: Now for people that didn’t follow this closely, explain how this started with Colin Kaepernick. What action he took, why he took it, and then what he’s done since then.
SK: Colin said he’s always been bothered by police brutality, but he never understood it as the systemic problem that it was. And he’s a young guy, he was 21 when he came into the league, and he literally started auditing a few classes at Berkeley, and from those classes began understanding what systemic racism was. Began understanding the systems behind mass incarceration or white supremacy or police brutality. And he was doing this with very few people, including myself, not knowing. I had no idea he was auditing classes. He was kind of undergoing a personal metamorphosis, and he was doing it while he was recovering from the surgeries that he had had.
And during last summer he saw the deaths of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and they just affected him personally. And really without talking to anybody, he decided at a pre-season game that he wasn’t going to stand up for the national anthem. And so Colin and I had been talking for couple of months at that point, and I think it really was a spur of the moment, gut decision where he heard the anthem and just decided like, “I’m not going to stand up for that. I don’t feel like it. I don’t believe it.” And when they noticed, a local reporter asked him about it at the end of the game, and that he hadn’t prepared any bullets and he just said:
CK: I mean, ultimately it’s to bring awareness and make people, you know, realize what’s really going on in this country. There are a lot of things that are going on that are unjust, people aren’t being held accountable for. And that’s something that needs to change, that’s something that you know this country stands for freedom, liberty, justice for all. And it’s not happening for all right now.
SK: And, you know that he was doing this to be in solidarity with victims of police brutality. And I was working with those families: Philando Castile’s family, Alton Sterling’s family. And they were deeply moved by it. And I think when he learned that these families who rarely get anything that resembles justice, when he learned that they were touched by his demonstration, I think he decided to stick with it.
And it became a national conversation where after games there be dozens of reporters there just to ask him what he was thinking. And people were taken aback because what they found was a bright, brilliant young man who had ample reason to do what he was doing and could explain it very articulately. And I think people thought maybe there was no depth there, like a stereotype of an athlete.
And I, I had the thought man that he was so careful and methodical about how he handled this that — not that the country would change, but I had never thought he would be, in essence, banned from the league. And that’s what we have here, a guy who, in the prime of his physical career, was not even brought in for a serious look.
JS: And I want to talk about that, because the flip side of this argument, I don’t mean to say that there’s only two ways of looking at this, but you have NFL commentators and others who are saying, “Look at the stats that he put up last year, he had a terrible season.”
SK: He didn’t, you know?
JS: I’m saying, but this is what is said. That he clearly had peaked, and sort of was on his way down. What’s interesting is that you have, I’m from Wisconsin, so I’m biased, the best quarterback in the country, Aaron Rodgers, who is not known for being a political guy, actually very recently came out and said, “No, I think that Colin Kaepernick should be on a team, and that this is political. This is not about his skills.”
SK: Yeah, when I saw Aaron say this, like he’s not a guy that takes hard stands on political issues. And so when he said something I was very curious as to what he was going to say. And he said emphatically, without hesitation, like, “no this is not a football decision, that had he not taken the stand that he that he took, he would be on the team right now. He would be the quarterback of the 49ers, and so he works out six days a week and has been. He’s in incredible shape. He’s, he could start for a team right away. Yet, here we are. He has not even been given a backup position.
And so there have been a lot of lies about him, like people said that he wouldn’t take a backup position. That’s a lie. He would. People said he also would not even accept a smaller contract. That’s a lie. He also hasn’t even been offered any contracts. And —
JS: And you, and you have guys who have criminal convictions.
SK: Yeah.
JS: Who have done time in prison, I mean Michael Vick and the whole, you know, dog torturing thing, and he you know he comes back into the league and there is there was also a lot of racism in the way that Michael Vick was covered. But, but these guys, and some of them are white players who have all sorts of trouble with the law.
SK: Sure.
JS: And we’re not talking about a guy who broke the law here, we’re talking about a guy who nonviolently took a political position.
SK: Well, that’s what’s disturbing man, is he is the stereotype of what black men are told they have to be to be successful. Like he, he is quiet. He literally stays in at night, he doesn’t party or go to the clubs, he’s never been in legal trouble a day in his life. He’s a college graduate, a bright guy, he’s in a committed relationship with an upstanding woman. I mean I hate to even list these things, but he is everything young black men are told they will need to be to rise up any type of corporate ladder. And—
JS: Well, except —
SK: Except black.
JS: Yeah
SK: But here’s the thing: other black men in the league, as you noted, have done horrific things. And I think it gets to the fact that the decision is actually extremely political. At least seven team owners in the NFL have given a million dollars or more to Donald Trump’s campaign. People can universally agree that NFL ownership is the most conservative ownership group of any sports league in the world.
DJT: In the audience we have somebody that’s under no pressure whatsoever because he’s got a great quarterback named Tom Brady, and a great coach, and a great coach named Belichick. Bob Kraft. So good luck, Bob.
SK: And I think what they’re trying to do is to make an example of Colin. And I think it’s working. Last year on any given day, you would see dozens, as many as 50 people demonstrate. And now yesterday I think there were five. Now that the season has started, that number may even go down to four, three. And I think guys are spooked. Guys have told me, particularly guys on rookie contracts, guys that don’t have Colin’s name or reputation have told me, “I can’t do this man. If they do to me what they did to him, I haven’t made the money he’s made and I have no backup plan.”
So it effectively did what I believe those owners wanted to do. It spooked the majority of guys, so basically the only guys who are doing it at this point are guys who are firm in their position. But all the other guys who are doing it, they’ve been spooked and they’re backing down. I think that that was what they wanted, was to freak enough guys out that they’ll back down. The only people that are left are kind of revolutionary guys, guys who, you know, are radicals at heart.
JS: You know, it’s also interesting, this kind of mealy mouth line, “Well, these guys shouldn’t be political.” The entire framing of the NFL for many years has been overtly political in celebration of the U.S. war machine. You have the jets that are flying overhead, Ted Cruz was at a game this weekend celebrating with this American bald eagle that went over a huge American flag tarp —
SK: And it was like a bald eagle on steroids, it was the largest bald — when I first saw it I was like, “Is that real!” And he was but he was bragging because the flag took up the entire field from corner to corner. I think they literally found the world’s largest bald eagle, and the world’s largest flag. And there’s money being exchanged here between the military and the NFL. They actually are paying for a lot of these demonstrations that people didn’t even understand that marketing dollars are at play.
JS: Also, and it’s not like, “Oh look, we’re all coming together to celebrate our country.” It is overtly about celebrating the part of our country that wages wars.
SK: Yeah.
JS: That increasingly a majority of people are against. So the politics is already drilled. into the whole apparatus. It would be one thing if we had some massive celebration of the First Amendment or the Fourth Amendment, you know, as part of the patriotism but it’s just one part of America that’s being honored and that is the militaristic component of this country.
SK: Yeah. Yeah, I agree, and in spite of that people aren’t looking at the nuanced nature of really what’s at play here. Even the fact that they brought back Hank Williams, Jr., who for the first time in almost six years will be doing his Monday Night Football anthem.
[Hank Williams Jr. “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight”]
Well it’s Monday Night and we’re ready to strike
Our special forces are in full flight
We’re coming by air and on the ground
Monday night football’s taken over the town
We gotta get ready, we gotta get right
It’s going to be a battle in the NFL tonight.
SK: They literally waited until President Obama left office, because he said horrendous, racist things about President Obama, they waited until Obama left office.
Gretchen Carlson: You mean when he went to John Boehner played golf with President Obama.
Hank Williams, Jr: Oh yeah, yeah and Biden and Kasich, yeah. Aha.
GC: What did you not like about it? It seems to be a really pivotal moment for you.
HW, Jr: Come on, come on. It’d be like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu. OK?
GC: OK.
HW, Jr.: And the country this shape is in, the shape this country’s in, I mean.
BK: So I don’t understand that analogy actually.
HW, Jr.: Well I’m glad you don’t, brother, because a lot of people do. You know, they’re the enemy. They’re the enemy.
BK: Who is the enemy?
HW, Jr: Obama!
SK: And then brought him right back to open up for Monday Night Football. And so for anybody to say, “Hey, Colin shouldn’t be bringing politics to the field.” It’s already there. And I think the we have crossed a point where if nine months ago people were saying he shouldn’t be political, or other people are saying this is just a football decision. I think with comments from guys like Aaron Rodgers, but a few dozen athletes across the league, many of them who have been lifelong competitors of Colin, have all come out to say, “Listen, cut the crap. This is just about him not liking his politics and not liking the stand that he took.”
And that’s why I thought a boycott was necessary. Like that’s not OK. It’s not OK for a place like this to boot a man in the prime of his life because he took a peaceful stand against something that millions of us believe we should all be taking a stand against and that’s police brutality. It’s not a stand against police but a stand against police brutality, it’s a stand against injustice.
JS: I want to talk to you about Charlottesville and about this — what has become a very widespread campaign to try to take down these memorials of Confederate figures which many of them, as you well know, do not date back to the time of the Confederacy. They were built at key moments in much more recent American history as a way of directly confronting demands for equal rights or progress that was made on local levels in some of these municipalities. But I specifically want to ask you about this campaign that you spearheaded that seems to be gaining traction. And that is to identify and have charges brought against some of the men who were involved with this beating a young black man named Deandre Harris in a parking garage.
SK: The parking garage of the Charlottesville Police Department, which is crazy. Like they were literally adjacent to the Charlottesville Police Department. Deandre Harris, a great kid, 19 years old, he serves as a special assistant in a special education classroom at a local elementary school. I hate to say it like this, but no criminal record, you know, great reputation and like thousands of counter protesters who wanted to just go there to show white supremacists who have showed up in huge numbers in their home — he lives in Charlottesville, he’s from there. And all these protesters who came there to demonstrate as white supremacist, as neo-Nazis but came from out of town, they came from all over the country, literally flew in from I’ve counted as many as 25 different states. This was a huge gathering.
JS: Well, and the car that killed, the car that was driven by the man who killed Heather Heyer was from, it was an Ohio licensed plate a car.
SK: Absolutely and so these guys came in from out of town and so Deandre and Heather and others who lived there locally just said, “Hey, we have to show up.” And they had no plan, no strategy, they had never seen, like most of us, they’d never seen something like this with their own eyes, but they just wanted to be there to let people know, “Hey, this is not OK.” So there was a march of white supremacists who were going through the streets of downtown Charlottesville and Deandre and a group of others were also walking on the sidewalk alongside them, constantly yelling back and forth at them. And one of the white supremacists had a flag or flag pole with like a speared tip on the end of it.
And not Deandre, but another guy and a white supremacist started wrestling over that flag. And the white supremacist, who we have not been able to identify, gets the flag and gets ready to ram the tip of it into Deandre’s friend. And as they do that, Deandre takes a swing at a guy and misses.
And all of a sudden, in an instant, a group of guys who are marching many of who didn’t even see what I just described to you. Like, all of this is on film in four different angles, you see it literally from every side, they just converge right on Deandre. And one guy knocks him to the ground, and then at least five guys maybe six, just began to pummel him and literally jumping in the air, coming down with their feet, their fist, with pipes, flagpoles, and just mauled him for what Deandre said felt like minutes but in a probably being more like twenty seconds.
But it was twenty seconds of nonstop beating. And, he finally was able to scramble out and then he stumbles literally right to the doorsteps of the police department. And you see, in the videos, the police are right there. They saw the incident unfold, and if you see any videos from that day, police had taken such a hands-off approach, that they were letting almost anything go, to the point that we saw just a few weeks ago another member of the KKK. literally pulled out a gun and shot at someone and the police were right there and just let him shoot. And he just kept on walking. Just an insane — an insanely mismanaged moment.
JS: How many of the individuals who beat Deandre Harris have been charged?
SK: So this is what’s crazy. So the day it happened, people from Charlottesville started messaging me right away and saying, “Listen, there’s a guy who was very badly beaten.” And several guys even said, “Hey, I’ve got photos, I’ve got videos.” And I posted the first image that I found on my timeline on Twitter and Facebook, and said —and it was, to me, what will become an iconic image because you see him on the ground, you see two men whose feet are completely off the ground as they jump up to come down on top of him, you see two weapons in midair coming down on him. And I just tweeted, “Let’s find out who these guys are.”
My thought was because of the size of my network and as tense of a moment as our country was in, that it would probably be a few days and we would find everybody there. Because within three days I had clear pictures of almost everyone involved.
JS: Some of them had some obfuscation of their face, but most of them were just openly —
SK: Yeah there’s one guy who has on really heavy goggles and a hat and ironically he is that, we’re now closer to finding him, but the first man that we found was a young man named Dan Borden, also from Ohio, a lot of these guys did come in from Ohio, and Dan Borden, it was actually a member of his family who contacted me and said, “I know who that is.” And several of his high school classmates, he literally just finished high school year ago, and so once we clearly identified it was Dan Borden I tweeted, “Hey, we have identified Dan Borden.”
And he three days after we’d identified Dan Borden, several people began saying to me personally that they knew who another guy was and his name was Michael Alex Ramos. And they sent me videos of him saying that he was a part of it. And we also had a video of Dan saying he did it. And so I felt very comfortable identifying Dan Borden and Michael Alex Ramos because we had videos of them admitting it. We had a treasure trove of photos from their own profiles of them there and several days later someone from the Charlottesville Police Department contacted me and asked me if I would give them all the information I had, and I did.
A few days after that, two different agents from the FBI reached out to me and asked me if I would give them everything I had and I did. And still, was probably a week later and they had not arrested Dan Borden or Alex Ramos, and finally they issued arrest warrants, first for Dan, then for Alex and arrested them and charged them. And what was disturbing about it was that it’s |
, fluoxetine, an antidepressant, has been effective in reducing lesions in relapsing MS patients [33]. Morever, oligodendrocyte dysfunction or demyelination has recently been implicated in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression [12], [34], [35]. Interestingly, all three disorders display major overlapping domains in their transcription profiles, especially genes involved in energy metabolism, inflammation and myelination [36]. Therefore, our present observations may support the notion that some psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depression may share similarities in disease mechanism with MS.
In conclusion, this study demonstrates that the atypical antipsychotic drug Que exerts immunomodulatory role and prevent mice from deterioration of EAE symptoms and demyelination. The novel effect of Que described here may lead to more effective strategies for treating not only schizophrenia, but other autoimmune diseases such as MS, and also provides new insight into pathogenesis of schizophrenia and related psychiatric disorders.The world’s electricity grids are facing a dramatic makeover in coming decades as the rapid expansion of renewable energy, distributed generation, battery storage and smart technology takes hold. It’s going to be a challenge to the energy industry’s operations and to their business models – as big as the challenge that hit the world’s telecom networks more than a decade ago with the success of the mobile phone.
It may be, however, that the introduction of the electric vehicle in great quantities could be a saviour to much of the established infrastructure, protecting assets that could otherwise be stranded and leading to an overall reduction in electricity costs.
The Australian Energy Markets Commission, which is responsible for setting the electricity market rules, released an issues paper this month to help prepare for the sort of changes that might need to be implemented if the uptake of EVs takes off.
It came to two initial conclusions: Badly managed, the rollout of EVs could have a severe impact on electricity costs if battery charging times were not controlled and this resulted in large addition to peak demand.
However, if managed properly, the rollout of EVS could lead to a noticeable reduction in energy costs because it would increase load factors at night time and spread the fixed cost of the network over a larger consumer base. And its storage capacity has the potential to put energy back into the grid at times of peak demand and help reduce wild fluctuations in pricing.
The paper includes work done by the consultancy group AECOM, which finds that the difference in costs to the grid between controlled and uncontrolled charging could be as much as $12 billion if the take up of EVs is high, described as 47 per cent of new vehicles sales by 2020 and 54 per cent by 2030.
In the central scenario, where EVs account for 20 per cent of sales by 2020 and 45 per cent by 2030, AECOM says the additional cost to the grid to meet peak demand on uncontrolled charging out to 2030 is $8.9 billion. But if time of use charging is introduced, this cost is reduced to just $550 million. With smart meter charging, it is reduced to $270 million, and with controlled charging, the cost is reduced to zero (although some rural areas may need upgrades).
It should be noted that even in the high scenario, the additional load on the National Electricity Market will be 14.2 million megawatt hours, or just 3.7 per cent of the market. If this is required in the early evening when commuters return home and plug in their car, that will cause problems for peak demand, and for prices. But if the load can be distributed, it should be easily absorbed – and help reduce the occasions when excess capacity and weak demand causes “negative prices” during the night, a situation sometimes exacerbated by the rollout of wind energy.
The AECOM research estimates a wide range of consumption depending on the size of the vehicle and its use, just like with petrol cars. On average, a small car will consume 19kWh per 100kms, a little over $4 in energy costs. Those same vehicles may pay between $8 and $10 for fuel. A large car will consume 21.kWh.
On average it is expected that a small car on average kms (15,000) will consume around 2.7 MWh of electricity a year. A large car on high kilometers (45,000kms) will consumer nearly 10MWh. A taxi might consume 25MWh.
The AECOM research notes EVs may in fact help manage transmission and distribution networks, because their storage capacity can reduce system stress at times of peak demand, as well as during planned outages and in the event of asset failures.
EVs may be used to manage wholesale price risk faced by retailers. This could occur under smart charging where EV users may respond to the current retail price, thus lowering average prices for EV users and reducing price risk for retailers. And EVs may also be used to manage price risk through the controlled charging option.
Another aspect is that the rollout of the EV is likely to stimulate the introduction of smart meters and associated infrastructure to other appliances in the house. Indeed, the paper canvasses the possibility that EVs will be used to provide power to household appliances rather than relying on the grid. It says some utilities believe VsH, as it is called, will have all of the benefits of and none of the problems on distribution networks that can be anticipated with supplying EV storage to the grid(V2G) on distribution networks.
EVs may be used to recharge at times that coincide with the availability of renewable generation, meaning that EV charging could benefit from lower prices at that time.
One of the big questions, however, is how all this is managed. Which is the purpose of the AEMC issue paper. It will likely lead to a range of regulatory reform, some of which has been pushed for by utilities and some of it not. This includes the potential of time of use pricing, managing smart meters and increasing demand side participation (where energy users such as EVs put energy back into the grid, or in the case of large contracted users, sell back excess capacity).
The AECOM is broadly consistent with other studies on the rollout of EVs, including those by AGL Energy, and the Australian Energy Market Operator, although these analyses do inevitably differ on predicting the extent of the uptake of the EV – and in the case of AEMO, the impact on peak demand. The study by AGL, which has a commitment to provide renewable energy to support the rollout of the Better Place network due to begin in Canberra this year, also found that a broad uptake of EVs would have a relatively minimal impact on the nation’s electricity market.
It did conclude, however, that “the correct mix of pricing, policy and regulatory settings should ensure a smooth transition to the decarbonisation of the transport fleet.” And key amongst this is the issue of time of use pricing, among others, which the utility says is essential if the country is to take advantage of smart meters, EVs and distributed generation.
AGL agreed with AECOM in concluding that there should be more than sufficient existing generation, transmission and distribution network capacity to manage the demands of the EV, “provided that the combination of smart meters and critical peak pricing form part of the energy market policy fabric for EV owners.”
It also says that the combination of EVs and time of use pricing could maximize the use of network and generation infrastructure, and this in turn could lower unit costs for all consumers.Advertisement
CNN is feeling the effects of being labeled fake news by President Donald Trump, and it’s not over!
The overnight numbers are in, and Nielsen is showing CNN hitting the bottom for viewership on the along with MSNBC. Fox News clearly was the winner beating out broadcast networks too.
CNN is currently under a lawsuit from black employees and trying to turn the narrative around on fake news by labeling established websites that hit them hard during the election as sources not to trust.
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It seems that has backfired and their viewership is dropping like sand in an hourglass. It’s only a matter of time before they change up and fire people.
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From Associated Press:
Nielsen estimates 31 million viewers watched TV coverage of President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday. That audience total, measuring continuous coverage by 12 broadcast and cable networks, soundly beat the 20.6 million who viewed President Barack Obama’s second inauguration in 2013. But a president’s second swearing-in typically logs a drop-off in viewership. Obama’s first inauguration in 2009 was seen by 37.8 million people. Fox News Channel was by far the most-watched network of all, cable or broadcast, with 8.43 million viewers. Cable rivals CNN had 2.46 million, and MSNBC had 1.35 million. NBC was the most-watched broadcast network with 5.8 million viewers, followed by ABC (4.9 million) and CBS (4.6 million). The most-watched inauguration since 1969 was President Ronald Reagan’s first oath-taking in 1981, which was seen by 41.8 million people. The debates between Trump and Hillary Clinton were watched by record numbers of viewers, with 84 million people tuning into the highest-rated first debate in September 2016. However, daytime television has far fewer viewers than prime time.
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Are you laughing at CNN’s demise? Believe me; they got more coming as long as they continue to act out and as the opposition. They are not willing to change their direction, so expect more to drop off soon.
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Don’t forget to follow the Wayne Dupree Show social media accounts onFacebook, Google Plus & Twitter.As our Earth orbits lazily around the Sun, some 13,000 asteroids pass close by. Known as Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), these asteroids are more than just a heavenly curiosity; they are treasures. The resources contained within them mean they have the potential to provide untold riches, the future oil fields of space.
The question is, would it be worth it? Some might ask whether it’s realistic to stage such a seemingly out-of-this-world plan. Those involved in the nascent asteroid mining industry, however, argue that there are a number of misconceptions about their efforts.
“It is natural to doubt when you don’t know much about it” explains Chris Lewicki, the president and chief engineer of asteroid mining company Planetary Resources. “Most people read the headline and make assumptions.
“We are only repeating what has been done throughout history, just in a new environment,” he adds.
Natural resources have always allowed us to expand to new frontiers. When Europeans first settled North America, they lived off the resources they found on the land, and in doing so created one of the world’s biggest economies. During the 20th Century oil helped shape and redefine the world; momentous changes like these were started by a relative few.
Those involved in looking to mine asteroids believe it has the potential to shape and define the 21st Century
“Prospectors always go first, that is what has happened throughout history,” says Chad Anderson, managing director of the Space Angel Network, a global network for early investors offering access to the emerging private space industry.
Those involved in looking to mine asteroids believe it has the potential to shape and define the 21st Century. “The results could be revolutionary in benefits to space exploration, and all of us on Earth,” says Steve Eisenhart, the senior vice president of Space Foundation, a global non-profit which promotes space-related endeavours.
Sourced from space
The first thing to understand about space mining is that it is not only about mining asteroids, or even the Moon and then returning those resources back to Earth. “Instead, there is a lot of value in keeping the resources in space and using them to continue our exploration of the Solar System and beyond,” says Anderson.
The most important resource for prospective space miners is water. The reason: travelling into space by current standards is the equivalent of taking a road trip across America, but having to bring all your fuel with you – only much worse. It takes more energy to escape the first 300 kilometres from Earth than the next 300 million kilometres. “Once in Earth’s orbit, you are halfway to anywhere in the Solar System,” says Lewicki.
But if rocket fuel was sourced from space for space, that problem can be avoided. When water is broken into its constituents – hydrogen and oxygen – you have two of the most commonly used elements in rocket fuel. What is most exciting for those looking to mine space is that water is throughout our Solar System. It is on the Moon, Mars and asteroids, and that’s just the places we know about.
Asteroids are of particular interest to Planetary Resources. “We know asteroids have water because it has been found on meteorites which have landed on the surface of the Earth,” says Lewicki. “They also don’t need much energy to land on. It’s easier than a trip to the surface of the Moon.” These near-Earth asteroids could act as off-world ‘gas stations’.
Asteroids also give us the potential to create tools in space
And as humans venture beyond Earth orbit, water will be essential for life support and growing food. It can even be used to shield astronauts from radiation. Yet it costs $50m (£32.8m) per tonne to ship it into space.
Asteroids also give us the potential to create tools in space. “Iron is abundant,” says Lewicki, as is nickel and cobalt. “Using technology such as 3D printing you can grab material off asteroids and 3D print something that never has to be on a rocket.” Tools, machines and even habitats can then be built off Earth, reducing the cost of exploration even further.
Of course space, as the saying goes, is hard, and off-world mining won’t exactly be a walk in the park. “Sure there will be challenges to overcome, but that is the history of space,” says Eisenhart. Planetary Resources say they are already making money from the technology they have developed, even before they’ve started mining anything beyond Earth.
“It is important to know that this is something that is going to happen – it is already happening,” says Lewicki. The company already has one satellite in orbit, and the next satellite to launch will have to the ability to look for water on near-Earth asteroids, using infra-red imaging sensors. Meanwhile, other private companies are looking into mining water and other resources on the Moon.
While you can’t own the Moon or asteroids, you can own the materials you take away from them
The first water could be extracted from an asteroid by the first half of the 2020s. That will mark the beginning of new era, where humanity has moved off our planet and has a presence in space forever. “I love that it is audacious, but that is what inspires the imagination and innovation,” says Eisenhart.
Of course, mining asteroids raises some legal questions. In the US, the law recognises that while you can’t own the Moon or asteroids, you can own the materials you take away from them – the same way you can’t own the ocean, but you can own the fish you take from it.
This means private companies could go into space, take materials they need, and it would be perfectly legal. The recent move by President Obama is seen as a huge step forward in terms of creating a stable legal framework to build upon.
Exactly where space mining could lead us is impossible to predict. But its advocates clearly believe that their early efforts are an investment in the long-term future of our species. We might not live to see the benefits, but our descendants spread throughout the Solar System may well be profitting from them.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department has approved the potential sale of more than 130 Abrams battle tanks, 20 armored recovery vehicles and other equipment, worth about $1.15 billion, to Saudi Arabia, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.
An Abrams main battle tank, for U.S. troops deployed in the Baltics as part of NATO's Operation Atlantic Resolve, leaves Riga port March 9, 2015. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins
The approval for land force equipment coincides with Saudi Arabia leading a military coalition in support of Yemeni forces loyal to the exiled government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi who are trying to oust Iran-allied Houthi forces from the capital, Sanaa. Human rights groups have criticized the coalition’s air strikes because of the deaths of civilians.
The U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which implements foreign arms sales, said that General Dynamics will be the principal contractor for the sale.
“This sale will increase the Royal Saudi Land Force’s (RSLF) interoperability with U.S. forces and conveys U.S. commitment to Saudi Arabia’s security and armed forces modernization,” the agency said in a notice to lawmakers posted on its website.
Lawmakers have 30 days to block the sale, although such action is rare.
Saudi Arabia and its mostly Gulf Arab allies intervened in Yemen’s civil war in March 2015 after the Houthi movement had pushed the Hadi administration into exile in Saudi Arabia.
On Tuesday, the Saudi-led military coalition conducted air strikes on Sanaa for the first time in five months, residents said, after U.N.-backed peace talks to end the conflict broke down at the weekend.
Medics said nine civilians were killed in a strike on a potato chip factory in the Nahda district of the capital.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch called on the United Nations General Assembly in June to suspend Saudi Arabia from the U.N. Human Rights Council until the military coalition stops killing civilians in Yemen.
“The Saudi-led coalition’s campaign in Yemen has been devastating for civilians (and) the U.S. should be suspending arms sales to Saudi Arabia, not approving more,” said Kristine Beckerle, a researcher with Human Rights Watch.
U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut who has been critical of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, said in a statement that he was concerned about the high civilian casualty rate in Yemen. Murphy said Saudi Arabia had “largely backed away from” the fight against Islamic State militants “and I’d like to see them commit to rejoin that fight as part of major new military sales.”Everton captain Phil Jagielka says that he is happy to be back in training as the Blues start pre-season today, but admits he might wake up stiffer tomorrow than he did today.
The Everton players not involved in the European Championships or the Copa America were back at Finch Farm this morning as Ronald Koeman takes control of his first training session at Everton, and Jagielka said that he hopes the manager lets them get the balls out soon.
It seems a far cry from the days when Jagielka first joined Everton, where the first day of pre-season would involve running until you threw up, but he says it still takes a lot out of the players.
“I’ll probably wake up tomorrow a bit stiffer than I did today,” said Jagielka.
“But that’s part and parcel of pre-season and hopefully we can get the balls out as quick as possible and make the running a bit more disguised.
“Everyone seems to have come back in great shape the excitement is there and we just have to wait and see how this season unfolds.”
On his new manager, Jagielka says that he hopes Ronald Koeman can get his ideas across to the team quickly in order to have a positive season.
“A lot has changed over the course of pre-season,” he added.
“It’s been great to get in and meet people and hopefully start off positively.
“We’ve all been in contact over the summer waiting for the announcement to finally get made.
“There’s still quite a few boys to come back to add to the squad but it’s nice to come back in and get to say hello to the new members of staff.
“[Koeman] was a fantastic player and he’s proven to be a fantastic coach as well so hopefully he can put his ways forward to the team with his coaching staff and we can have a positive season.”Lifting of almost all economic and financial sanctions would happen as soon as conditions are met, a process that could take at least six months
Iran will be freed from almost all economic and financial sanctions under the plan agreed with major world powers in Lausanne, but only after fulfilling a list of stringent conditions in a process that is expected to take at least six months, according to western diplomats.
The diplomats also conceded that the process could take significantly longer, raising the risk that the Iranian public might grow disillusioned with the agreement, and strengthen the country’s hardliners.
Britain must act now to bring Iran in from the cold | Simon Tisdall Read more
The plan agreed on Thursday includes a set of parameters for a comprehensive agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme due to be signed in Vienna at the end of June. They require Iran to carry out a set of tasks intended to extend its breakout time, the period it would take to produce enough fissile material for a warhead, to a year.
The tasks include:
Removal of the core of the heavy water reactor at Arak, rendering it inoperable.
Agreement to the application of the additional protocol, a regime of enhanced inspections carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Cutting Iran’s installed centrifuges from about 19,000 to just over 6,000, of which slightly more than 5,000 would be used for enrichment. The remaining 13,000 would be disabled and put under IAEA seal.
Reduction of Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) from more than eight tonnes to just 300 kg, either by dilution or export.
Cooperation with an IAEA investigation into evidence of past work on nuclear weaponisation, specifically the granting of access for inspectors to suspect sites and people.
Once the conditions have been fulfilled, the EU oil embargo and all other EU economic and financial sanctions would be lifted, as well as the block on Iran using the Swift system for international electronic banking. In coordination with the EU, Barack Obama would issue waivers on corresponding US sanctions. US and European sanctions would have to lifted together because the US measures are extra-territorial, so would punish European companies for dealing with Iran.
John Kerry scores diplomatic victory in Iran after years of frustration Read more
Over the course of 18 months of negotiations, it became clear that a gradual lifting of economic sanctions would not be effective. As long as some restrictions remained, banks would be wary of financing trade or investment in Iran. The sanctions would all have to lifted together, but that also raised the bar that Tehran would have to cross.
“Realistically it will take Iran at least a couple of months to take the necessary nuclear steps that will allow us to provide sanctions relief. Once the IAEA confirms that Iran has taken those steps the EU will immediately terminate implementation of its economic and financial sanctions,” a European official said.
Western officials estimate that the list of conditions should take about six or eight months to fulfil, but that would depend to some extent on how quickly Iran could dilute or arrange the sale of its LEU.
More complicated still will be the issue of the IAEA investigation into possible past weaponisation work. The investigators would require access to military and Revolutionary Guard sites and to talk to the people in their ranks. That would give hardliners in the security establishment a veto on the necessary progress to lift sanctions. A lot will also depend on the IAEA interpretation of the level of Iranian compliance.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Iran’s top nuclear negotiator receives a jubilant welcome in Tehran.
Under the Lausanne blueprint, breakout time would be held to a year for the first 10 years but after that, western officials are insistent that precautionary measures are in place so that breakout time would not “fall off a cliff”, plummeting back to its current level of two or three months. Instead, they said, it would be held at a level closer to 10 months.
To that end, development work on advanced centrifuges would be restricted even after the first decade of the agreement, particularly in the case of the IR-6 centrifuge which uses the existing plumbing of the Natanz enrichment plant and so could be installed very rapidly.
Western negotiators acknowledge that behind the phasing of the plan lay the hope that Iran would evolve over the lifetime of the agreement into a less authoritarian regime, and a less volatile actor on the world stage.
“Our hope is – and 10 years is quite a long time – that we will manage to develop a new kind of cooperation with Iran,” an EU official said.In an important recent book, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh refers to the present era of corporate-driven climate crisis as 'The Great Derangement'. For almost 12,000 years, since the last Ice Age, humanity has lived through a period of relative climate stability known as the Holocene. When Homo sapiens shifted, for the most part, from a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence to an agriculture-based life, towns and cities grew, humans went into space and the global population shot up to over seven billion people.
Today, many scientists believe that we have effectively entered a new geological era called the Anthropocene during which human activities have'started to have a significant global impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems'. Indeed, we are now faced with severe, human-induced climate instability and catastrophic loss of species: the sixth mass extinction in four-and-a-half billion years of geological history, but the only one to have been caused by us.
Last Thursday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their symbolic Doomsday Clock forward thirty seconds, towards apocalypse. It is now two and a half minutes to midnight, the closest since 1953. Historically, the Doomsday Clock represented the threat of nuclear annihilation. But global climate change is now also recognised as an 'extreme danger'.
Future generations, warns Ghosh, may well look back on this time and wonder whether humanity was deranged to continue on a course of business-as-usual. In fact, many people alive today already think so. It has become abundantly clear that governments largely pay only lip service to the urgent need to address global warming (or dismiss it altogether), while they pursue policies that deepen climate chaos. As climate writer and activist Bill McKibben points out, President Trump has granted senior energy and environment positions in his administration to men who:
'know nothing about science, but they love coal and oil and gas – they come from big carbon states like Oklahoma and Texas, and their careers have been lubed and greased with oil money.'
Rex Tillerson, Trump's US Secretary of State, is the former chairman and CEO of oil giant, ExxonMobil. He once told his shareholders that cutting oil production is 'not acceptable for humanity', adding: 'What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?'
As for Obama's 'legacy' on climate, renowned climate scientist James Hansen only gives him a 'D' grade. Obama had had a 'golden opportunity'. But while he had said 'the right words', he had avoided 'the fundamental approach that's needed'. Contrast this with the Guardian view on Obama's legacy that he had 'allowed America to be a world leader on climate change'. An article in the Morning Star by Ian Sinclair highlighted the stark discrepancy between Obama's actual record on climate and fawning media comment, notably by the BBC and the Guardian:
'Despite the liberal media's veneration of the former US president, Obama did very little indeed to protect the environment.'
And so while political 'leaders' refuse to change course to avoid disaster, bankers and financial speculators continue to risk humanity's future for the sake of making money; fossil fuel industries go on burning the planet; Big Business consumes and pollutes ecosystems; wars, 'interventions' and arms deals push the strategic aims of geopolitical power, all wrapped in newspeak about 'peace','security' and 'democracy'; and corporate media promote and enable it all, deeply embedded and complicit as they are. The 'Great Derangement' indeed.
Consider, for example, the notorious US-based Koch Brothers who, as The Real News Network notes, 'have used their vast wealth to ensure the American political system takes no action on climate change.' Climate scientist Michael Mann is outspoken:
'They have polluted our public discourse. They have skewed media coverage of the science of climate change. They have paid off politicians.'
He continues:
'The number of lives that will be lost because of the damaging impacts of climate change – in the hundreds of millions. [...] To me, it's not just a crime against humanity, it's a crime against the planet.'
But the Koch Brothers are just the tip of a state-corporate system that is on course to drive Homo sapiens towards a terminal catastrophe.
Earlier this month, the world's major climate agencies confirmed 2016 as the hottest since modern records began. The global temperature is now 1C higher than preindustrial times, and the last three years have seen the record broken successively - the first time this has happened.
Towards the end of 2016, scientists reported 'extraordinarily hot' Arctic conditions. Danish and US researchers were'surprised and alarmed by air temperatures peaking at what they say is an unheard-of 20C higher than normal for the time of year.' One of the scientists said:
'These temperatures are literally off the charts for where they should be at this time of year. It is pretty shocking.'
Another researcher emphasised:
'This is faster than the models. It is alarming because it has consequences.'
These 'consequences' will be terrible. Scientists have warned that increasingly rapid Arctic ice melt 'could trigger uncontrollable climate change at global level'.
It gets worse. A new study suggests that global warming is on course to raise global sea level by between six and nine metres, wiping out coastal cities and settlements around the world. Mann describes the finding, with classic scientific understatement, as'sobering' and adds that:
'we may very well already be committed to several more metres of sea level rise when the climate system catches up with the carbon dioxide we've already pumped into the atmosphere'.
It gets worse still.
The Paris Climate Accord of 2015 repeated the international commitment to keep global warming below 2C. Even this limited rise would threaten life as we know it. When around a dozen climate scientists were asked for their honest opinion as to whether this target could be met, not one of them thought it likely. Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, was most adamant:
'there is not a cat in hell's chance [of keeping below 2C].'
But wait, because there's even worse news. Global warming could well be happening so fast that it's 'game over'. The Earth's climate could be so sensitive to greenhouse gases that we may be headed for a temperature rise of more than 7C within a lifetime. Mark Lynas, author of the award-winning book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, was'shocked' by the researchers' study, describing it as 'the apocalyptic side of bad'.
Burying The Climate Issue
Given all of the above, what does it say about the British government that it should bury an alarming report about the likely impacts of climate change on the UK? These impacts include:
'the doubling of the deaths during heatwaves, a "significant risk" to supplies of food and the prospect of infrastructure damage from flooding.'
At a time of manufactured fear by'mainstream' media about 'fake news' and 'post-truth' politics, how divorced from reality is the government when it would rather ignore such an important report, far less address seriously the urgent truth of climate chaos?
An exclusive article in the Independent noted that the climate report made virtually no impact when it was published on the government website of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on 18 January:
'despite its undoubted importance, Environment Secretary Andrea Leadsom made no speech and did not issue her own statement, and even the Defra Twitter account was silent. No mainstream media organisation covered the report.'
The government said in the ignored report that climate change meant that 'urgent priorities' needed to be addressed, including a dramatic rise in heat-related deaths, coastal flooding and'significant risks to the availability and supply of food in the UK'. So, lip service at least. But Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in London, said he was 'astonished' that the government had done so little to publicise the report:
'It's almost as if they were trying to sneak it out without people realising.'
Leading politicians, intelligence chiefs and their media allies are forever warning the British public of'security threats' which are so often blowback from Western foreign policy; or the warnings are overhyped claims to justify their own fearmongering agendas. But when it comes to the greatest threat of all – climate change – they are remarkably silent. This exposes as a lie the rhetoric from government and security services that they are motivated by genuine concern for the well-being of the population. The truth is that powerful forces are always driven primarily by the desire to preserve and boost their own interests, their own profits, their own dominance.
Amitav Ghosh rightly notes that the most powerful states derive their privileged position in large part by sitting atop a world-threatening carbon economy:
'The fact is that we live in a world that has been profoundly shaped by empire and its disparities. Differentials of power between and within nations are probably greater today than they have ever been. These differentials are, in turn, closely related to carbon emissions. The distribution of power in the world therefore lies at the core of the climate crisis.' (Ghosh, 'The Great Derangement', University of Chicago Press, 2016, p. 146; our emphasis)
Tackling climate change thus means tackling global inequity. This requires a deep-rooted commitment to not just 'a redistribution of wealth but also to a recalibration of global power'. He makes the crucial point that:
'from the point of view of a security establishment that is oriented towards the maintenance of global dominance, this is precisely the scenario that is most greatly to be feared; from this perspective the continuance of the status quo is the most desirable of outcomes.' (Ibid., p. 143; our emphasis)
The Myth Of 'Fearless and Free Journalism'
The'mainstream' media is not somehow separate from this state-corporate status quo, selflessly and valiantly providing a neutral window into what powerful sectors in society are doing. Instead, the major news media are an intrinsic component of this system run for the benefit of elites. The media are, in effect, the public relations wing of a planetary-wide network of exploitation, abuse and destruction. The climate crisis is the gravest symptom of this dysfunctional global apparatus.
News reporting on the economy, for instance, is typically divorced from reporting on the climate crisis. Judging by the lack of attention given to climate in last year's Autumn Statement, whether by Chancellor Philip Hammond himself or the media dutifully reporting on it, the global warming emergency had miraculously gone away. It is as if there are two separate planets: one where 'the economy' happens; and another one, the real world, which is beset by catastrophic climate change.
Some readers will say: 'But surely the best media – the likes of the BBC, the Guardian and Channel 4 News - report climate science honestly and accurately?' Yes, to a large extent, they do a good job in reporting the science (though the BBC has often been guilty of 'false balance' on climate). But they rarely touch the serious, radical measures needed to address the climate crisis, or the nature and extent of the climate denial 'Beast'. This is taboo; not least because it would raise awkward questions about rampant neoliberalism addressed, for example, by Naomi Klein in her books The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything.
As Ghosh also observes, capitalism and imperialism are intertwined as primary drivers of the climate crisis. But when did a BBC environment, economics or business correspondent ever report this truth? Their silence is shameful; all the more so for their avowed responsibility to the public who funds them. Even the very fact 'that we live in a world that has been profoundly shaped by empire and its disparities... remains largely unacknowledged.' (Ibid., p. 146). It is certainly not acknowledged by the BBC and the rest of the major news media for which the public is supposed to be grateful. The BBC still reflects its origins in empire and the establishment while proclaiming falsely its 'independence' and 'impartiality'. Consider, for example, that Sir David Clementi, former deputy governor of Bank of England, has just been confirmed as the new BBC chair. This, in a nutshell, is how the state-corporate media system operates. A former banker will become the new chair of the 'independent' BBC, appointed by the government. This is all part of the fiction of'media plurality', 'impartiality' and 'freedom' from 'political interference'.
Even when the Guardian recently ran a live page on climate change on the day that President Trump took office, with a follow-up titled, 'So you want to be a climate campaigner? Here's how', the paper's compromised worldview was all too apparent. The top of the Guardian's website proudly proclaimed:
'With climate sceptics moving into the White House, the Guardian will spend the next 24 hours focusing on the climate change happening right now, and what we can do to help protect the planet.'
But you would have searched in vain for any in-depth analysis of how Big Business, together with co-opted governments, have hurled massive resources at stifling any real progress towards tackling climate change, and 'what we can do' about that. In particular, there was no Guardian commitment to drop any – never mind all - fossil-fuel advertising revenue. The proposal to reject ads from 'environmental villains' had been put to the paper by its own columnist George Monbiot in 2009, following a challenge from Media Lens. It got nowhere. Significantly, the Guardian's 'focused' climate coverage once again steered clear of its own questionable behaviour and its structural ties to elite money and power. Meanwhile, the paper continues to be riddled with ads promoting carbon emissions – notably short-haul flights and cars – ironically appearing right beside articles about dangerous global warming.
Even as such glaring contradictions, omissions and silences become ever more apparent to Guardian readers, the paper is ramping up its appeals for readers to dip into their pockets. When Trump triumphed in the US election last November, Lee Glendinning, the editor of Guardian US, pleaded:
'Never has the world needed independent journalism more. [...] Now is the time to support journalism that is both fearless and free.'
She deployed standard, self-serving Guardian rhetoric:
'Because the Guardian is not beholden to profit-seeking shareholders or a billionaire owner, we can pursue stories without fear of where they might take us, free from commercial and political influence.'
In repeatedly churning out the myth that the Guardian is 'free from commercial and political influence', any public doubts about its pure nature are supposed to be dispelled. But there comes a |
: Andrew Millar. pp. 271–2. 228676038. Birch, Thomas (1763).. London: Andrew Millar. pp. 271–2. OCLC Contemporary spelling, used by Bacon himself in his letter of thanks to the king for his elevation. ^ Homosexuals in History, New York: Carroll & Garf, 1977. page 44; Jardine, Lisa; Stewart, Alan Hostage To Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon Hill & Wang, 1999. page 148; Nieves Mathews, Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination, Yale University Press, 1996; Ross Jackson, The Companion to Shaker of the Speare: The Francis Bacon Story, England: Book Guild Publishing, 2005. pages 45 – 46 See opposing opinions of: A. L. Rowse, New York: Carroll & Garf, 1977. page 44; Jardine, Lisa; Stewart, AlanHill & Wang, 1999. page 148; Nieves Mathews,, Yale University Press, 1996; Ross Jackson,, England: Book Guild Publishing, 2005. pages 45 – 46 ^ a general reformation, both of divine and humane things, according to our desire, and the expectation of others: for it's fitting, that before the rising of the Sun, there should appear and break forth Aurora, or some clearness, or divine light in the sky" – "Howbeit we know after a time there wil now be, according to our desire, and the expectation of others: for it's fitting, that before the rising of the Sun, there should appear and break forth Aurora, or some clearness, or divine light in the sky" – Fama Fraternitatis ^ "Like good and faithful guardians, we may yield up their fortune to mankind upon the emancipation and majority of their understanding, from which must necessarily follow an improvement of their estate [...]. For man, by the fall, fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses however can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences. – Francis Bacon, Novum Organum ^ "We ought therefore here to observe well, and make it known unto everyone, that God hath certainly and most assuredly concluded to send and grant to the whole world before her end... such a truth, light, life, and glory, as the first man Adam had, which he lost in Paradise, after which his successors were put and driven, with him, to misery. Wherefore there shall cease all servitude, falsehood, lies, and darkness, which by little and little, with the great world's revolution, was crept into all arts, works, and governments of men, and have darkened most part of them". – Confessio Fraternitatis
References
Attribution
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Jackson, Samuel Macauley, ed. (1908). "Bacon, Francis". New Schaff–Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge 2 (third ed.). London and New York: Funk and Wagnalls.
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Sir John PeytonKurt Caselli's Last Ride
A tribute to the 30-year-old racer from California who died at the 2013 Baja 1000 race in November.
Editor's note: ESPN's Alyssa Roenigk was embedded with the Red Bull/KTM motorcycle team to cover this year's Baja 1000. From a seat in rider Kendall Norman's chase truck, she was able to experience the race from the viewpoint of not only Norman and his teammates but the friends, family, dirt bike mechanics and team managers who support them along the way. She spent the days leading up to the race with Norman's chase team as they drove from Santa Barbara, Calif., to Mexico and prepared for the race.
On the afternoon of race day, they met up with Norman's teammate Kurt Caselli as he and his mechanics put the finishing touches on the team's race bike. Then they drove south on Highway 1, camped overnight in the desert and, after picking up Norman at 7 a.m. at race mile 395, chased the bike through the Baja California peninsula. At 4 p.m. on Nov. 15, they were on their way to the finish in Ensenada, believing Caselli, the last rider in the KTM relay, was leading the race.
Courtesy Ivan Ramirez Ivan Ramirez's helmet-cam view, shortly before making the final relay exchange of the race with KTM teammate Kurt Caselli at the 2013 Baja 1000.
IT HAD BEEN nearly 16 hours and 779 grueling miles since the start of the 2013 SCORE Baja 1000 as 20-year-old Ivan Ramirez raced toward Pit 15, adrenaline charging, to make the final exchange of the race motorcycle with his teammate Kurt Caselli. And he was coming in hot. About 100 yards from the pit, Ramirez realized he had underestimated the power of race day and hit the brakes a few yards too late. He overshot his mark and sent his crew scrambling. Caselli, always involved and on the ready, ran toward the orange 450 XC-F, yanked the bike stand from its path, waited for Ramirez to dismount and placed it underneath the bike.
For factory-backed pro teams challenging for a championship, the Baja 1000 is a relay race. One bike per team covers the full 883 miles, this year's course distance, while its riders switch off at a deftly choreographed series of pit stops throughout the Baja peninsula. This year, the motorcycles started at night, in two-minute intervals, with start position determined by a qualifier.
The KTM bike ridden by the team of Caselli, Ramirez, Mike Brown and Kendall Norman started first, at 11 p.m., followed by Honda and Kawasaki, the other two top teams contending for the overall title. Starting first provided an advantage, but it also meant that, to win, KTM would have to cross the finish line two minutes and one second ahead of the second-place bike.
At this final exchange, Ramirez had reason to be amped. For nearly 800 miles, his team had swapped the lead with the 16-time defending champion Honda squad five times, and at that point, 104 miles from the finish, KTM had a one-minute unadjusted lead. One minute. Through 16 hours of racing, the FMF/Bonanza Plumbing/KTM and JCR/Honda teams remained close enough to taste each other's dust. Ramirez made the last pass of the day back at race mile 675, and, as he watched Caselli jump on the bike, the magnitude of the moment hit him. "I was feeling super happy and confident," Ramirez said. "Winning the Baja 1000 was our dream."
It was 2:48 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 15, as Ramirez handed off the bike to Caselli, aware that, in 104 miles, he could become the first Mexican to win the Baja 1000 in its 46-year history. Caselli, only 30 but already one of the most accomplished riders in his sport, would round out his résumé with a championship he'd dreamed of winning since he was a kid and, along with Ramirez, Brown and Norman, deliver KTM its first Baja 1000 win.
"When I gave the bike to Kurt, I knew he would keep everything going for our team," Ramirez said. "I said to him, 'Just ride smart. The helicopter's not with you.' That's the last thing I said. And, 'Be safe.'"
J Photo Gallery Kurt Caselli's Baja 1000 Donald Mirelle A look back at Kurt Caselli's last days at the 2013 Baja 1000 race. View gallery »
IT WAS FITTING Caselli was the rider assigned to bring his team across the finish in Ensenada. This was, after all, his plan. Two years earlier, he had walked into KTM team manager Antti Kallonen's office in Murietta, Calif., and told him he needed a new challenge. He was negotiating his next contract with the company, but, instead of arriving with a typical list of questions about championship bonuses and salary details, he had come with promises.
He had ridden for KTM for nearly a decade, had won three World Off-Road Championship Series titles and the AMA National Hare and Hound overall championship from 2011 to 2013, and had proved himself as a rider who could excel in any off-road motorcycle race in the country. Now he wanted to spend more time racing outside the U.S. He had a list of goals, including racing and winning the Dakar Rally and contesting rallies in Europe, but one race tugged at his adventurous spirit more than any other: the Baja 1000.
Caselli and his older sister, Carolyn, grew up in Palmdale, Calif., riding in the desert and camping with their parents, Rich and Nancy, both former desert racers who instilled in their children a sense of adventure. "They encouraged us at what we were naturally skilled at," Carolyn said. "For Kurt, that was athletics. For me, it was academics. Because of them, I know I can do anything. Kurt believed the same about himself."
Kurt began racing at age 12 and quickly became known for his speed and determination. Rich and Kurt were inseparable, father and son, best friends and passionate supporters of American off-road racing. When Rich died in 2008 after a stoic, silent battle with liver cancer, Kurt broke the news to the off-road racing community through an email, then rarely spoke about his dad publicly. Their relationship became his to hold on to quietly and to honor through his riding. As a kid, he'd watched his dad race Baja and dreamed of one day following in his tracks … when he was ready and the time was right.
"That day in my office, Kurt said to me, 'You've always been supporting Baja through private teams,'" Kallonen said. "He said, 'Why don't we do a factory team, build a program, and I'll race Baja?'"
To the off-road racing community, the Baja 1000 is more than a race. It's an occasion, a consciousness, a way of life. Every year since the first Mexican 1000 Rally from Tijuana to La Paz was held in 1967, the best drivers and riders in the world have converged on Ensenada to race motorcycles, production vehicles, trophy trucks and custom race vehicles alongside anyone with the desire and enough cash to cover the $3,000 entry fee -- weekend sportsmen racing alongside professional riders with factory support and near $1 million budgets. The race is a punishing test of mind, body and machine over hundreds of miles of captivatingly stark, treacherous, peaceful terrain.
Donald Miralle for ESPN The Magazine Caselli, posing here at the KTM shop in Baja on Nov. 14, dreamed of winning the Baja 1000 for his dad, who died of liver cancer in 2008.
To Caselli, it represented a missing accolade in his résumé, a race that his father had loved and that Kurt wanted to win in his memory. He wanted to challenge longtime champ Honda, which had won Baja every year since 1997, and bring another motorcycle manufacturer to the race. Two decades earlier, the 1000 had been a prestigious competition in which multiple factory teams battled year after year, fender to fender, for the championship. Before Honda, Kawasaki dominated the race, winning nine consecutive years, but the manufacturer left Baja shortly after the death of its three-time champ Danny Hamel in the 1995 race.
"Kurt and KTM coming in was a great moment for the sport," said 11-time Baja champ Johnny Campbell, owner of the JCR/Honda team. "It was intriguing to have that level of effort coming in to try and take our championship away. I welcomed that challenge."
KTM has a long history in off-road racing and a brilliant stable of riders in motocross, FMX, endurocross and rally, including 2010 AMA Supercross champ Ryan Dungey and five-time X Games gold medalist Ronnie Renner. Kallonen, a former motocross racer from Finland, took over KTM North America's off-road efforts in 2006. Since then, his riders have won more than 30 off-road titles.
"KTM had won all the off-road races in the States there are to win," Kallonen said. "But we'd never won Baja. That was a challenge for the company and a challenge for Kurt. He could become known as a true all-around racer." When Kallonen ran Caselli's plan up the ladder at headquarters in Austria, the response was unanimous: Let's go for it.
Caselli was at the center of KTM's Baja program, both as the team's Rider of Record on race days -- essentially a team captain who must start or finish every race -- and as its undisputed leader on the days between. He told KTM what bike he wanted to ride and what athletes he wanted racing with him. When Kallonen needed to round up the troops for a meeting, it was Caselli who was first to arrive, always welcoming Kallonen with, "Terve, Antti," a common Finnish greeting.
Although off-road racing is known as an individual sport, it is far from a singular pursuit. Caselli understood the camaraderie required to race in the elements. During races, he was known to offer spare bike parts, which he would eventually have to pay for himself, to competitors he'd never met so they could finish a race. After pit stops, he would pause for an extra second to say "Thank you" to the mechanics.
Caselli was involved in every aspect of the team, including mentoring his young teammate Ramirez. Ramirez was an Ensenada native who raced his first Baja 500 at age 14, and Caselli believed he would become a multi-time Baja 1000 champ. Less than a year after that initial meeting with Kallonen, Caselli and Ramirez won their first race in Mexico, at the 2012 SCORE San Felipe 250, the first of three races in the annual SCORE Championship Desert Racing series.
In June 2012, three-time Dakar champion Marc Coma and two-time X Games Enduro X champ Brown joined Caselli and Ramirez for the Baja 500 and the team finished third. Then, in November, the KTM team of Caselli, Ramirez, Brown and four-time Baja winner Quinn Cody raced their first Baja 1000 and finished second. "We learned a lot last year," Kallonen said. "This year wasn't about collecting experience. This year, we felt like we had everything we needed to win."
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Shortly after another second-place finish at the San Felipe 250 in March, Caselli invited Ramirez to move in with him at his home in Palmdale, where they rode together, worked out at the gym and competed to beat each other's Strava times on road cycling routes. "He taught me so much this year," Ramirez said. "We were pushing the limits. Kurt would say to me, 'Work harder and the results will pay off.' I did because I knew they would."
During KTM's second run at the Baja 500 this June, Caselli hit a rock in a whoops section and suffered a high-speed crash at race mile 190. Although not seriously injured, he was done riding for the day. He was picked up by the team helicopter and replaced by backup rider Justin Jones. The bike required multiple repairs throughout the race, but Jones, Ramirez and Brown were able to hang on to second place.
Not long after the 500, KTM added six-time Baja 1000 champ Norman, 29, to the team. Known as "Mr. Baja," Norman had ridden for Honda since 2004 and had more experience racing the San Felipe area than anyone on his new team. For 17 years, Caselli and Norman had been fierce rivals. Now they were teammates, becoming friends and racing toward the same goal.
TWO WEEKS BEFORE the 2013 Baja 1000, Caselli arrived in Mexico to pre-run his sections of the course, memorizing each tree, rock and terrain change. "By the start of the race, every rider can close his eyes and ride his section," Caselli said Thursday afternoon at Ramirez's father's bike shop in Ensenada, 10 hours before the start of the race. "We know what's coming before we get to it. We don't want any surprises."
During his weeks in Ensenada, Caselli and his teammates rode from sunrise to sunset, 10 to 12 hours per day. The hours in between can feel monotonous, lonely and mentally draining without friends and family around to distract from the stress of the upcoming race. So, riders choose their company carefully. "You need someone in your chase team who you know can put up with you, who understands you are tired and stressed and is willing to do anything you need," Caselli said.
By the start of the race, every rider can close his eyes and ride his section. We know what’s coming before we get to it. We don’t want any surprises. Kurt Caselli
For his first week of pre-running, Caselli's cousin Jeff Kagan followed him during rides. After returning home for four days, Caselli drove back to Ensenada with his fiancée, Sarah White, and his longtime friend Jason Ortiz, a firefighter for the Los Angeles Fire Department, for his final week of pre-running. "Kurt liked having me around for my positive energy," White said. "He also appreciated having conversations that weren't about motorcycles and racing."
Since they got back together in February, after Caselli showed up at her door at 4 a.m. with Valentine's Day flowers and that smile she never could turn away, White had begun traveling the world with Caselli, supporting him at international races and planning vacations to Paris and Rome in between. Before their trip to Paris in July for his 30th birthday, she read about the Pont des Arts, known as the Love Lock Bridge, and bought a set of black Master Lock padlocks to pack in her suitcase.
During their visit to the bridge, they wrote promises to one another in permanent marker on the metal arms of the locks, attached them to the wall alongside thousands of others and tossed the keys into the Seine. Although it would be another month before Caselli proposed, said White: "I consider that the time we got married."
The couple met 10 years ago. She was 16; he was 20. That day, Caselli told a friend, "One day, I'm going to marry that girl." They dated for a few years, broke up, dated again and broke up again. This time, they knew they were together for good. "I've never had anyone affect me like Kurt did," White said. "We always laughed when we heard that Pink song, the one where she says, 'Sometimes, I hate you. That's how I know how much I love you.' But this past nine months, it's been different; it was perfect."
In the car, Caselli would belt out that Pink song, any song, really, but especially embarrassing girl-pop. He was even known to sing during races; his off-key tunes relayed to his team through the headset in his helmet. "He loved to sing," White said. Especially if doing so would make someone else laugh. This was the guy who'd once shaved off half of his chest hair and told his friends he was conducting an experiment to find out what girls really preferred.
While Caselli pre-ran his sections of the course that week, Ortiz and White learned the roads, practiced the routes they'd take on race day, planned when they would sleep and eat and when they would make sure their rider did the same. "We spent so many hours driving and talking," Ortiz said. "About life, our families, our goals, people from our past. We talked about how he dealt with his dad's passing, what he'd think about his mom dating again, about the adventure of getting married. We started planning he and Sarah's joint bachelor-bachelorette party."
A month and a half earlier, SCORE -- a race organizer that has produced desert races on Baja for 40 years -- released the course map detailing the counterclockwise loop through the northern half of the peninsula. Kallonen divided the course into race legs based on each rider's strengths and the best logistics for his chase team to transport him from one leg to the next.
Courtesy Sarah White While visiting Paris for Caselli's 30th birthday, Caselli and fiance Sarah White spent an afternoon at the famed Love Lock Bridge, wrote promises to one another on locks, hung them on the wall and threw the keys into the Seine.
As the team's Rider of Record, Caselli would start the race at 11 p.m. He would race the first 198 miles in the dark, with LED lights mounted on the front of the bike and on top of his helmet. At race mile 198, he would hand off the bike to Norman, who was selected to ride the next 200-mile section because of his knowledge of the tough, rocky San Felipe area and his experience riding at night. The LEDs would be swapped with the halogen lights Norman preferred. Both riders would be in communication with Kallonen, the team's spotter -- responsible for being in constant contact with his riders during the race -- in the chase truck in the event they needed assistance.
After sunrise, Kallonen would hop in the team's helicopter along with its pilot, backup rider Justin Jones and the team medic and chase his riders from race mile 325 until the finish, breaking away only for pre-scheduled fuel stops every two hours. At a pit at race mile 395, the light would be removed from the bike, Ramirez would take over and the intervals would become shorter, between 90 and 185 miles for the remainder of the race.
"In the daylight, riders could push harder, not thinking they have to pace themselves," Kallonen said. At mile 504, Brown would take the bike from Ramirez, then return it at race mile 690. At race mile 779, Ramirez would make the final exchange with Caselli, who, under Kallonen's plan, would have slept at a hotel after riding his first leg, awoken around 11 a.m., eaten breakfast and driven back into the desert to await Ramirez's arrival at Pit 15. He would then race the final 104 miles and have the honor of bringing his team across the finish.
NINETEEN MILES BEFORE the final exchange, Ramirez informed Kallonen that his speedometer had broken. The speed limit on the highway is 60 mph and teams are docked time penalties for exceeding it. (There is no off-road speed limit during the race, however.) So Kallonen, who was scheduled to break away to refuel when Ramirez entered the highway, decided to stay with Ramirez and pace him with the helicopter until the team's chase truck arrived.
"The truck was late getting to Ivan, so we stayed with him a few miles longer," Kallonen said. As the chopper peeled away to refuel, Kallonen radioed Ramirez a reminder that he was refueling and would return to the air in approximately 25 minutes. He then called the pit at race mile 779 and asked them to inform Caselli that he would catch up with him later than planned.
"Kurt was upset," White said. "He was uncomfortable knowing the helicopter wasn't with him. He knew he would be able to communicate with the pit from his radio headset for a few miles, but he said to Anthony [Di Basilio, his mechanic and close friend], 'From [the pit], you're not going to be able to tell me if a horse or a cow is in front of me.'"
Typically on race days, Kurt was anxious, cranky and too focused to relax. But this time, he'd been different. In the hours before the start of the race, he and White had lain in bed at the hotel in Ensenada, joking around, laughing and talking about their future. "We had the most beautiful conversations," she said. "He wanted to talk about our wedding and what we would name our first kid."
He was equally relaxed while he rested up for the final leg, holding her hand throughout the night and, at breakfast, chatting about anything but racing. As they waited for Ramirez to arrive, White joked that her life had become one big vacation since Caselli proposed on Aug. 29, surprising her at an Italian restaurant in Santa Barbara. "Good thing we have forever to keep it going," he had said.
As Ramirez rode into view of Pit 15, White kissed Caselli's helmet. "I said, 'I love you, babe.' He said he loved me so much. I was so happy. I was floating," she said. As Caselli raced away from the final exchange, a buckskin-colored wild horse ran through the pit. "He was acting crazy and then he ran the same direction as Kurt," White said. "I can't stop thinking about that horse."
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ANXIOUS TO CATCH UP with the race at the next road crossing, White and Ortiz got back in their truck. Ramirez hopped on Caselli's pre-run bike, rode to Highway 3, then headed north to a checkpoint at race mile 798 where the course intersected the highway. They planned to watch Caselli pass, then head to the finish. Caselli should have arrived at this checkpoint a little after 3 p.m.
At 2:49 p.m., one minute after leaving his pit, Caselli maintained a one-minute margin over Honda, but, because of the two-minute head start, he was aware he still trailed for the overall lead. Caselli was fast, and fresh, but he knew he needed to be cautious until the team helicopter returned overhead. Until then, he was on his own.
At 2:55 p.m., Caselli passed race mile 786. One minute later, at the same location, Colton Udall of team Honda misjudged a cattle guard, crashed into a fence and destroyed his front wheel. He was uninjured but was down for 27 minutes as a replacement wheel was delivered and the bike was repaired. As each minute ticked by, KTM extended its lead. At 2:58 p.m., the team was ahead of Honda by three minutes. Ninety miles from the finish, Caselli was officially leading the race.
Around 3:15 p.m., Ortiz and White arrived at the road crossing where Ramirez, who had beaten them there, told them that Caselli had yet to go by and that he heard Honda had crashed. Ortiz dialed his walkie-talkie into KTM's race channel, informed Caselli of the crash and told him to slow down; the race was all but won. He heard no response and assumed either Caselli heard him and didn't answer, or the radios were out of range. "Looking back, I should have known Kurt would have been to the road crossing by then," Ortiz said. "He always beat us there during pre-running, and he would have been faster on race day."
In the moment, however, the thought struck no one. Ramirez hung at the checkpoint to wait for Caselli. Ortiz and White continued to Ensenada to meet up with Brown and Norman and watch Caselli ride across the finish. "Then I realized I was sitting on Kurt's sat phone," White said. "He'd left it in the truck."
Kurt was upset. He was uncomfortable knowing the helicopter wasn't with him. He knew he would be able to communicate with the pit from his radio headset for a few miles, but he said, 'From [the pit], you're not going to be able to tell me if a horse or a cow is in front of me.' Sarah White, Caselli's fiancée
THE DAY BEFORE the race, Caselli lined up to take his qualifying lap. It was the first time a qualifier, instead of a random draw, was held to determine start positions. This was also the first year the bikes would start at night, creating 10 hours of separation between the motorcycle start and the truck start the next morning at 9 a.m. This would prevent the fastest trucks from catching up to, and possibly colliding with, the slowest motorcycles, a concern in years past.
Caselli was the fastest rider, earning his team two minutes of separation from second-place Honda. With an 11 p.m. start, Caselli believed the pole position was crucial. "On top of going 80 to 90 at night, there's a lot of dust," Caselli said the afternoon of race day. "For the first 7 miles, there will be a lot of spectators camping to find a spot to watch the trucks, and the locals will have had hours to drink beer and get rowdy. I was really worried, so it's great to be starting first."
Start times and qualifiers weren't the only safety precautions new to the 2013 race. For the first time, teams were required to rent a two-component tracking system, including a SPOT tracker with an SOS button that could be pushed in case of emergency. These SPOT trackers also allowed anyone with access to an Internet connection, including fans, teams and SCORE operations officials, to watch the race in real time, with updates every 2.5 minutes showing where each vehicle was located on the course, if it was moving and at what speed.
The second component, a data logger, recorded location, speed and elevation every five seconds and was collected at the finish, allowing penalties to be assessed immediately after the race. Many riders also carried satellite phones and wore helmets equipped with headsets linked to a radio. A Medevac transport helicopter was on standby at the Ensenada airport; two SCORE helicopters -- one for filming and one for providing emergency medical assistance -- were available; and 23 emergency rescue vehicles and ambulances were stationed along the course.
"This was the safest Baja 1000 in history," said SCORE owner Roger Norman, who bought the series in 2011. Three of the motorcycle teams, KTM, Honda and Kawasaki, rented helicopters for their spotters.
Before the race, the motorcycle teams debated whether they should attach the SPOT trackers to their bikes or give them to their riders, possibly to wear in a hip pack or on a lanyard. The devices would be more secure on the bike, but, if a rider crashed and was separated from the bike, he would be unable to push the SOS button. Only one SPOT device was assigned to each team, so if the riders carried them and handed them off like a baton at each exchange, a rider might forget to hand off the tracker to the next guy. This would lead to penalties, disqualification or a rider being without the device altogether. The teams decided the trackers would be attached to the bikes.
AFTER A 30-MILE flight and 12-minute stop to refuel, the KTM helicopter lifted off to intercept Caselli on the course. By that point, Kallonen had been awake and on alert for 31 hours. He received a call from his mechanics at Pit 15 to inform him Caselli left the pit at 2:48 p.m. It was now 3 p.m., so Kallonen calculated that Caselli should have been at race mile 790.
Donald Miralle for ESPN The Magazine An aerial view of KTM rider Kendall Norman racing early in the day on Nov. 15, trailed by his nearly mile-long dust cloud produced in the wake of motorcycles on the course.
"We lifted up and we didn't see any dust," he said, referring to the nearly mile-long, orangeish-white trail produced in the wake of motorcycles on the course. "We knew Honda was one minute behind Kurt and the easiest way to find them is to spot their helicopter. We knew they were up in the air, but we didn't see them. We didn't see anything."
According to Campbell, at that moment the Honda helicopter was hovering above race mile 786, the spot where Udall crashed, waiting for a wheel to be delivered. Campbell was spotting from the chopper.
Kallonen instructed his pilot to fly to the road crossing at race mile 798 to get a better look. "I could see in the direction of our pit at mile 779, where Kurt started, and I couldn't see dust or a Honda helicopter," Kallonen said. "I couldn't see forward because there was a mountain." After hovering at race mile 798, Kallonen decided to fly ahead on the racecourse. "The riders said this was a fast section," he said. "Maybe it was faster than I thought and they'd gone by us already."
Kallonen called ahead to his next pit at race mile 829, but his crew told him they didn't expect Caselli for several minutes. "We continued flying forward, around the mountain, and didn't see anything," he said. "We flew to the next pit and they confirmed no one had come by. Then we started backtracking, flying low, knowing they had to come across us."
About halfway back to the spot where he began searching, the Honda helicopter came into view and Kallonen's pilot made contact with the Honda pilot. "They said they had not seen Kurt and their rider hadn't seen him," Kallonen said. The Honda pilot informed KTM of Udall's crash. "He said they thought we were a half-hour ahead."
Between 3:30 and 3:45 p.m., Kallonen instructed his pilot to fly back to the highway crossing at race mile 798. "I didn't find anything, then we flew all the way to the pit where Kurt got on and tracked the entire course," he said. But he still didn't see Caselli, or his bike. Throughout the day, Kallonen had received updates to his sat phone from folks monitoring the race online back in the States. He began receiving texts that his bike was stopped at race mile 796, so the helicopter spent extra time hovering over that area.
Still, its passengers saw nothing. "Then we started to suspect he took a wrong turn and was lost or broken down," Kallonen said. "It's normally easy to spot an orange bike and our rider, so we started getting higher to see more of the course."
In the SCORE Cruz Roja (Mexico's Red Cross) emergency command trailer in Ensenada, Kim Carpenter of SCORE operations was manning communications. She noticed on the live tracker that the KTM bike had not moved for 45 minutes but realized she had heard no updates over the radio.
"I thought it was strange," she said. "I was becoming increasingly concerned and said something to the people in the command post [which included race director Norman and safety director Bill Black]. We started watching for alerts."
Still unable to locate or reach Caselli, Kallonen began switching channels on the radio, informing anyone listening that he could not locate his rider. "Every rider had a sat phone and rider radio hooked up to the helmet," Kallonen said, unaware Caselli was without his satellite phone. "We were flying over the course asking for him, 'Kurt, do you copy?' Then it came to mind that he was not able to talk. We've had accidents before with Kurt, going back to the Baja 500, where I ask him, 'Are you OK?' He can respond with the radio. This time, there was no answer. We really started to get worried and get the word out."
Around 4 p.m., White and Ortiz, still driving to meet Caselli at the finish, heard a terrifying call over the race radio. "Antti came in on the station we were on and said, 'This is KTM. We can't find our rider. We are looking for our rider. We don't know where our rider is,'" White said. "That's all we heard."
The pilot landed the helicopter near the highway crossing, where Kallonen told Ramirez to go back to Pit 15, at race mile 779, and ride in the direction of the course to look for Caselli. "Then we landed at race mile 798, talked to a SCORE official and confirmed that Kurt hadn't gone by," Kallonen said. Caselli should have passed that location by around 3:10 p.m., but nobody there had seen him. "We knew we were looking from 780 to 798, and we got back up in the air. We'd been flying for well over an hour and had little gas left. We did one more pass, backwards from 798."
The pilot informed Kallonen that the helicopter was dangerously low on fuel. It was also nearing sundown and the choppers are required by law to be on the ground after nightfall. "We had no choice but to leave the area and land the helicopter," he said. "Everyone was 100 percent focused on finding Kurt. We did everything in our power. But we could not find him."
Meanwhile, Baja Pits president Carlos Orozco was manning a support pit at the road crossing at 798. Shortly after 4 p.m., he said he received a call from Bob Steinberger, a man known as "The Weatherman," who monitored and trafficked communication from atop Mount Diablo during the 1000. "He said, 'We have a rider lost around race mile 796 and you're the closest pit,'" Orozco said. "He knew I'd have a rider and a bike for that reason, in case someone ran out of gas or was in |
25th ODI captain.
Cricket Australia confirmed Wade would not be replaced in the squad, while Australia's full XI for the second ODI will be named tomorrow.
Australia's squad: Aaron Finch (c), Pat Cummins, James Faulkner, Peter Handscomb, Josh Hazlewood, Travis Head, Sam Heazlett, Shaun Marsh, Glenn Maxwell, Billy Stanlake, Mitchell Starc, Marcus Stoinis, Matthew Wade (injured), Adam ZampaSite of Beginning Trip of Abernathy Boysto New York City in 1910
On April 5, 1910 5 year old Bud and 9 year old Temple Abernathyleft the Crossroads Ranch near Frederick, Oklahoma and traveledalone on horseback to New York City. Their father, JackAbernathy, a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, wasplanning to meet the President in New York City following anAfrican Safari trip. His two young sons begged him to allowthem to travel the 2,000 miles on horseback to meet their dad andPresident Roosevelt.
The young boys became famous as they crossed the country. Theyhad many adventures and arrived in New York City as plannedon June 18, 1910. While in New York City, Bud and Templeconvinced their father to buy a Brush Runabout. "Wildcat" carwhich they drove back home, and their father followed in a newMaxwell Touring Car. A restored Brush Runabout is located atthe Pioneer Townsite Museum in Frederick, Oklahoma.President Trump’s base among Republican voters is showing its first signs of erosion, according to opinion polls. His overall numbers are also at an historic low for a new president.
But what happens if Trump goes into total disruption mode and invites a government shutdown? Recent shutdowns have upset voters and damaged the Republican brand.
Now the question is whether the Trump brand is stronger than the GOP brand?
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At the moment, more than three-quarters of Republicans remain Trump fans.
Even after the violence in Charlottesville, Va. — and the president’s failure to immediately damn the racist and anti-Jewish marchers — Trump can still look at polls and see that he is far more popular than any other Republican.
Trump is betting he can leverage his populist appeal among the rank-and-file to blame the GOP majority in Congress for forcing him to shut the government.
“Believe me, if we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall,” the president told his supporters at a rally in Phoenix last week, as anti-wall, pro-immigrant protesters picketed the venue.
Later, he specifically targeted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration Senate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Pence meets with Senate GOP for 'robust' discussion on Trump declaration MORE (R-Ky.) and Speaker Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE (R-Wis.) for failing to do his bidding. They should have raised the debt ceiling as part of a recent Veterans benefits bill, as he “requested,” Trump tweeted.
“Could have been so easy – now a mess,” was the president’s damning conclusion.
“Trump Divorces the GOP Congress,” was the headline on an editorial in the Wall Street Journal last Friday.
“They physical wall is Mr. Trump’s personal preoccupation,” the Journal’s conservative editorial page editors wrote. “He can veto a bill without it but then he’d be responsible for the shutdown.”
Trump appears happy to do just that.
He can tell his supporters that enough-is-enough with do-nothing Republicans and obstruction from Democrats. He can portray himself as a hero, daring to take the risk of a shutdown to “drain the swamp.”
But how will that heroic image hold up if federal workers are told to stay home and benefit checks don’t go out?
The president’s men are trying to stop him from playing Russian roulette with a government shutdown — especially if it is being done to build a wall.
Polls show a large, clear majority of Americans oppose building the wall. Most Americans also oppose shutting down the government.
But the odds of a shutdown are increasing.
"Presidential approval continues to decline, and is the lowest for any first-term president in his first year in office," top Goldman Sachs economist Alec Phillips wrote in a memo to clients earlier this month. "Low approval ratings raise legislative risks. In the near term, we believe there is a 50% chance of a brief government shutdown, as the president seeks to solidify support among his base by embracing more controversial positions."
The president’s team is not as confident as Trump that any good will come of a shutdown.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin Steven Terner MnuchinFed chief sees 'conflicting signals' from economy Treasury announces new Venezuela sanctions Trump trade chief changes terminology after president contradicts him MORE, a former Goldman executive, appeared alongside McConnell last week and gave little attention to the president’s call for a wall. Instead, he assured Republicans there would be no government shutdown brought on by a failure to raise the debt ceiling.
“We’re going to get the debt ceiling passed,” Mnuchin predicted confidently. “Everybody understands, this is not a Republican issue, this is not a Democrat issue. We need to be able to pay our debts.”
McConnell agreed: “America is not going to default, and we’ll get the job done in conjunction with the secretary of the Treasury,” he said.
Ryan shares McConnell’s view: “I don’t think a government shutdown is necessary, and I don’t think most people want to see a government shutdown, ourselves included,” he said at a news conference in Oregon last week.
That leaves open the question of whether Republican voters agree.
Already some House Republicans seem reluctant to push back against Trump.
House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) is predicting that as part of a debt ceiling resolution, Congress will “find at least a billion or so dollars to make sure that we start the wall.”
Meanwhile, Democrats see political gold in a bloody intramural GOP fight over the debt ceiling this fall.
“Democrats have made clear we will not support funding for President Trump’s misguided, ineffective border wall,” Rep. Joseph Crowley (N.Y.), who chairs the House Democratic Caucus, told The Hill last week. “If President Trump and Republicans insist on wasting taxpayers’ money, they will be to blame for any government shutdown.”
For all his bravado, Trump knows he has not delivered the “winning” that he promised his base. That is why he held the Phoenix rally so quickly after Charlottesville. The latest polls show Trump losing swing votes in key states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan.
So, now we find out if Republican voters will abandon Congressional Republicans in order to stand by a man who sees himself as bigger than the GOP: Trump.
Let the fall games begin.
Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.And over at DC Comics, the publisher has announced their contribution to the spookiest of holidays with a new 80-page one shot called DC House of Horror, which will feature a ton of well-known horror writers teamed up with established artists to tell scary tales featuring your favorite DC heroes like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman in supernatural predicaments.
Among the creators for House of Horror are authors Brian Keene, Weston Ochse, Edward Lee, Mary SanGiovanni, Wrath James White, Nick Cutter, Ronald Malfi, and Bryan Smith. They'll be teaming with artists Rags Morales, Bilquis Evely, Howard Porter, Scott Kolins, Dale Eaglesham, and the book will be released on October 25th, just days before Halloween. The cover is from comics legend Mike Kaluta, which you can see down below:
According to the official description, in these stories "Martha Kent fights for her life against a creature from a spacecraft that lands in front of her farmhouse! A young woman is possessed by the spirit of a murderous Amazon warrior! The last surviving member of the Justice League faces down a horror beyond imagining!"
DC Comics has a very long tradition with horror anthology comics, stretching back to the 1940s, with titles like Ghosts, House of Mystery, House of Secrets, The Unexpected, The Witching Hour, and even Weird War Tales, which mashed up war stories with the supernatural on a monthly basis. These books were published well into the '80s, until superheroes began to dominate everything at both DC and Marvel. But it's nice to see DC pay homage to their horror anthology past with this one-shot. Hopefully this can become an annual tradition.
DC House of Horror hits comic shops on October 25, 2017.
Are you excited about this superhero/horror mash-up? Be sure to let us know down below in the comments.
Images: DC Comics / Warner BrothersTerri Gallagher, the Founder and President of Gallagher and Consultants, a temp workforce strategy consultancy, kindly shares her experience of being a beginning businessman.
Terri has a passion for technology and innovation and it’s the foundation of her business; her approach is based on current state temp workforce trends incorporating cutting edge technology and globalization factors that are rapidly changing our workforce.
Terri leverages 20+ years of experience in enterprise contingent (temp) workforce strategies to bring value-add innovative solutions and delivery for her clients; particularly in the manufacturing sector. She was raised single-handedly by her father, a steelworker, which developed her love of this evolving and every changing industry. Prior to Gallagher and Consultants, Terri was responsible for the successful design, solution and delivery of several global and domestic contingent workforce programs, across sectors ranging from $25M – $2B in temp workforce spend.
Find Terri on LinkedIn.
#1 You Can Actually Live Quite Comfortably on 25% of your Former Income
Maybelline is actually just as good as Chanel and no one can tell the difference. Everyone will still love you; even when you pick up less checks and can’t go to The Palm. Especially your pets; they don’t care. Bonus: it makes you a more tolerant person.
#2 Make Fear your Friend; It’s Presence is a Good Sign!
I named my fear; she is a wolf named Natasha. I acknowledge her but let her know she will not run amok. She is fine with that…most of the time…because…well…she’s a wolf. Feeling fear means you are getting to the good stuff, growing your business, your skills, your courage, getting beyond your comfort zone; see it as such.
#3 Don’t Vent to your Friends Working Corp. Job. Ever
They love you but don’t get it. They will say, “Well, you can just go back to your regular job if this doesn’t work out anyway.” You can’t go back; you are changed forever.
#4 You Will Change and Shape Shift into Someone Your Friends and Family May not Recognize. And that’s OK
Being an entrepreneur means you have to up your game, be your strongest self, voraciously protect your time, peace of mind, focus. YOU are center stage, warts and all. You are answering your true calling and being your most authentic self, you might lose some folks along the way, and that’s OK. Probably time for them to go anyway.
#5 Speaking of Changing… Say Hello to Personal Demons you Never Knew you Had… Until now
“Know that you can do it, you are good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people like you!”, says Stuart Smalley. Things your Personal Demon will say, “You can’t pull this off”, “Who are you to go up against the biggest staffing companies in the world?”, “You are crazy putting all your money at risk for this”, “You are not smart enough, tough enough.”
#6 It is REALLY hard work, for a REALLY long time, and DELAYED pay-off
It can be lonely, scary, challenging, where is the money?!! But know that the small voice (the smartest voice) tells you this was the right thing to do. And that voice is always right, have faith. “You are the smartest savviest person I know. If you decided to do this, you are onto something because you don’t do anything really stupid.” ~My sister Jackie.
#7 Get Support from People who “Get It” and Mentors, because You Need the Help, You have a Lot to Learn
There is a lot you don’t know. Even if you were a brilliant, hard-driving V.P. before you started this adventure. How could you know? You never ran your own company. Be vulnerable and ask for help. Find mentors who know what they are doing and have been successful.
#8 Dating is hard your first year, you are not Playing “Hard to Get” or being “Mysterious”, you are trying to SURVIVE and not to Lose your House
You really ARE that busy and intensely focused. That is what it takes your first year, so be flexible and understanding, and don’t get annoyed when I can’t just go at the drop of a hat. Or one can date other entrepreneurs… and they might get it, but if they are in their first year, you might not see much of them either.
#9 When you Least Expect it or are thinking about quitting, you will just then experience that taste of success
Something really good will happen just then, when you are absolutely at the wall and don’t think you can handle it. A client you have been prospecting for six months wants to meet you, you get asked to do a key note speech and they will PAY YOU, a collaborator has a deal they want to bring you into and it’s big bucks. It’s the Universe throwing you a bone, telling you that you made the right decision. The signs are there… you just need to pay attention.
#10 It’s Hard, Scary, You are Wearing Cheap Makeup, Working Long Hours, Dealing with Natasha the Wolf, Feeling Crazy, but… It’s worth it!
You have to take a swing, you know you do. No matter what happens, that is the most important thing; to get up to bat and give it a shot. That alone already puts you in rare company. The pay-off is living your most authentic life, adding to the dialog, making more money than you ever dreamed, and on YOUR terms.The Army Corps of Engineers has told fourth-generation tree, vine and wheat grower John Duarte that he broke the law simply by plowing his land in rural Tehama County, California. Experts say that under the EPA’s Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule, the same type of regulatory enforcement could become commonplace, threatening farmers across the nation. EPA has said that farmers have no need to worry about the rule because normal farming is exempt from regulation, but what’s happening to the Duarte family shows how the EPA and the Corps work around that exemption.
“The Corps and EPA aren’t trying to micromanage farmers. They’re trying to stop farmers,” Duarte said. “They’re trying to turn our farm land into habitat preservation. They’re simply trying to chase us off of our land.”
Duarte decided to take his case to court, which was met by a counter-suit from the U.S. Justice Department, seeking millions of dollars in penalties, basically for plowing his field, according to Tony Francois, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which is representing Duarte.
“Anyone who’s being told not to worry about the new Waters of the U.S. Rule, as finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, they should be thinking about this case,” Francois said. “The very thing they are telling you not to worry about is what they are suing Duarte over – just plowing.”
The American Farm Bureau Federation has produced a video with John Duarte talking about the problems he has encountered with federal water regulations. The video also illustrates how the climate regarding water regulations will likely become much worse and encompass the entire nation under the widely-reviled Waters of the U.S. rule. Click here if you do not see the video below.I’ve been thinking about how to write this with a delicate hand since yesterday, when I first started seeing “Me Too” pop up on social media as a status from women who were interested in letting people know they, too, have been victims of sexual harassment/assault. I wanted to be especially careful because so many of these women I like and admire, and I’ve no wish to downplay their experiences.
And I’ve been there, too, ladies. Hoo boy, have I. From subtle hints and suggestions; to blatant power plays using gender stereotypes (and even body parts. That one was no fun.); to an outright “You’re cute. If you sleep with me, I’ll help you get a job” kind of thing. It’s been a real drag at times. No doubt about it.
All that said, this kind of hashtag activism — the very same kind displayed by former FLOTUS Michelle Obama when she used #bringbackourgirls in a weak attempt to “do something!” about the Nigerian schoolgirl kidnappings — is a hammer without a nail, which is to say: what’s the goal here?
Banding together in solidarity to fight a common enemy is noble enough, but only if the end goal is noble. Martin Luther King Jr. used this kind of call to ideological unity to great effect. But he had legislation in mind. Who’s the common enemy for the #MeToo ladies? Men? A society that doesn’t recognize it has a problem? And is legislation on the list of possible solutions? And what would it do, exactly? Enforce laws against sexual harassment and assault? More than those that already exist? (Because they do.)
And since we’re at it, we’ll have to define our terms here; because, as was pointed out to me this morning by several women, sexual harassment is different from sexual assault and rape by several orders of magnitude. So what exactly are ladies “Me Too”-ing? (My experiences up top never even came close to rape, thank God. Can I even begin to understand what those women go through?)
There are other problems I see with this kind of easy activism. It has the potential to spiral out of control rather quickly and become (much as I hate to use the word since Weasel Woody recently used it regarding his brother in perversion, Weinstein), a witch hunt. This came through my Twitter feed this morning:
Lots of brave survivors posting under #metoo. But now I want every man who ever harassed/assaulted someone to post #Idid. — Nancy Leong (@nancyleong) October 16, 2017
This is a call for men to admit they are harassers, and possibly rapists. And if they don’t, will they be shamed until they do? Because that’s where these things tend to lead in a culture that is determined to stop men from behaving naturally, whether it be by punishing them for wanting to play with guns and tanks in school or by asking them to tamp down their appreciation for the female form. And ladies, while we’re at it, part of the freedom of being able to wear that gorgeous dress that hugs your curves is that you might have to endure a compliment or two from the visually-aligned male of the species. (Here’s where defining our terms comes in handy — is a compliment the same as harassment?)
I suppose we could go the route some have suggested: letting Islam’s rules regarding women dictate how we approach relationships between men and women.
‘If you just forced covering on women, dictated what they wore, and enslaved them in the household non of this haram shit would happen” https://t.co/AeFdKy66ht — Mujahed Kobbe (@Moj_kobe) October 15, 2017
I suspect no one really wants that here in the free West. Which is why the outcry over Mike Pence and his decision to steer clear of even the appearance of impropriety is so baffling in light of these things. Pence has done quite a noble thing as regards women: he puts the onus on the man to play a role in the preservation of a woman’s dignity, rather than the way of the hijab, which places all the blame on the woman for being a temptation by virtue of her very sex.
As RedState’s own Brad Slager wrote recently, this is a very confusing thing for men. Do feminists want men to protect them? Or are they opposed to that kind of chivalry?:
My favorite reaction to the decades-long sex scandal was the call for men to stand up and halt these aggressive actions on behalf of women. Oh really?!?! Funny, since feminists and the media have spent the past generation attempting to tamp down this very behavior. Men who cherish and protect women have been cast in the role of the enemy. Holding a door open for a lady has been called demeaning. Any chivalrous or traditional act is regarded as casting the female in a subservient role. Treat women as equals, and don’t pay them preferential attention, has been the lesson plan.
But the most pressing concern for me personally about these efforts to crowdsource victims is that any nuance is lost as the effort grows. It’s not fair to lump all men together — to turn them all into a Harvey Weinstein, even if they were a little inappropriate in a comment, or were a little demeaning in their attitude. That’s not the same as rape, and it shouldn’t be regarded as such.
Finally, apparently — and this is not unusual while people are still wondering if they should feel victimized — humor is out of the question. I think the gathering storm of outrage only exacerbates that. And I take comedy very seriously because laughter heals better than anything. Certainly better than a hashtag.
So, too, does a good shoulder to cry on. If that’s what #MeToo offers, numerous shoulders, then I fully support it. But let’s be careful we don’t cheapen what is a very real struggle for women who have been truly victimized in our attempt to relate. Because maybe we actually don’t. And that’s ok, too. Doesn’t mean we can’t be empathetic even if we don’t know the pain.U.S. President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ribbed each other on their countries' hockey successes in their remarks at the arrival ceremony for the official visit Thursday, but Twitter users called an offside over their facts.
Obama joked that Americans and Canadians share many things in common, but there will always be points of contention.
There are some things Canadians and Americans will never agree on: whose beer is better, who is better at hockey, Obama says <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/statevisit?src=hash">#statevisit</a> —@fitzpatrick_m
"Where's the Stanley Cup right now?" -Obama, qui rappelle que Chicago a la coupe. Trudeau: 'don't get me started'... sourire aux lèvres. —@Ydb
Some thought that prodding Canada on our teams' lack of Stanley Cup success cut a little too close.
Obama says American hockey is better than Canadian hockey.<br><br>In other news: first war declared between Canada and America since 1812. —@sierradean
And others pointed out a glaring problem with Obama touting the Chicago Blackhawks' dynasty as an example of American exceptionalism.
Obama says Blackhawks' Stanley Cup win proves US is better at hockey than Canada, but there are only 3 Americans on the team... <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Canada?src=hash">#Canada</a> —@Nate_Norris
Trudeau himself pointed out that three of the Hawks' top players — Jonathan Toews, Duncan Keith and Patrick Sharp — are Canadian. But Trudeau erred here, as well.
I enjoyed PM Trudeau's Blackhawks comeback, but I have to deduct some points: Patrick Sharp currently plays for the Stars. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/PMDC?src=hash">#PMDC</a> —@mattan81
Patrick Sharp no longer plays for the Blackhawks. He’s in Dallas.<br>but ANYWAY he won the Cup with them, so I GUESS.<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/PMDC?src=hash">#PMDC</a> —@cfhorgan
But if all that matters is where a team is based, well, that could pose a problem for future U.S.-Canada relations.Cedstick Profile Joined November 2009 Canada 456 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-03 09:18:11 April 03 2013 08:56 GMT #3
Make sure to keep this thread bumped too, guys Korean teams are looking ridiculous right now. Between individual player skill, their teamwork, and the crazy fucking strats they pull-off, I'm more hyped than I have been for an eSports tournament than I have been in a long time. You're right that it's going to be a close season -- and an insane one. Can't wait to see MVP Cheese shake things up with their stupid bullshit :DMake sure to keep this thread bumped too, guys http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=36321934#post36321934 "What does Rivington do when he's not commentating?" "Drool." ~ Categorist
locodoco Profile Joined July 2010 Korea (South) 757 Posts April 03 2013 12:29 GMT #4 whoever wrote this and placed my team 9th,is gonna eat thier words in 2 days i wish riot would give me better ping
Chexx Profile Joined May 2011 Korea (South) 5348 Posts April 03 2013 12:33 GMT #5 On April 03 2013 21:29 locodoco wrote:
whoever wrote this and placed my team 9th,is gonna eat thier words in 2 days whoever wrote this and placed my team 9th,is gonna eat thier words in 2 days
I take full responsibilty. I wanted to come to the stadium on Friday. Prove me wrong and I will get you a beer :p
GTR ranked your team on 6th. I take full responsibilty. I wanted to come to the stadium on Friday. Prove me wrong and I will get you a beer :pGTR ranked your team on 6th. Administrator Follow me @TL_Chexx
Mensol Profile Joined September 2012 Turkey 5143 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-03 12:54:01 April 03 2013 12:53 GMT #6 who is CJ frost's new adc? i've never heard him before. If you don't know what the fuck you are doing, how are your enemies supposed to know what the fuck you are doing. - imaqtpie on NA teams at Worlds.
Mensol Profile Joined September 2012 Turkey 5143 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-03 13:20:28 April 03 2013 13:17 GMT #8 On April 03 2013 21:57 Chexx wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 03 2013 21:53 Mensol wrote:
who is CJ frost's new adc? i've never heard him before.
He was on MVP Blue before joining Frost He was on MVP Blue before joining Frost
he is amazing :3 CJ Frost without woong = my favorite Korean team! he is amazing :3 CJ Frost without woong = my favorite Korean team! If you don't know what the fuck you are doing, how are your enemies supposed to know what the fuck you are doing. - imaqtpie on NA teams at Worlds.
PallasAthena Profile Joined September 2010 22 Posts April 03 2013 13:27 GMT #9 These power rankings seem like they were made by a Silver V NA player who only watches MLG and Dreamhack tournaments.
Absolutely no real research into them. I mean, MVP blue 8th? What Korean league are you watching dude?
Letmelose Profile Joined September 2006 Korea (South) 933 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-03 14:06:45 April 03 2013 14:02 GMT #10 Even the professional players seem to have varying opinions on the issue. No one can make one of these lists without looking quite stupid when they turn out to be wrong. However, that won't stop me from trying out.
1. SK Telecom T1 2: I just picked this team because I don't want KT Rolster B to win, it seems too obvious an answer.
2. KT Rolster B: Many people's favourite to win.
3. CJ Entus Blaze: A solid team that will die at the hands of KT Rolster B.
4. MVP Blue: The darkhorse pick of many professionals, but won't win.
5. CJ Entus Frost: CJ Entus Frost will be broken by any team that knows the obvious limitations of CloudTemplar.
6. KT Rolster A: Doen't quite pack the punch to break into the top four.
7. Najin Shield: Will get knocked out at the round of eight, their mid-laner will be their downfall.
8. SK Telecom T1: Will get shut down once they are heavily researched.
9. Najin Sword: Slow start to the group, too bad their group is loaded.
10. MVP Ozone: Unlucky to be in the grouup of death. Homme will struggle against superior top-laners, and Dade will not have the mental fortitude to perservere.
11. LG IM: Even at their strongest, they had poor co-ordination, and their solo-que style of play shall be their demise.
12. ahq Korea: I don't forsee a bright future for this team.
sung_moon Profile Joined September 2008 United States 1920 Posts April 03 2013 14:27 GMT #11 Wait Woong is gone from CJ? Wow, thought he was the captain, and if he did get replaced, he'd just get benched.
Not that I'm complaining, just surprised he left the team all together. Forever Young
Chexx Profile Joined May 2011 Korea (South) 5348 Posts April 03 2013 14:27 GMT #12 On April 03 2013 22:27 PallasAthena wrote:
These power rankings seem like they were made by a Silver V NA player who only watches MLG and Dreamhack tournaments.
Absolutely no real research into them. I mean, MVP blue 8th? What Korean league are you watching dude?
I think you have no idea what are you posting?!
If you had read what I wrote about MVP Blue then you would know that I value them high but you need to take a look at their results. And Its not overwhelming. I have high hopes for MVP Blue.
Next time please read what I wrote before you write something which is clearly wrong I think you have no idea what are you posting?!If you had read what I wrote about MVP Blue then you would know that I value them high but you need to take a look at their results. And Its not overwhelming. I have high hopes for MVP Blue.Next time please read what I wrote before you write something which is clearly wrong Administrator Follow me @TL_Chexx
sylverfyre Profile Joined May 2010 United States 3289 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-03 14:47:35 April 03 2013 14:41 GMT #13 On April 03 2013 22:27 PallasAthena wrote:
These power rankings seem like they were made by a Silver V NA player who only watches MLG and Dreamhack tournaments.
Absolutely no real research into them. I mean, MVP blue 8th? What Korean league are you watching dude?
The thing is, this isn't the NA scene, where being less than 4th in a power rank means you're a pretty weak team. With so many teams with incredible results and proven strength, it's hard to justify ranking relatively unproven team higher than what they got. (I might put them above LG-IM, though, especially with a vacancy in their team. But that's such a minor change I can't exactly tear down the whole power ranking over it.)
8th on a power rank also doesn't mean a prediction they will get 8th place in the tournament either. That's what a dark horse is - we are predicting them to rise above this rank. The thing is, this isn't the NA scene, where being less than 4th in a power rank means you're a pretty weak team. With so many teams with incredible results and proven strength, it's hard to justify ranking relatively unproven team higher than what they got. (I might put them above LG-IM, though, especially with a vacancy in their team. But that's such a minor change I can't exactly tear down the whole power ranking over it.)8th on a power rank also doesn't mean a prediction they will get 8th place in the tournament either. That's what a dark horse is - we are predicting them to rise above this rank.
Letmelose Profile Joined September 2006 Korea (South) 933 Posts April 03 2013 15:16 GMT #14 On April 03 2013 23:41 sylverfyre wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 03 2013 22:27 PallasAthena wrote:
These power rankings seem like they were made by a Silver V NA player who only watches MLG and Dreamhack tournaments.
Absolutely no real research into them. I mean, MVP blue 8th? What Korean league are you watching dude?
The thing is, this isn't the NA scene, where being less than 4th in a power rank means you're a pretty weak team. With so many teams with incredible results and proven strength, it's hard to justify ranking relatively unproven team higher than what they got. (I might put them above LG-IM, though, especially with a vacancy in their team. But that's such a minor change I can't exactly tear down the whole power ranking over it.)
8th on a power rank also doesn't mean a prediction they will get 8th place in the tournament either. That's what a dark horse is - we are predicting them to rise above this rank. The thing is, this isn't the NA scene, where being less than 4th in a power rank means you're a pretty weak team. With so many teams with incredible results and proven strength, it's hard to justify ranking relatively unproven team higher than what they got. (I might put them above LG-IM, though, especially with a vacancy in their team. But that's such a minor change I can't exactly tear down the whole power ranking over it.)8th on a power rank also doesn't mean a prediction they will get 8th place in the tournament either. That's what a dark horse is - we are predicting them to rise above this rank.
I really dislike the tone of the writing that depicts SK Telecom T1 2 as nothing but an unproven team. It's one thing to be untested at the highest level, but to disregard the opportunity to rate one of the hottest up-and-coming teams is quite disappointing to say the least. Their qualification rounds saw them stomp the highest rated amateur team in Korea without breaking a sweat. Of course, the difference between amateur teams and professional teams are growing by the minute, but surely the heroics of GSG against established professional teams in the NLB must be fresh in the minds of many followers of the Korean LoL scene.
The team is already being mentioned as being one of the monstrous during practice, and players such as Faker, Piglet, and bengi may be unknown in the professional realm, but these guys are creme de la creme of the solo-que world, and are individually no inferior to many of the professionals already in the scene. Imp, one of the highest rated AD carries of Korea has already mentioned that SK Telecom T1 2's bottom lane may be the strongest in Korea right now. Hell, the current AD carry for CJ Entus Frost, Hermes, is one of the reject try-outs for the SK Telecom T1 2's AD carry role.
This team deserves more hype, and I feel this power ranking has failed to do so. Of course, a team this inexperienced may just crash and burn considering the strength of their group, but there's a reason why many people are expecting this team to do well this season. I really dislike the tone of the writing that depicts SK Telecom T1 2 as nothing but an unproven team. It's one thing to be untested at the highest level, but to disregard the opportunity to rate one of the hottest up-and-coming teams is quite disappointing to say the least. Their qualification rounds saw them stomp the highest rated amateur team in Korea without breaking a sweat. Of course, the difference between amateur teams and professional teams are growing by the minute, but surely the heroics of GSG against established professional teams in the NLB must be fresh in the minds of many followers of the Korean LoL scene.The team is already being mentioned as being one of the monstrous during practice, and players such as Faker, Piglet, and bengi may be unknown in the professional realm, but these guys are creme de la creme of the solo-que world, and are individually no inferior to many of the professionals already in the scene. Imp, one of the highest rated AD carries of Korea has already mentioned that SK Telecom T1 2's bottom lane may be the strongest in Korea right now. Hell, the current AD carry for CJ Entus Frost, Hermes, is one of the reject try-outs for the SK Telecom T1 2's AD carry role.This team deserves more hype, and I feel this power ranking has failed to do so. Of course, a team this inexperienced may just crash and burn considering the strength of their group, but there's a reason why many people are expecting this team to do well this season.
Chexx Profile Joined May 2011 Korea (South) 5348 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-03 16:10:42 April 03 2013 15:57 GMT #15 On April 04 2013 00:16 Letmelose wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 03 2013 23:41 sylverfyre wrote:
On April 03 2013 22:27 PallasAthena wrote:
These power rankings seem like they were made by a Silver V NA player who only watches MLG and Dreamhack tournaments.
Absolutely no real research into them. I mean, MVP blue |
university hadn’t considered race? This is the very thought experiment that Lesage asks us to undertake about whether the plaintiff would have been denied in any event. (Such counterfactual thought experiments about what the world would have looked like if some undesirable fact or emotion were removed from the picture are difficult, but common, devices in the law.)
This explanation doesn’t fully convince me that AGC and Lesage are both correctly decided. For example, I don’t get why, if AGC is correct, the Lesage Court does not allow for the possibility that the plaintiff there, even if would not have been admitted in any event, could obtain nominal damages for having been treated procedurally unfairly. The Court has permitted nominal damages for other procedural injuries that do not result in tangible harm—Carey v. Piphus being perhaps the most prominent example. But reconciling Lesage and AGC in terms of of the law of remedies is far more plausible than any suggestion that Associated General Contractors was threatened with a procedural injury that counts for standing purposes, but that Mr. Lesage did not suffer one—when the alleged procedural injury in the two cases is identical.
Another Significant Factor in Lesage: The Supreme Court’s Sequencing
Another factor that is relevant in interpreting Lesage is the sequence for resolving various parts of cases that the Supreme Court itself seems to have followed in precisely the cases cited in Lesage for support.
In those cases on which the Lesage opinion relies, the Supreme Court has spoken on the merits, and then remanded for consideration in the courts below of whether the government can prove that the plaintiff wouldn’t have received the benefit even absent the constitutionally impermissible procedural input.
And in at least one of the cases cited by the Court in Lesage, it appears that (as in Lesage itself), an award of damages was the only remedy sought, so the failure to analyze the damages question first would, if the Lesage rule stems from Article III, run afoul of the requirement that jurisdictional thresholds be resolved prior to any merits analysis.
The “Affirmative Defense” Character of the Lesage Approach
A related factor is that under the Lesage framework, the defendant has the duty to prove that the plaintiff would not have received the benefit; the plaintiff does not have to prove that she would have received it. But Article III standing requirements, the Court has repeatedly said, place burdens on plaintiffs, who are the ones invoking the federal courts in the first place. Thus, the fact that the Lesage test is an affirmative defense for government defendants suggests that it is something that can be waived, and is not a prerequisite for the Article III standing that is needed to create a case or controversy.
More generally, let’s suppose that we were to consider affirmative defenses to damage liability as jurisdictional threshold issues that must be resolved before we are satisfied that there is Article III “injury-in-fact” or “redressability” in damage-only cases. Then, whenever any question existed about whether damages would at the end of the day be appropriate—e.g., a question about the statutory availability of damages, or about accord and satisfaction (that is, the prior settlement of the obligation), or about res judicata (that is, the existence of another lawsuit on the very same matter that has already run its course)—a federal court would have to resolve any such issues before looking at the true merits of the case.
In practice I don’t think judges are actually scrupulous about doing that. Nor would it seem to make good sense, in terms of judicial efficiency, to force them to process issues in that order. (Much of the “Article III standing” doctrine has been fashioned nearly out of whole cloth by the Court over the last half century, so we can reasonably assume that the Court will try to be at least minimally sensible in providing answers to questions that haven’t yet been definitively resolved.)
Finally, I should point out that at the end of the Lesage ruling, the Court held open the possibility that Mr. Lesage might be able to prevail on his damage claims under statutes other than section 1983. If the Court meant to say that he lacked Article III standing, then that would have required that he be ousted from court altogether, and his damage claims under these other statutes would have been dead. And yet the Court said they needed to be examined.
The Court’s Options
All of the analysis above explains why I would conclude that Lesage is best understood as a case about the extent of damage liability under section 1983, not about Article III standing. If I am right about this, then the Court can grant review on the merits of the Fisher case, provide guidance about the permissible scope of affirmative action today and (if need be) remand for resolution of the Lesage issue. Under my reading, Lesage poses no real barrier to the Court’s granting review on the merits of the Fisher case.
Yet I do acknowledge that some lower courts have—without elaborate analysis– described the Lesage doctrine in Article III jurisdictional terms. Perhaps the Court will decide not to take up Fisher because of these difficulties.
Or the Court could use Fisher to address the question of what Lesage means in addition to (or instead of) the affirmative action issues. I actually think sorting out Lesage—which is an example of poor judicial craftsmanship and “Exhibit A” for those people who dislike summary rulings that are issued without full briefing and argument—is important in its own right.
We shall see soon enough.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Nov. 4, 2016, 1:08 PM GMT / Updated Nov. 4, 2016, 1:08 PM GMT By Carrie Dann
As Election Day looms, Hillary Clinton and her allies have outspent pro-Donald Trump forces on TV airwaves by a margin of 2-1 in the nation’s key presidential battleground states.
Overall, more than $385 million has been spent on presidential TV ads in 13 battleground states – Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Iowa, Colorado, New Hampshire, Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine and New Mexico. According to data from Advertising Analytics, Hillary Clinton and her allies have shelled out about $260 million on ads in those markets while Donald Trump and groups supporting him have spent about $125 million.
Despite the disparity, the 2-1 margin represents a significant last-minute influx of cash by Trump and his boosters – and a widening map of competitive states where both teams are spending big. One month ago, Clinton had an overall edge of 4-1 in the most competitive battlegrounds. Republicans have since poured nearly $7 million in advertising into Wisconsin and about $1.6 million into Michigan; Democrats have spent $2.8 million and $2.7 million in each state, respectively.
Florida, a notoriously expensive state for television advertisements, has accounted for about a third of the spending overall, with Democrats spending about $77 million compared to Republicans’ $38 million.
Other top states include Ohio (a total of $65 million spent), North Carolina ($48 million spent), Pennsylvania ($44 million spent) and Nevada ($34 million spent). In each of those crucial battlegrounds, the pro-Clinton effort has outstripped the pro-Trump spending by a margin of about 2-1.
In Iowa, a state that appears to trending in Trump’s direction, Republicans have spent only about $2.6 million compared to nearly $16 million spent by Democrats.Via PIX11
The shooting of five people in a Brooklyn park yesterday afternoon may have been a revenge shooting. One of the victims had complained to the police on Friday about his daughter being harassed by some men who were upset she was rebuffing their advances.
Rolando Pizarro, 45, was shot in the stomach while his wife Melody Amil, 37, and son Rolando Jr., 22, were both shot in the leg. They were all shot in the Hope Ballfield in Bushwick. Two others who were shot had been on the sidewalk: Wanda Espinoza, 52, was shot in the stomach and Manuel Rivera, 62, was shot in the leg.
According to the Daily News, Pizarro was the target: "His 18-year-old daughter was allegedly harassed by a group of young men while she was working a shift at a nearby McDonald’s restaurant, the neighbor said. The teen refused their advances before one of the men tossed a milkshake in her face."
A family friend, Ivette Miranda, told the Post, "She called her dad, Rolando, and he went there to the McDonald’s and called the cops. He filed a police report right there. Those guys are bad men. They wanted to get back at Rolando for filing a report."
She added, "They retaliate the next day, look this is what happened," and "If the police can’t take care of us, we’ll have to start taking care of ourselves."
All the victims are in stable condition. Pizarro's 18-year-old daughter was not present—she was working at McDonald's.A multimillion-dollar project at the Detroit-Windsor tunnel to replace an 85-year-old ceiling slab will force the border crossing to shut down for eight months during weeknight hours.
The complicated US$16.8-million construction project will force the tunnel to close Sunday through Thursday from roughly 9 p.m. until 5:30 a.m, according to a Windsor city council report.
Pending last-minute changes, the tunnel closure schedule will commence in November and continue until early June 2018 and be off-limits to traffic during those times.
There will also be four full weekend closures of the tunnel stretching from 9 p.m. on Friday until Monday morning at 5:30 a.m. to remove the existing ceiling. The weekend shutdowns will occur near the start of the project — with the first one likely to occur on Nov. 17.
A nightly shutdown of the tunnel is guaranteed to frustrate many sports fans in Windsor as Little Caesars Arena — the new home for the Detroit Red Wings and Detroit Pistons — debuts this fall.
Several commuters who rely on the tunnel at night, largely those employed at Detroit-area hospitals, will also be impacted.
But a recent inspection by the tunnel’s engineering consultant uncovered a dire need for a “full removal and replacement of 4,000 linear feet of the river section of the tube,” according to the council report.
“We will be removing the entire concrete ceiling in the tunnel’s river section and replacing it,” said Neal Belitsky, president and CEO for the Detroit-Windsor tunnel. “We hope the project will go as quickly, smoothly and safely as possible. That’s why it will be a full closure and we can’t go one lane (at a time).
“The tunnel has been here servicing the community for 86 years and our goal by doing this is to be here another 86 years. This is part of the rehabilitation process that will keep the tunnel operating as one of the front doors to Windsor. There will be some pain for people and we understand that.”
A tender was issued for the project and has been awarded to Toebe Construction, a company based in Wixom, Mich.
The company is a prominent road and infrastructure firm which most recently was involved in replacing the deck for the Ambassador Bridge, constructing several portions of the Herb Gray Parkway and completion of the US$230-million Gateway project that created several new freeway connections to the Detroit side of the bridge.
Windsor’s tunnel corporation will pay for half the construction costs of the ceiling replacement. The corporation estimates there will be a loss of C$740,000 in toll revenues — equivalent to roughly 150,000 vehicles — due to the nightly closures, according to the council report.
Final negotiations with Toebe on a shutdown schedule is taking place this week with both Windsor and Detroit tunnel officials, so an exact timetable for the tunnel’s closure should be announced in the next week or two, Belitsky said.
Transit Windsor, which operates the tunnel bus, is also involved in the discussions. The council report says the tunnel may be allowed to remain open some nights during “special events” in either Windsor or Detroit.
During non-construction hours, the tunnel will resume normal traffic operations.
The Detroit-Windsor tunnel first opened to traffic in November 1930.
The ceiling project is actually a three-phase effort with the first two phases already nearing completion. They involved repairs to the tunnel lining, plus replacing all electrical and communication components, which include new fire alarms, carbon monoxide monitoring and video surveillance systems.
“This is the last phase and not uncommon for a tunnel built of its generation,” Belitsky said. “This tunnel was constructed very similar to other tunnels in New York and Boston and at the same stage where they need to undergo rehabilitation.”
A spokesman for the Ambassador Bridge said Monday meetings will be held in the coming weeks to iron out staffing issues for both bridge company employees and customs officers on both sides of the border in regards to the tunnel’s nightly closures.
“We are going to have meetings involving all the stakeholders, so that everybody is prepared and we keep traffic moving,” said Stan Korosec, director of government relations for the bridge’s Canadian side.
“Customs knows when games are scheduled and to have extra staff in place. We already have traffic staff on duty 24 (hours) seven (days a week), so we will add staff if more is needed. It will all be part of the planning. We are not expecting any big problems.”
dbattagello@postmedia.comTerrariums are lot like aquariums, but without the fish... and usually without the water. These little glass homes often house low-maintenance plants like moss and cacti. Here are 15 examples of unusual terrariums that will liven up any room.
1. Recycled Meterbox Terrarium
Check out this up-cycled electric meter cabinet. After a good scrubbing and new paint job, it's ready to house a plant of your choice. It comes with pebbles, charcoal, dirt and moss to get you started.
2. Large Hanging Terrarium
This cool geometric terrarium can be hung up or placed on an end table.
3. Ecosphere Terrarium
Marimo balls are basically fuzzy little spheres of algae. These tiny glass orbs hold three of them, as well as shells, aquarium plants, and a single pearl. The whole product looks very zen.
4. Jumbo Multi-Level Dinosaur and Air Plant Moss Terrarium with Charm
Great for (inner) kids! Let your tiny dinosaur explore its own little glass ball.
5. Endor Forest Terrarium
Capture some movie magic with this terrarium. It even comes with Ewoks! The plants are included—just not real.
6. Glass Terrarium House
Give your plant a lovely house of its own.
7. Under Lake View Aqua Terrarium
Technically, this is a vivarium because of the betta fish resident—but you don't have to add a fish if you don't want to. The glass enclosure comes with a marimo ball and "sea elements."
8. Live Dino-terrarium
This one is a little weird, but good weird, like a dinosaur with a plant growing in its belly.
9. Moss ring
This ring is seriously cool. Moss is enclosed in glass and great to wear to any earthy occasion.
10. Moss Ball Terrarium Necklace
Here's some more cool jewelry. A teeny-tiny marimo ball is trapped inside a glass sphere with sand and water. You have your own little ecosystem around your neck!
11. Unicorn Moss Terrarium
For the lovers of all things kitsch, here is a unicorn in a glass heart. The bottle brings up nostalgic memories of sand art
.
12. Potion Bottle Marimo Terrarium
A perfect gift for any witches or wizards you may know.
13. Miniature Forest Plant Kit For Terrarium
This bonsai in a box looks just like you captured a piece of a tiny forest.
14. Cube Terrarium
This slanted cube can sit nicely on your table.
15. Hanging Terrarium
These orbs come with their own stands to hang on and big openings for the plants to grow out of.The upcoming documentary "Occupy Unmasked" is getting the kind of promotional push too rarely received by right-of-center films.
The movie, directed by Steve Bannon and featuring the late Andrew Breitbart, tells the story of the chaotic, destructive Occupy Wall Street movement. The message hardly fits the standard theatrical template, which routinely sides with or sympathizes with the bedraggled protesters seeking their "fair" share of the one percent's cash.
That didn't matter to Mark Cuban, whose company is bringing the film to both theaters and VOD outlets.
It's a chance for conservative audiences to support a film they can actually see without having to hop on a jet or travel for hours in their car. Video on Demand services are changing the way audiences access independent films, allowing folks in smaller towns the same chance to see cutting edge movies their big city peers enjoy.
Should "Occupy Unmasked" thrive, it will do more than give audiences a look at OWS they won't find in mainstream media outlets. It could crack open the door for like-minded filmmakers to finally make movies the country can see.View this email in your browser
iExec had a very broad media coverage in French mainstream press these days, and Gilles Fedak appeared on French National TV (BFM Business) a few days ago. We've won the INSA 'Disruptive Innovation' Award 2017! It was the perfect occasion to celebrate iExec 1 year birthday.
In the Dev Letter #10, you will learn more about version 1.0 upcoming release and brand new features added to the SDK, now including the payment in RLC. ;)
Also, you'll find more infos about the Devcon3, upcoming events full agenda and don't miss Hadrien's awesome post about the future Proof-of-Contribution.
And...
Stay tuned!
The iExec Team
Dear all,iExec had a very broad media coverage in French mainstream press these days, and Gilles Fedak appeared on French National TV (BFM Business) a few days ago. We've won the INSA 'Disruptive Innovation' Award 2017! It was the perfect occasion to celebrate iExec 1 year birthday.In the Dev Letter #10, you will learn more about version 1.0 upcoming release and brand new features added to the SDK, now including the payment in RLC. ;)Also, you'll find more infos about the Devcon3, upcoming events full agenda and don't miss Hadrien's awesome post about the future Proof-of-Contribution.And... iExec's brand new website goes live!Stay tuned!The iExec Team iExec new website goes live!
The long awaited website goes live today. All feedbacks are welcome. You can leave them on contact@iex.ec.
The long awaited website goes live today. All feedbacks are welcome. You can leave them on Slack or send us an email at https://iex.ec iExec Dev Letter #10
"Welcome to iExec Dev Letter #10. New features were added during the last two weeks. You can now login with Metamask, submit a job paying in RLC and manage both your ETH and RLC wallets using the new interface."
Read the Dev LetterIn a recent article on the “Secret of Fatima”, Steve Skojec, the founder and editor of OnePeterFive, published for the first time in the English language words from Rome’s chief exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth (d. 2016), about Padre Pio and his knowledge of the Third Secret of Fatima. They come from a newly published book written by José María Zavala, entitled The Best Kept Secret of Fatima (El Sécreto Mejor Guardado de Fátima). Zavala interviewed Father Amorth in 2011, and was instructed to keep the interview secret until after the exorcist’s death.
Fr. Amorth personally knew Saint (Padre) Pio for 26 years, and it is from this towering figure of 20th century Catholic sanctity that he claims to have learned the contents of the Third Secret of Fatima. According to Fr. Amorth, Padre Pio said that the Third Secret pertained to the infiltration of the Vatican by Satan and the rise of a “false church” – details that are not found in the Vatican’s official publication of the Third Secret in 2000. Below we publish details of the interview with Fr. Amorth:
***
In the interview, Fr. Amorth relates — as he has done elsewhere — that he does not believe the consecration of the world by Pope John Paul II in 1984 was sufficient to satisfy the requirements set forth by Our Lady.
“There was no such consecration then,” he [Father Amorth] says. “I witnessed the act. I was in St. Peter’s Square that Sunday afternoon, very close to the Pope; so close, I could almost touch him.”
Pressed by Zavala as to why he so forcefully believes that the consecration was not done, Fr. Amorth replied: “Very simple: John Paul II wanted to mention Russia expressly, but in the end he did not.”
Fr. Amorth said further: “I have no doubt that the consecration did not occur on the terms required by the Virgin. But we must not lose sight of what she herself wanted to tell us through Lucia: ‘In the end My Immaculate Heart will triumph.’”
Zavala then asked about the Third Secret: “Forgive me for insisting on the Third Secret of Fatima: Did Padre Pio relate it, then, to the loss of faith within the Church?”
Fr. Gabriele furrows his brow and sticks out his chin. He seems very affected.
“Indeed,” he states, “One day Padre Pio said to me very sorrowfully: ‘You know, Gabriele? It is Satan who has been introduced into the bosom of the Church and within a very short time will come to rule a false Church.’”
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“Oh my God! Some kind of Antichrist! When did he prophesy this to you?” I [Zavala] ask.
“It must have been about 1960, since I was already a priest then.”
“Was that why John XXIII had such a panic about publishing the Third Secret of Fatima, so that the people wouldn’t think that he was the anti-pope or whatever it was …?”
A slight but knowing smile curls the lips of Father Amorth.
“Did Padre Pio say anything else to you about future catastrophes: earthquakes, floods, wars, epidemics, hunger …? Did he allude to the same plagues prophesied in the Holy Scriptures?” [asks Mr. Zavala]
“Nothing of the sort mattered to him, however terrifying they proved to be, except for the great apostasy within the Church. This was the issue that really tormented him and for which he prayed and offered a great part of his suffering, crucified out of love.” [says Fr. Amorth]
“The Third Secret of Fatima?”
“Exactly.”
“Is there any way to avoid something so terrible, Fr. Gabriele?”
“There is hope, but it’s useless if it’s not accompanied by works. Let us begin by consecrating Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, let us recite the Holy Rosary, let us all do prayer and penance …”∎
by Maike Hickson, www.onepeterfive.com
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FacebookThe King leads the way
The captain had a great night, the highlight of which was his assist on the opening goal in the 40th minute.
He started the move in RBNY's own half, picking up a lay-off from Bradley Wright-Phillips, stepping into DC territory, playing the ball square to Lloyd Sam, charging into space as the defense spread to cover every runner except the man wearing 14 - who had enough room to hold his arms out wide: PASS TO ME.
Sam obliged, Henry took a touch and switched the point of attack with a deft back-heel for Peguy Luyindula, who leaned into his marker and let it pass to BWP. 1-0.
By midway through the second-half, the New York Red Bulls' King of Goals was visibly gassed. In the 73rd minute, he received another pass on the halfway line - but this time there was no surge forward.
He punched the ball to Roy Miller BWP, who gave it right back to a static Henry. Not inclined to run, he looked for another outlet, spotted Luyindula on the move, took a step away from oncoming pressure and launched a high ball over the top. Peguy did the rest: 2-0.
Those two assists were the 46th and 47th of the captain's RBNY career. Alongside the 52 goals he scored himself in that time, he's directly contributed to 99 goals for this club.
As has been the case since he arrived, he's only interested in one type of achievement for this team: the type that puts silverware on display for next season. As has been the case since he arrived, he's doing as much as he can and leaving it all on the field to make it so.
We don't know if this is going to work out. But it is riveting to watch.
All hail Peguy Luyindula, part 2
After his cameo in the opening game of these playoffs resulted in two goals and big win for RBNY, Peguy returned to Mike Petke's good books and the starting lineup. He did not disappoint.
His part in the first goal was sublime. He didn't touch the ball, but without his heads-up decision to lean into Chris Korb, BWP never gets the chance to take his shot.
As for the second goal: what happened to the guy whose constant bungling in front of goal led to him dropping back to midfield in the first place?
Luyindula has long been a good player for this team. If keeps up this level of performance, he is getting dangerously close to being great.
It's only half-time
A two-goal lead is a wonderful thing, and twice as many goals as the Red Bulls managed against D.C. United in three regular-season meetings.
But it is only half-time in the series, and DC will surely regroup and come out firing at RFK next week. The longest 90 minutes of the season lies ahead.Notre Dame will have a new starting quarterback when it kicks off the 2012 season.
Incumbent signal-caller Tommy Rees and linebacker Carlo Calabrese both have been suspended for the Irish's Sept. 1 opener against Navy in Dublin, Ireland, coach Brian Kelly announced Tuesday. Neither player will travel for the game.
Both players were arrested May 3 outside an off-campus party.
"Our players understand that it's a privilege to be associated with the University of Notre Dame and its football program, but with that comes great responsibility," Kelly said in a release. "Carlo and Tommy put themselves in a situation that when given a choice between two distinct paths, they responded with a set of poor decisions. This conduct was inconsistent with my expectations for our football program -- especially our veteran, team leaders. Carlo and Tommy will not travel with the team to Ireland and can attempt to climb the depth chart following the conclusion of their respective suspensions."
Andrew Hendrix, Everett Golson or Gunner Kiel will start the season as the Irish's quarterback. Only Hendrix has game experience.
Rees plead guilty on July 23 to misdemeanor resisting law enforcement and illegal consumption of alcohol by a minor in connection with the spring arrest. The rising junior was sentenced to 50 hours of community service and 11 months of probation, and he had to write a letter of apology to officers involved in his arrest. He was also given a suspended sentence of 30 days in jail.
Prosecutors agreed to dismiss one count of resisting law enforcement and a battery count.
Rees was pepper-sprayed and arrested after allegedly running away from the party and knocking the wind out of a police officer who caught up to him.
Calabrese was arrested the same night on a misdemeanor count of intimidation. Police said that Calabrese was upset by Rees' being arrested and ignored caution to stay out of the street, twice telling an officer: "My people will get you."
Calabrese's legal proceedings have not been resolved.
Rees is the only one of Notre Dame's four scholarship quarterbacks with any starting experience -- 16 games through his first two seasons -, including the final 12 last season. He has thrown for 3,977 yards with 32 touchdowns and 22 interceptions. He is 12-4 as a starter.
Calabrese, a rising senior, played in all 13 games last season, splitting time inside with Dan Fox and recording 37 tackles, one tackle for loss and one sack.After being eliminated from ESL One: Cologne by Team Kinguin in the group stage decider match, Cloud9's Jordan “n0thing” Gilbert sat down with theScore eSports to discuss his team’s performance, his play and his predictions.
How are you feeling now that you've had some time after your loss to Kinguin?
We are feeling motivated to come back to the next Major, make it out of groups, go far in the tournament, and continue to prove that North America can compete with the best.
How much did you guys prepare for Team Kinguin specifically?
We knew we would play them most likely the night before. They were playing Team Immunity so we figured we might as well prepare for one so we chose Kinguin. The format is kinda random, but we actually thought about us too. We knew they didn’t have many strategies so it came down to us just playing our game.
It was an extremely close match against Kinguin, why do you think you ended up losing?
I think where we made mistakes was probably doing the same pistol rounds we have done in the past 'cause they anti'd them kinda, and they won both pistols, which pretty much swung the whole match in their favor.
Losing both pistols is really tough for the economy. We actually still won more gun rounds than them. I think it was just us getting a little too complacent with things that are pretty small like the pistol rounds or our default setups on Counter-Terrorist side.
Your group was arguably the hardest to call. With you, mousesports and Virtus.pro all being teams that are dangerous. What did you think about the group coming into it?
We’ve been in a group with mousesports and Virtus.pro like four times already this year. We figured that we shouldn't change too much 'cause it’s easy to over analyze and screw yourself over with too much thinking. We tried to make sure that we stay focused on the little tendencies they had and play well.
We beat mousesports, we felt like we could, we got a pistol round win. We lost both pistol rounds to Virtus.pro and we got beat. So pistol rounds seem to be the theme of our losses lately.
Going back to Day 1, it seemed like your team struggled against mousesports until Skadoodle was able to pick up the AWP. How much does your team play around him having an AWP?
Anytime we have a sniper who will be getting the gun a lot, we pretty much let him look for picks and where they are. Anytime mousesports wasn’t throwing smoke grenades or was giving him space, basically he was our priority number one.
Virtus.pro seem to have a really good read on you guys, and TaZ even talked about that a little bit in his post-match interview. Do you feel like that is true? If so, what do you think you need to do to counter that?
We are all good friends so we always talk to each other after the game. He thinks he knows everything about our game, which you know, watching a demo you can learn a lot about a team. I think their answers are pretty straight forward so in the future I don’t think it will be too hard for us to beat them. I think we just have to play well individually and like I said before, hopefully win some pistol rounds.
In the past, many players have said that North American players didn’t think enough. Has anything changed?
The reality is that a lot of the time North American players think too much about the wrong things. There is a lot of skill in North America, but I think that only lately have we really started to solidify more logic into our tactics across the board. A lot of North American players tend to not think about the team and tend to think about their fragging, which doesn’t mean they don’t have the ability, it just means that they are focused on the wrong areas.
Overall, how would you evaluate your personal performance in the event?
I might give myself a six or seven out of ten. I felt like that even though we had limited chances, I made some mistakes that I actually corrected in the past. Somehow, they weren’t as damaging to our rounds, but I still could have played the situation differently in terms of pulling out of grenades when I don’t need to for example and looking at my teammates screens. Things that seem trivial, but they actually play a big part when I do them at the wrong time.
Expectations for this team coming into the tournament were higher than ever before. Did it give you guys confidence or put more pressure on you?
I think overtime, as a pro team, you learn to disregard the whole context of how the public perceives your team. We really focused on the bootcamp, on what people knew about us, and that is more important than anything. People sometimes think you're good because one player popped off and you won a game in big fashion. But, if you know why you won, then you know how high to value yourself. We knew why we won, it was winning pistols and two to three players playing well each game. I think we were placing pressure on ourselves individually just to play well 'cause we know we can beat anyone if three or four of us play good, let alone just two.
What are your plans for the rest of the tournament?
Hanging out with our fans and support our sponsors, keep our chins up and show appreciation for how big Counter-Strike is growing and eat froyo.
Let’s get some predictions!
Who is going to win it all and why?
I think right now, Fnatic should win it all, but Virtus.pro is up one map on them as we speak. I thought Fnatic would win so I will stick there so I don’t seem too lame.
Who has been the MVP of the tournament?
I don’t know if I’ve been watching enough today because we’ve been doing a lot of signings. I’ve heard KRIMZ is playing really well and TaZ is really underrated. He does a lot for his team but I am not sure.
Who surprised you or who disappointed you in the tournament?
Team Immunity surprised me because they probably should have beat Kinguin before we played them. For disappointed, probably Counter Logic Gaming because I felt that they probably should have made it out of groups against Natus Vincere.
This article was edited and condensed for clarity.A Canadian Perspective on the Differences in How Professional Sport
is Seen Between the UK and Canada
I have spent the last several months immersing myself in what may be my new favourite sport: Rugby League. I live in Toronto, and we have had a new team debut here this spring and summer. The Toronto Wolfpack started off in the third tier of the mostly-English Rugby Football League (RFL), with all the other teams in our league based in the UK. It was an audacious experiment that seems to be working, though not everyone is happy about it. I bought season tickets and have watched all the games, live here in Toronto or on TV for most of the road games (one was only carried on the radio), and I have loved every minute of it. And along the way I have been learning that the business of sport, at least where rugby league is concerned, works very differently in the UK than what we are used to here in North America.
Language Barrier!
Yes, we all speak English, but that doesn't mean we speak the same language! There is a fair bit of terminology that differs between the UK and North America. The schedule is a list of "fixtures", the standings are the "table" (or in Australia, the "ladder"). The team uniform is the "kit". Out of bounds becomes "into touch". And that's all before we get into any details of the game itself, where there is a lot of new terminology (knock-on, offload, out on the full, 40-20, obstruction,...). It hasn't been too hard to pick up on the different terms, but I have been a bit surprised how much there is to learn.
Promotion and Relegation
The next difference is the idea of promotion and relegation. In all the sports I had watched before, there is a league with a more or less fixed set of teams. Sometimes the league grows by expansion, by adding terrible new teams filled with other teams' cast-offs. Sometimes teams move from one city to another, usually because the new city will pay more to build them a shiny new arena or stadium. Occasionally a team will fold after years of financial failure.
In the promotion/relegation system used for soccer and rugby league in the UK, there is a hierarchy of leagues, and each season there is some movement of teams among them, with the top teams in lower leagues getting promoted to a higher level league, and the worst teams getting related to a lower league. Two seasons ago the Toronto Maple Leafs were rewarded for their last place finish with the best lottery odds for the first pick in the annual amateur draft, and did land that first pick. The result was Auston Matthews, a huge part of their ascension from the bottom to the middle of the league (and hopefully higher going forward!). Imagine if instead they had been relegated to the AHL, playing with the Albany River Rats and the Grand Rapids Griffins instead of the Montréal Canadiens and Pittsburgh Penguins. With promotion and relegation, the end of the season becomes critical for those near the bottom as well as for those contending for the championship.
I don’t think one system is necessarily better than the other. Having one of my teams relegated would be a terrible thing to go through, but it sure makes the end of the season more meaningful for more teams, and exciting for the fans!
League 1. The team's goal was to get promoted quickly to the middle tier (The Championship), and within a few seasons make their way to the elite Super League. They stocked their team with players with Super League experience as well as some who had played in the Australian National Rugby League (NRL), and with the salary cap rules changed to allow teams in all three tiers to spend the same amount, the Wolfpack were able to field a very strong team that out |
apped and they are unable to move.[94] Afterwards, the three siblings go on a picnic. While Elfman cooks “man stew,” Lisanna asks Mirajane if is it okay to eat above a dangerous cliff, to which Mirajane replies with a smile.[95] After Lisanna empties the water from a lake the siblings find the clock piece they have been seeking. Elfman then goes to grab it but throws it in another direction, away from the group, which surprises them. They then find out it was Mary Hughes who made him do so. Mirajane asks if she had been following them and Mary confirms it with the clock piece at her feet.[96] Mirajane questions Mary's reasons for collecting the clock parts, only to call her a puppet when Mary says that she is just doing what she is told to. This enrages the other woman, who uses the second movement of her Command Magic on Mirajane, knocking her out and removing her Satan Soul; using it to attack Elfman and Lisanna. After Mirajane regains consciousness, she witnesses Elfman and Lisanna defeated by Satan Soul and asks Mary Hughes to stop. Mary, however, replies that now she is not a puppet anymore, but someone with power. With that, she attempts to destroy the three siblings with Satan Soul's Satanic Blast. Mirajane, however, unleashes her Halphas form and protects both herself and her siblings, much to everyone's horror and surprise. After Elfman remarks that this form is incredibly dangerous, he and Lisanna run away while their sister fights against Mary Hughes and her former Satan Soul. Mirajane remarks that although she loves Zentopia's teachings, people like Mary Hughes should not be members of it. Enraged, Mary Hughes decides to break the rules and use the Third Movement of her Command Magic, becoming now one with Satan Soul. Regardless, Mirajane easily overpowers Mary Hughes in Hand to hand combat and defeats her with Cosmic Beam after telling her that her biggest sin was stealing Satan Soul and using it right in front of her to harm her little brother and sister. Fretting what will happen next, Elfman remarks that Halphas is scary, she does not kill Mary however, who loses consciousness from the shock while Elfman further comments that Mirajane destroyed a city in this form like it was nothing. After this event, the Take Over siblings acquire the clock part.[97] Mirajane, Lisanna and Elfman arrive at the ruins along with the rest of the guild and their clock pieces. Mirajane assists as her guild mates attack Byro Cracy, but their attacks are all cancelled by the latter's Magic. The clock pieces start to glow and come together and Mirajane and the others watch as the clock pieces form the Infinity Clock. Just then the Reborn Oración Seis appear to the shock of the guild members.[98] After the appearance of the Reborn Oración Seis, Mirajane witnesses the overwhelming strength of the former Dark Guild. She and her siblings become victims of Racer's attack, but they and their guildmates are saved by the guild Blue Pegasus. Mirajane is seen by Natsu, along with Gajeel and Elfman, after the Dragon Slayer wonders about everyone's fate.[99] After returning to the guild, Mirajane and the others discuss the Reborn Oración Seis and the Infinity Clock. They are shocked and confused when Kinana writes some mysterious words on the wall with a fork. Mirajane watches as Cana chooses the teams to find Oración Seis. Although Mirajane herself stays at the guild, Elfman forms a team with Natsu, Lucy and Michelle.[100] After it is revealed that Michelle is in fact Imitatia, the sixth member of Reborn Oración Seis, Elfman feels guilty about fleeing and leaving Natsu and Lucy to be taken by the enemy. Mirajane comforts him, saying that this was the best he could do. Soon after that, the archaeologists that Lucy's group encountered in the past appear at Fairy Tail, requesting to see her. Upon learning that she has been kidnapped, they explain to Mirajane and the rest of the Fairy Tail Mages that Real Nightmare has to be prevented at all costs. Convinced, Mirajane, along with Ichiya, Elfman and a few other Fairy Tail Mages, boards Christina in order to head for the Infinity Clock. Soon after boarding on the magical airship, the group hears strange noises coming from the deck, and Mirajane volunteers to go and check what is going on, with Elfman following her. The Strauss siblings find that the stern has been broken, and Mirajane notices another presence on board, but is too late to identify the intruder and is attacked by Racer. Mirajane then, in order to protect Elfman and the other Mages, transforms into her Satan Soul and jumps from the deck, along with Racer, telling Elfman to leave this Dark Guild Mage to her. Although Racer overpowers her at the beginning, she then transforms to Demon Halphas, promising to defeat him at any cost.[101] Racer tries to get away from Mirajane, in order to destroy Christina, but soon Mirajane is able to easily keep up with him. Mirajane manages to catch up to her opponent and strike him down twice, asking him to stop the senseless fight, but Racer instead becomes even faster, surprising Mirajane. He becomes fast to the point that he is able to create illusions of himself and attack Mirajane at an incredible speed. Mirajane is being mercilessly assaulted and so the two Mages switch roles, as she runs away from Racer while trying to identify the real one. Once she knows which is the real Racer, she throws him to the ground, along with herself, creating a large crater. As Racer lies defeated, he demands to know why his opponent is faster than him, to which Mirajane replies that they are different, since she is moving forward and wants to protect her friends, whereas he is only running away from his past. She reveals that she used to be the same way too, but eventually managed to move forward, which made her strong. As Racer gets up and attempts to walk away, Mirajane tells him that there is no one will chase after him anymore. Mirajane then stands behind Racer, who falls to the ground and cries in defeat and redemption.[102]
Grand Magic Games arc
After the guild decides to join the Grand Magic Games, Mirajane, together with her teammates Elfman, Lisanna and Cana, hike out to the mountain to train and enhance their power.[103] Upon returning from this training, Mirajane is chosen by Makarov to be part of Fairy Tail's Team B, along with Laxus, Gajeel, Juvia and Jellal Fernandes (disguised as Mystogan). She accepts after the offer prompts her to imagine Erza obeying her.[104] The team ultimately bests Fairy Tail's Team A and places second in the preliminary rounds, defeated only by Team Sabertooth.[105]
As the Grand Magic Games start, the first event, Hidden, is announced. Gray enters the event and loses, and when the battles start, both Lucy and Jellal lose as well. Later, Mirajane, along with the rest of the Fairy Tail Guild, heads to a local bar to celebrate Fairy Tail's terrible loss on the first day of the Grand Magic Games, and she and Erza each promise each other to do their best.[106]
During the events of the second day, Chariot, everyone notices Natsu, Gajeel and Sting experiencing motion sickness as they're Dragon slayers. Mirajane wonders if Laxus also experiences such problems, to which he tells her not to say anything.[107] As Natsu proclaims their entrance in the game is for their comrades, and as he and Gajeel win points for their teams, Mirajane smiles at them.[108]
During the second match of the day's battle portion, when Elfman is called to battle Bacchus, Mirajane is shocked. She feels uneasy upon hearing Bacchus' wager in his and Elfman's bet.[109] But upon her brother's victory, she expresses relief and happiness.[110]
In the next match, Mirajane is selected to fight against Team Blue Pegasus' reserve member, Jenny Realight.[111] The match begins but it quickly turns into a swimsuit contest much to the delight of the males in the stadium.[112]
After modeling for a short while, the two talk and Mirajane suggests that they end their match peacefully. They do several more poses and both gain tying points in their contest. Jenny then makes a bet: the loser will have to appear nude in the next Sorcerer Magazine, which Mirajane accepts. When Jenny enters her battle mode, Mirajane responds by transforming into Satan Soul: Sitri and quickly defeats her, gaining 10 points for her team. She then tells an upset Jenny that she'll be looking forward to seeing her in her birthday suit.[113] After the match, Mirajane says that she felt a bit embarrassed, while her teammates congratulate her, with Natsu (in his corner) saying that she is as strong as she was before.[114]
During the third day's battle portion, Mirajane is extremely surprised to see what seems to be Laxus getting beaten around by "Alexei."[115] She later expresses shock when she sees Laxus disappear and another Laxus popping up out of nowhere, with Raven Tail's members defeated and "Alexei" exposed as Ivan Dreyar. When Laxus is declared the winner, she is visibly pleased.[116]
After Laxus's victory over Raven Tail, Wendy and Sherria's match begins. At some point during the battle, Wendy succeeds in countering Sherria's powerful Heavenly Gathering of Clouds, and Mirajane explains Sherria's Magic effect; she says that Sherria has the ability to heal her own injuries but cannot recover from her fatigue. Carla continues the explanation, saying that Wendy has the ability to recover fatigue and so she boosted Sherria's stamina to change the course of Sherria's attack.[117]
Later that day the other Fairy Tail members are seen partying at a local bar for their successful day.[118] She smiles as she watches Lisanna being forced by Natsu to barrel surf.[119] Later, Mirajane and the other Fairy Tail members head off to Ryuzetsu Land.[120] While there, she is confronted by Blue Pegasus member Jenny who proceeds to rip off the top of Mirajane's bathing suit, as revenge for beating her in their previous battle. Mirajane retaliates by pulling down the bottom of Jenny's bathing suit.[121]
During the fourth day of the Grand Magic Games, Mirajane is seen asking how Juvia got pushed out of the water sphere when she got distracted.[122] Later, Mirajane and Juvia come to the infirmary to check on Lucy. She guesses that Lucy has fallen asleep while hugging her keys. When Makarov arrives and says that they have to combine Team A and B, Mirajane asks why, to which he replies that since Team Raven Tail was disqualified, the guilds are uneven.[123] When the new Fairy Tail team comes out, Mirajane says that this is the real meaning of the strongest team.[124]
As Natsu and Gajeel from the newly formed Team Fairy Tail enter the arena to battle Sabertooth's Sting and Rogue, Mirajane, alongside her guild mates, watches the match with confidence.[125] The fierce battle between the Dragon Slayers takes place with both sides intensely fighting for the win. When Sting uses his Holy Nova, Mirajane is shocked by the impact the explosion causes.[126]
As the battle continues, Mirajane is shocked to hear Sting say to Rogue that he alone is enough to beat both Natsu and Gajeel.[127] Later, she anxiously watches with the rest of the guild to see the outcome of Natsu's battle.[128] Mirajane is filled with joy when Natsu defeats Sabertooth's Sting and Rogue, placing team Fairy Tail in the lead with 45 points.[129]
After hearing about Lucy's arrest by the Fiore Army, Mirajane listens as the Mages discuss the situation.[130] While wondering about Lucy's arrest, Erza questions why the kingdom only arrested her and not the others, to which Mirajane replies that it'd be suspicious if they, as participants in the games, were arrested and didn't appear. As Makarov gives his take on the situation, Mirajane listens in.[131] The next day, while Team Fairy Tail heads out for the final day of the games, Mirajane goes with Natsu, Wendy, Happy, Carla and Panther Lily on a mission to rescue Lucy.[132]
On the way to Mercurius, Mirajane notes that the last fight of the games is about to start. While wondering about how to get into the castle unnoticed, the group puts on costumes as envisioned by Happy to disguise themselves. Mirajane considers the idea and puts on a hockey mask, but this is ultimately discarded.[133] Some time later, Mirajane disguises herself as a palace guard and "captures" Wendy and Natsu, effectively sneaking all of them into the palace under the guise of putting them in the dungeon.[134] Eventually, Mirajane and the others locate Lucy and Yukino in one of the cells. Upon finding them Natsu breaks down the door to free them both. Outside the cell, the floor collapses beneath Mirajane and the others, sending them down into an underground cavern known as "Abyss Palace."[135] They begin looking around the place, searching for a way out.[136]
As the Exceed try finding a way out, Mirajane comments on how the kingdom captured them as they came to rescue their captured friend. As the others discuss the events, Mirajane points out to Lucy how Yukino resembles Lisanna, while telling Yukino that Lisanna is her sister.[137] As a passage is found, Mirajane squeezes through and comes across a wounded Arcadios, who tells her and the rest to escape as they are attacked by a large shadowy figure. As more figures appear, Arcadios identifies them as the Garou Knights, executors working with the kingdom.[138] Mirajane and her friends prepare to fight.
Despite Natsu's laughter and lack of worry, Mirajane hears Arcadios warn the team that the Magic the knights use is created for killing people. As the team prepares to battle the knights, Mirajane notes it to be an opportunity to have them reveal the exit when they win. Once the battle begins, Mirajane activates her Satan Soul: Sitri and saves Wendy, who is targeted and nearly swallowed up by Cosmos' plant technique.[139] Soon after, Cosmos and Kamika activate their combination attack, which nearly sucks the Mages inside. Working together, Mirajane, Panther Lily and Natsu use their Magic to destroy the technique, creating a large explosion as a result.[140] In the aftermath, Mirajane finds herself separated from everybody else. Calling out worriedly for Lucy and Yukino, Mirajane is told by Kamika, who ended up in the same area as her, that she shouldn't look away from her.[141]
As they begin fighting, Mirajane is attacked by Kamika's Paper Blizzard: Green Dance. Though she tries holding her breath as it surrounds her, Kamika reveals that the green paper is the God of poison, causing Mirajane to fully realize that the knights truly are trying to kill them.[142] As she continues to struggle, Kamika suggests that Mirajane simply end it by dying. Mirajane replies by stating Magic shouldn't be used to kill people, though it is needed to protect others. She then explains that when people are looking, she holds back, but that when she's alone, she can release her full power. To Kamika's surprise, Mirajane then inhales the poison, which she calls a treat for a Demon such as herself.[143] Going forward, Mirajane attacks Kamika, sending her crashing through the walls of the underground and eventually to the same place where the other defeated knights lay. With this, Mirajane also reunites with the rest of the rescue team.[144]
With the knights beaten, the team tries finding a way out of Abyss Palace. As they walk, Mirajane asks Loke how he came, to which he states he jumped. Soon after, Mirajane looks on as the group comes across a door which opens as they walk towards it. Suspecting it to be a trap, Mirajane and the rest stay back as a hooded figure appears.[145] Natsu asks the figure who they are, at which point the figure begins crying and apologizing, asking for strength. Curious, Mirajane stays back before the figure reveals herself[146] The figure is shown to be Lucy from the future, greatly surprising Mirajane. As she begins to talk about something that will happen to the country, she suddenly collapses. Mirajane talks to the Lucy of the present, who expresses feelings of being creeped out by another of her.[147] Later, while trying to find a way out of the castle, Mirajane and the others end up getting lost. She cheerfully comments on how bothersome it is, before reminding her Guildmates that they need to maintain a good outlook with their King, since they're still in the Games. Soon after, the future Lucy awakens after having collapsed earlier and she begins to explain her situation with everyone.[148]
Mirajane becomes worried as the Lucy from the future reveals that a herd of ten thousand Dragons will attack the country. She listens as the present Lucy doubts that the others will believe this, and Natsu assures her that they won’t. When the future Lucy expresses hesitation at Carla’s question about the future, Mirajane is stunned to think that they will die. When asked about the Eclipse, she reveals that she arrived on the fourth of July, and Mirajane states that she thought the Eclipse could take a person further back in time. The future Lucy tells them to meet Jellal by using an underground passage, as he should be thinking of a strategy. As she apologizes for not having one, Mirajane looks on as Natsu comes close to future Lucy's face and thanks for the information.[149] While going through the underground, the group is confronted by the army. Rather than fight, Mirajane leaves to look for Arcadios and Yukino when she notices the latter is missing, telling everyone to be careful as she runs off.[150]
Desperate, Mirajane begins to look for Yukino all over the spacious castle.[151] She eventually finds the former Sabertooth Mage leaning up against a wall, demanding at first to know what she was doing there, before beckoning for Yukino to come with her. As Yukino tearfully replies that she can't, as no matter who she travels with, misfortune is always one step behind her, Mirajane kindly replies that none of her friends at Fairy Tail ever blame others for their troubles, and embraces the former Sabertooth Mage. She tells her that it is okay, as everyone exists for a reason, and that no matter how small Yukino's might be, she still has one.[152]
Later, as Lucy attempts to close the Eclipse Gate in order to get rid of the Dragons, Mirajane and Yukino arrive, with the latter combining her keys with Lucy and summoning all 12 Zodiac Spirits to close the door. Mirajane then notices Future Rogue, who arrives to the place noting that there are 7 Dragons present. When he announces the beginning of the Dragon age, Mirajane questions his motives, but receives no real reply.[153]
Mirajane and those near the castle are confronted by Zirconis, a Dragon whose soul was met by several Fairy Tail Mages previously. Wendy attempts to talk to him but the beast uses a breath attack which Mirajane protects her from by getting her down to the ground. Mirajane and the rest are shocked to see that the attack did not hurt anyone, rather, it vaporized the clothes of the soldiers and several others, with Mirajane referring to it as the first time she's seen something so pitiful.[154]
With Lucy's clothes being vaporized as well, Zirconis laughs at Wendy's resolve to defeat him. As he kidnaps Lucy, Mirajane readies to attack, supported by Wendy's Arms X Vernier, however, they are thrown away by Zirconis' shock wave. She then transforms into her Satan Soul: Sitri form and attacks Zirconis. Her attack is proven to be ineffective, however, it works as a diversion as Wendy is able to land a hit with her Sky Dragon's Roar. Annoyed, Zirconis then throws Lucy into the air, and while Happy flies after her, Mirajane and Wendy claim that they will deal with Zirconis,[155] and the two Mages stay and face him in an aerial battle.[156]
Later, after Ultear uses Last Ages to rewind the time, Mirajane is seen fighting Motherglare's Hatchlings, when she suddenly states that she has just seen a glimpse of the future, with Evergreen claiming that she has also had such sensation.[157] After the gate's destruction, Mirajane remains bewildered by her vicinity alongside the Thunder God Tribe, looking on as the Hatchlings and the Dragons disappear from their timeline.[158]
Several days after the battle with the Dragons, Mirajane, in a dressing room with Lucy, Wendy, Lisanna and Yukino, consoles an embarrassed Yukino about her appearance, stating that she looks gorgeous in her dress.[159] Shortly thereafter, Mirajane and the others leave the dressing room and arrive at the Royal Palace where they are greeted by Elfman; Mirajane and her two siblings then converse at a nearby table.[160] Mirajane then later accompanies Yukino as she approaches Sting and Rogue and looks at her with concern when she tries to leave after they notice her presence. Curious, Mirajane listens as Sting apologizes to Yukino for the way he and Sabertooth treated her; her curiosity turns to shock when Sting asks for Yukino to rejoin their guild, and even more so when an extremely drunk Kagura comes over to the group, demanding for Yukino to join Mermaid Heel instead.[161]
All the teams from the Grand Magic Games soon speak up about Yukino joining their respective guilds and get into a fight, causing the young girl to break down in tears. Seeing this, Mirajane consoles the Celestial Spirit Mage, asking her not to cry; Yukino turns her head and smiles at Mirajane in spite of the tears streaming down her face, proclaiming herself to be happy, prompting Mirajane to smile back at Yukino, stating that she's glad that Yukino was finally able to smile and that she now has many different places to call home.[162] Afterwards, everyone returns to their guilds. When Fairy Tail arrives to Magnolia, they are greeted by a mass of people happy with their victory in the Games. As Mirajane walks through the crowd waving and smiling at the people, they call her name.[163]
Eclipse Celestial Spirits arc
Note: Events in this arc occur only in the anime and do not constitute canon material.
Click "show" to read the plot arc. Mirajane cleans up with guild bar with Kinana while everyone is out dealing with the strange natural disasters that are occurring, and helps explain this to Natsu, Lucy and Happy when they return to find the guild empty. After they learn that all the good jobs have been taken, Mirajane and Kinana hand the three a job that specifically needs Lucy in a town called Seabellus. Later, when Yukino shows up in the guild, Mirajane and all those that returned from their jobs listen as she explains that her Gold Keys aren't working, that she doesn't know the reason, and that Lucy's other ten most probably aren't working either.[164] After Lucy and the others arrive at the guild, after Crux updates them on the situation, Yukino informs the guild about a ritual called Liberum that she found in an ancient test, causing Crux to reveal that Liberum is a ritual that the Celestial Spirits perfom in order to achieve "perfect freedom". When they suggest gathering more info, Levy notes that the Magic Library contains and vast collection of books. After Makarov puts Erza in charge, she signs Mirajane and Elfman together.[165] Mirajane, along with the other Fairy Tail Mages, arrives as a reinforcement to help the main group through the use of Warren's Telepathy. This causes the Celestial Spirits to return to their gates due to being outnumbered. After taking one of Hisui's Celestial Spirit Banishment Keys, Mirajane tracks down Pisces, who await her at the beach.[166] Underwater, Mirajane manages to gain the advantage in her fight after going into her Satan Soul form against Pisces. After thwarting a maneuver by her opponents, Mira sends the pair above water and releases Magic Power to conjure an explosion, making quick work of them. Apologizing for using excessive force, Mira offers one last piece of advice to the Mother and Son spirits prior to closing their gate.[167] After reuniting with the Mages who have closed their spirits' gates, they decide to go looking for Natsu and the others. As they venture through, they hear Ophiuchus' voice. After being informed that the Celestial Spirit King was the one responsible about Liberum, Levy informs Mirajane and the others about Liberum Verus.[168] and that the only way to stop Liberum is by destroying the Trinity: Ophiuchus, Astral Spirytus and the Celestial Globe all at the same time. The Mages then mobilize, destroying every last bit of the place. As the Mages deliver the last strike, Lucy, Yukino and Hisui strike the Globe with Gottfried and Natsu defeats Ophiuchus with his Darkness Phoenix Blade.[169] After reuniting, the Mages wounder about the current situation. Horologium then appears, stating that Liberum was completed and the Eclipse Celestial Spirit King is demolishing the Celestial World at the moment. After receiving some Celestial Clothing, Mirajane and Elfman ready themselves to go the Celestial World. After being sucked by the Eclipse King, Mirajane and the others find them selves confronted by a giant beast, who Lucy recognizes as the Spirit King.[170] Erza signals them to attack, but in vain as all of their attacks turn ineffective. The Celestial King then starts turning every Mage in front of him into a sky constellation, were Mirajane, Cana and Elfman are caught in a blast.[170] After the defeat of the King, Mirajane is turned back to normal alongside her comrades. She the listens as the Celestial Spirit King, now back to normal, thanks the Mages regarding the past events, although not clearly remembering them. After that, Mirajane and the others return to their world.[171] Sometime after that, while Asuka and Natsu are sitting at the bar, the little girl asks for some cake, in which Mirajane that they've run out of it, much to her dismay.[172] Days later, when Juvia ask about a gift to get to Gray, Mira states that the best gift is home-made one, giving an idea to the Water Mage.[173] After being asked by Lucy, Mirajane decides to teach her, plus Natsu and Happy, her Transformation Magic where she explains the basic principles and theories of Transformation, before going through the three main stages. She then watches as three try out their Magics. Suddenly, havoc is heard in town, with Mirajane and the others coming to see the cause, just to find both Macao and Wakaba, having performed a malfunctioning transformation, as they were eavesdropping on her explanation. She then watches as Erza, disguised as Fairy Woman, arrive, taking down the two, causing her to turn "real". A few days later, Mirajane is seen serving some drinks, as Happy reads in the news that Fairy Woman saved Magnolia again.[174] When Natsu and Happy, broke, start moaning about not having money for food, Mirajane questions how did they spent all the money from their last job. She then tries to calm down an enraged Lucy who scolds the two fot attempting to sell her novel. When she tells them to take a job, Mirajane informs her that there is only one job and that it requests only Laxus.[175] Due to Ichiya's Handsome Perfume starting a plague in Magnolia, Mirajane is turned into Ichiyas. Ultimately, thanks to Natsu's efforts, the plague is halted using a Deodorant Lacrima, curing her and the others.[176]
Sun Village arc
Following their return, Mirajane sings as she takes a bath with the Fairy Tail girls. She comments on the recent increase of job requests Fairy Tail has received since their victory over at the Grand Magic Games, revealing that she is completely busy and does not know where to start. She then reassures Lisanna when she finds it odd that Natsu and Gray went out on a mission together, claiming that they started to treat themselves better recently. She keeps on bathing as Flare enters their bath-house and reveals to the crowd of girls that Raven Tail is no more.[177]
Tartaros arc
After Team Natsu, along with Wendy and Carla, returns to Fairy Tail, Mirajane is asked by Macao and the others to bring out the alcohol.[178] She, in conjunction with several Fairy Tail Mages, stares in amazement at the gates when a frantically screaming Jet walks in claiming to bring with him terrible news.[179] Mirajane, with the rest of the guild, later watches as Porlyusica walks out of the infirmary and informs them that the defeated Laxus, Yajima and Thunder God Tribe are in critical condition and may not make a full recovery. She then holds Lisanna close to her as Makarov lies to Freed about the casualties involving the village they fought Tempester in.[180]
Soon after the locations of several former council member are made known, the Fairy Tail Mages head out to become their protection. As preparations are made, Mirajane looks over Laxus as he rests in bed. Having heard what he did from Freed, she tells Laxus that he cares a great deal for his friends and they will remember his courage.[181] After discovering the former chairman's address, Mirajane and Erza quickly head to his location on top of a reindeer.[182] They shortly stop on their way to take a break, with Mirajane mentioning that Jellal is surely a target as well. Erza, however, states that Jellal can defend himself on his own.[183]
The two eventually reach the home of Crawford Seam, the former chairman of Magic Council. Mirajane enjoys herself with a cup of tea before the ex-chairman questions their purpose for coming. Mirajane apologizes for the guild looking for him and his address and Crawford proceeds to recall the past when he used to deal with Fairy Tail. Mirajane interrupts this and Crawford eventually reveals that nor himself neither the three ex-councilors that are supposed to protect the Face know of its location. Suddenly, Mirajane and Erza notice someone's presence and knowing it's the attackers, they tell Crawford to return to his room while they face the intruders, with Mirajane using Satan Soul to battle them. The two, fighting as a team for the first time, eventually defeat the enemies, although they find it odd that no strong opponent was sent to kill the former chairman. At that moment, Mirajane and Erza fall down unconscious and Crawford proceeds to take them, while announcing to Kyôka that two subjects have been captured.[184] Mirajane and Erza are then taken to the Tartaros HQ and while the latter is tortured for information, Mirajane is forced to undergo Kyôka's transformation process in order to become the Demon's slave, much to Erza's horror.[185]
Mirajane, unconscious, later appears in one of Kyôka's facilities. Lamy, a Demon from Kyôka's squad, states that even though she doesn't care about girls, she might modify Mirajane's body and proceeds to threaten her, claiming that her pretty face will be no more after she's done with her.[186] As she is about to do so, Mirajane regains consciousness and breaks from the facility, much to Lamy's shock and horror. Mirajane reveals that she already possesses Demon Particles and Lamy trying to insert them into her body just caused her to wake up.[187]
As she wanders around, Mirajane is found by Lisanna, who quickly rushes to her side and hugs her. Questioning what Lisanna is doing in Tartaros, Mirajane is shocked to hear that both she and Elfman were captured. Before the duo can act, both women are approached by Seilah, who states that Elfman was possessed and made to blow up the Fairy Tail Guild; however, before they can stress, the Demon continues that she miscalculated, as Elfman failed to kill anyone at all. With Mirajane and Lisanna relaxing to hear that their friends are safe, Seilah suddenly becomes glaringly angry, stating that she will take Mirajane's life as compensation for her embarrassment. Realizing Seilah is the one who harmed her siblings, Mirajane glares straight back demonically.[188] Mirajane and Seilah then engage each-other in combat, and Mirajane is impressed by Seilah's strength.[189] Mirajane is continuously struck down by Seilah's books, leading her to ponder if this is the power of a true Demon.[190]
With neither Mirajane nor Seilah managing to get the upper-hand in their battle, Seilah pauses to question Mirajane's abilities, commenting that her Macro seems to not be working on the Fairy Tail Mage. Not understanding, Mirajane is hastily informed by Lisanna about Seilah's Curse, and how the Demon has the ability to manipulate the bodies of those she chooses, Seilah herself adding that she doesn't even need to be present to control those she has taken over. Before they can continue, both women are interrupted by Ezel, who appears in one of the tanks surrounding them. Cursing someone profusely, the Demon demands that Seilah revive him at once, though Seilah refuses, asking him to wait until she is finished in her battle. Questioning what Ezel is doing at their location, Mirajane listens as Lamy explains that they are currently standing in Hell's Core, a laboratory where the members of Tartaros can be revived if they are ever injured and lose their bodies. Mirajane then decides that her top priority should be destroying the lab, surprising Seilah, who questions her abilities. However, at that very moment all of the test tubes in the lab explode, Mirajane revealing that due to her Take-Over Magic's properties, she was able to take control of the tentacle-like Demon connected to all of the tanks, using it to destroy them all. Now understanding Mirajane's Magic, Seilah reasons that that must be why her Curse doesn't seem to work; Mirajane too comments that she cannot seem to use Take-Over on Seilah's body. Recognising the nature of their battle now, both women relent to having a fist fight instead. Mirajane uses Satan Soul: Sitri, though Seilah shocks her by using her Curse on own body, commanding it to release her strongest form. Taking on a fearsome appearance, Seilah surges forward, catching Mirajane off guard and hurtling her into Lisanna and Lamy before blasting them with a surge of energy. Down and forced out of her Satan Soul form, Mirajane struggles to get up once more.[191]
Unable to compete with Seilah in terms of power, Mirajane once again attempts to use her Take Over Magic to control the Demon. Seilah comments on the futility of her actions, and activates her Macro to tear apart Mirajane's body, the Fairy Tail Mage screaming in pain as the Demon assaults her. Thinking back to the event where she had acquired Take Over, Mirajane reminds herself of the dedication she and her siblings have with one another. Motivated to fight back, she grabs onto Seilah's leg and successfully applies her Take Over ability on the Demon, gaining Seilah's Macro ability and using it to command Elfman to come to the aid of his family.[192] Later, it turns out that Mirajane and her siblings are joined by Jet, Droy and Warren, with the Telepathy Mage informing the rest of the Fairy Tail Mages about this. However, Mard Geer soon puts his Curse into effect and Mirajane, along with the rest of the Mages, ends up being caught by the transformed Cube.[193] Mirajane is later seen to be released from Alegria, the dispelling courtesy of the Celestial Spirit King.[194] However, she, along with a few more Mages, are then attacked by Lamy's clones, which Seilah takes advantage of to flee into the control room. While Elfman, Lisanna, Jet, Droy and Warren deal with the clones, Mirajane pursues the Demon.[195]
Some time later, Mirajane appears in Tartaros' control room. At great speed and in her Satan Soul mode, she grabs Seilah's face and throws her onto a wall, releasing Erza and others from the Demon's Macro. Having used all of her Magic, Mirajane reverts to her human form and, lying on the ground, watches in horror as Kyôka exclaims that Face will soon activate. She begs Erza to destroy the weapon and Titania dons her Armadura Fairy to fulfill this plea.[196] As the battle continues, Happy questions Lisanna's whereabouts and Mirajane explains that they are dealing with an army of Lamy's models. She, as well as everyone else in the ruins of Cube, then notice a sound signifying the arrival of the Dragon King, Acnologia.[197] She watches in disbelief, still completely exhausted, as the Dragon causes mass destruction.[198]
Later, as the battle between Erza and Kyôka progresses, Mirajane is hit by the Demon's Curse, causing her to be blown away.[199] After the battle is over, an exhausted Mir |
back into respiratory depression before emergency assistance arrives, administer an additional dose of Narcan Nasal Spray using a new Narcan Nasal Spray and continue surveillance of the patient.
If the desired response is not obtained after 2 or 3 minutes, administer an additional dose of Narcan Nasal Spray using a new Narcan Nasal Spray. If there is still no response and additional doses are available, administer additional doses of Narcan Nasal Spray every 2 to 3 minutes using a new Narcan Nasal Spray with each dose until emergency medical assistance arrives.
Additional supportive and/or resuscitative measures may be helpful while awaiting emergency medical assistance.
Dosing Modifications due to Partial Agonists or Mixed Agonist/Antagonists
Reversal of respiratory depression by partial agonists or mixed agonist/antagonists, such as buprenorphine and pentazocine, may be incomplete and require higher doses of naloxone hydrochloride or repeated administration of Narcan Nasal Spray using a new nasal spray [see Warnings and Precautions (5.2)]
Dosage Forms and Strengths
Narcan Nasal Spray is supplied as a single-dose intranasal spray containing 2 mg or 4 mg of naloxone hydrochloride in 0.1 mL.
Contraindications
Narcan Nasal Spray is contraindicated in patients known to be hypersensitive to naloxone hydrochloride or to any of the other ingredients.
Warnings and Precautions
Risk of Recurrent Respiratory and Central Nervous System Depression
The duration of action of most opioids may exceed that of Narcan Nasal Spray resulting in a return of respiratory and/or central nervous system depression after an initial improvement in symptoms. Therefore, it is necessary to seek emergency medical assistance immediately after administration of the first dose of Narcan Nasal Spray and to keep the patient under continued surveillance. Administer additional doses of Narcan Nasal Spray if the patient is not adequately responding or responds and then relapses back into respiratory depression, as necessary [see Dosage and Administration (2.2)]. Additional supportive and/or resuscitative measures may be helpful while awaiting emergency medical assistance.
Risk of Limited Efficacy with Partial Agonists or Mixed Agonist/Antagonists
Reversal of respiratory depression by partial agonists or mixed agonist/antagonists such as buprenorphine and pentazocine, may be incomplete. Larger or repeat doses of naloxone hydrochloride may be required to antagonize buprenorphine because the latter has a long duration of action due to its slow rate of binding and subsequent slow dissociation from the opioid receptor [see Dosage and Administration (2.3)]. Buprenorphine antagonism is characterized by a gradual onset of the reversal effects and a decreased duration of action of the normally prolonged respiratory depression.
Precipitation of Severe Opioid Withdrawal
The use of Narcan Nasal Spray in patients who are opioid-dependent may precipitate opioid withdrawal characterized by the following signs and symptoms: body aches, diarrhea, tachycardia, fever, runny nose, sneezing, piloerection, sweating, yawning, nausea or vomiting, nervousness, restlessness or irritability, shivering or trembling, abdominal cramps, weakness, and increased blood pressure. In neonates, opioid withdrawal may be life-threatening if not recognized and properly treated and may include the following signs and symptoms: convulsions, excessive crying, and hyperactive reflexes. Monitor the patient for the development of the signs and symptoms of opioid withdrawal.
There are limited data to inform if the 2 mg dose of Narcan Nasal Spray will avoid precipitation of severe opioid withdrawal in the setting of opioid dependence. However, the 2 mg dose may not provide an adequate and timely reversal in persons who may be exposed to an overdose of a potent or very high dose of opioids.
Abrupt postoperative reversal of opioid depression after using naloxone hydrochloride may result in nausea, vomiting, sweating, tremulousness, tachycardia, hypotension, hypertension, seizures, ventricular tachycardia and fibrillation, pulmonary edema, and cardiac arrest. Death, coma, and encephalopathy have been reported as sequelae of these events. These events have primarily occurred in patients who had pre-existing cardiovascular disorders or received other drugs that may have similar adverse cardiovascular effects. Although a direct cause and effect relationship has not been established, after use of naloxone hydrochloride, monitor patients with pre-existing cardiac disease or patients who have received medications with potential adverse cardiovascular effects for hypotension, ventricular tachycardia or fibrillation, and pulmonary edema in an appropriate healthcare setting. It has been suggested that the pathogenesis of pulmonary edema associated with the use of naloxone hydrochloride is similar to neurogenic pulmonary edema, i.e., a centrally mediated massive catecholamine response leading to a dramatic shift of blood volume into the pulmonary vascular bed resulting in increased hydrostatic pressures.
There may be clinical settings, particularly the postpartum period in neonates with known or suspected exposure to maternal opioid use, where it is preferable to avoid the abrupt precipitation of opioid withdrawal symptoms. In these settings, consider use of an alternative, naloxone-containing product that can be titrated to effect and, where applicable, dosed according to weight. [see Use in Specific Populations (8.4)].
Adverse Reactions
The following serious adverse reactions are discussed elsewhere in the labeling:
Precipitation of Severe Opioid Withdrawal [see Warnings and Precautions (5.3)]
Because clinical studies are conducted under widely varying conditions, adverse reaction rates observed in the clinical studies of a drug cannot be directly compared to the rates in the clinical studies of another drug and may not reflect the rates observed in practice.
The following adverse reactions were observed in a Narcan Nasal Spray clinical study.
In a pharmacokinetic study of 30 healthy adult volunteers exposed to one spray of Narcan Nasal Spray in one nostril or two sprays of Narcan Nasal Spray, one in each nostril, the most common adverse reactions were: increased blood pressure, constipation, toothache, muscle spasms, musculoskeletal pain, headache, nasal dryness, nasal edema, nasal congestion, nasal inflammation, rhinalgia, and xeroderma.
The following adverse reactions have been identified primarily during post-approval use of naloxone hydrochloride in the post-operative setting. Because these reactions are reported voluntarily from a population of uncertain size, it is not always possible to reliably estimate their frequency or establish a causal relationship to drug exposure: Hypotension, hypertension, ventricular tachycardia and fibrillation, dyspnea, pulmonary edema, and cardiac arrest. Death, coma, and encephalopathy have been reported as sequelae of these events. Excessive doses of naloxone hydrochloride in post-operative patients have resulted in significant reversal of analgesia, and have caused agitation.
Abrupt reversal of opioid effects in persons who were physically dependent on opioids has precipitated an acute withdrawal syndrome. Signs and symptoms have included: body aches, fever, sweating, runny nose, sneezing, piloerection, yawning, weakness, shivering or trembling, nervousness, restlessness or irritability, diarrhea, nausea or vomiting, abdominal cramps, increased blood pressure, tachycardia. In some patients, there may be aggressive behavior upon abrupt reversal of an opioid overdose. In the neonate, opioid withdrawal signs and symptoms also included convulsions, excessive crying, and hyperactive reflexes.
USE IN SPECIFIC POPULATIONS
Pregnancy
Risk Summary
The limited available data on naloxone use in pregnant women are not sufficient to inform a drug-associated risk. However, there are clinical considerations [see Clinical Considerations]. In animal reproduction studies, no embryotoxic or teratogenic effects were observed in mice and rats treated with naloxone hydrochloride during the period of organogenesis at doses equivalent to 6-times and 12-times, respectively, a human dose of 8 mg/day (two Narcan Nasal Sprays) based on body surface area comparison [see Data].
The estimated background risk of major birth defects and miscarriage for the indicated population is unknown. In the U.S. general population, the estimated background risk of major birth defects and miscarriage in clinically recognized pregnancies is 2% to 4% and 15% to 20%, respectively.
Clinical Considerations
Fetal/Neonatal adverse reactions
Naloxone hydrochloride crosses the placenta, and may precipitate withdrawal in the fetus, as well as in the opioid-dependent mother [see Warnings and Precautions (5.3)]. The fetus should be evaluated for signs of distress after Narcan Nasal Spray is used. Careful monitoring is needed until the fetus and mother are stabilized.
Data
Animal Data
Naloxone hydrochloride was administered during organogenesis to mice and rats at subcutaneous doses up to 10 mg/kg/day (equivalent to 6-times and 12-times, respectively, a human dose of 8 mg (two Narcan Nasal Sprays)) (based on body surface area comparison). These studies demonstrated no embryotoxic or teratogenic effects due to naloxone hydrochloride.
Pregnant female rats were administered 2 or 10 mg/kg naloxone subcutaneously from Gestation Day 15 to Postnatal day 21. There were no adverse effects on the offspring (up to 12-times a human dose of 8 mg/day (two Narcan Nasal Sprays) based on body surface area comparison).
Lactation
Risk Summary
There is no information regarding the presence of naloxone in human milk, or the effects of naloxone on the breastfed infant or on milk production. Studies in nursing mothers have shown that naloxone does not affect prolactin or oxytocin hormone levels. Naloxone is minimally orally bioavailable.
Pediatric Use
The safety and effectiveness of Narcan Nasal Spray have been established in pediatric patients of all ages for known or suspected opioid overdose as manifested by respiratory and/or central nervous system depression. Use of naloxone hydrochloride in all pediatric patients is supported by adult bioequivalence studies coupled with evidence from the safe and effective use of other naloxone hydrochloride drug products. No pediatric studies were conducted for Narcan Nasal Spray.
Absorption of naloxone hydrochloride following intranasal administration in pediatric patients may be erratic or delayed. Even when the opiate-intoxicated pediatric patient responds appropriately to naloxone hydrochloride, he/she must be carefully monitored for at least 24 hours, as a relapse may occur as naloxone hydrochloride is metabolized.
In opioid-dependent pediatric patients, (including neonates), administration of naloxone hydrochloride may result in an abrupt and complete reversal of opioid effects, precipitating an acute opioid withdrawal syndrome. Neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome, unlike opioid withdrawal syndrome in adults, may be life-threatening, if not recognized, and should be treated according to protocols developed by neonatology experts [see Warnings and Precautions (5.3)].
In settings such as in neonates with known or suspected exposure to maternal opioid use, where it may be preferable to avoid the abrupt precipitation of opioid withdrawal symptoms, consider use of an alternate naloxone-containing product that can be dosed according to weight and titrated to effect.
Also, in situations where the primary concern is for infants at risk for opioid overdose, consider whether the availability of alternate naloxone-containing products may be better suited than Narcan Nasal Spray.
Geriatric Use
Geriatric patients have a greater frequency of decreased hepatic, renal, or cardiac function and of concomitant disease or other drug therapy. Therefore, the systemic exposure of naloxone hydrochloride can be higher in these patients.
Clinical studies of naloxone hydrochloride did not include sufficient numbers of subjects aged 65 and over to determine whether they respond differently from younger subjects. Other reported clinical experience has not identified differences in responses between the elderly and younger patients.
Narcan Description
Narcan (naloxone hydrochloride) Nasal Spray is a pre-filled, single dose intranasal spray. Chemically, naloxone hydrochloride is the hydrochloride salt of 17-Allyl-4,5α-epoxy-3,14-dihydroxymorphinan-6-one hydrochloride with the following structure:
C19H21NO4• HCl
M.W. 363.84
Naloxone hydrochloride, an opioid antagonist, occurs as a white to slightly off-white powder, and is soluble in water, in dilute acids, and in strong alkali; slightly soluble in alcohol; practically insoluble in ether and in chloroform.
Each Narcan Nasal Spray contains a 2 mg or 4 mg single dose of naloxone hydrochloride in a 0.1 mL (100 microliter) aqueous solution.
Inactive ingredients include benzalkonium chloride (preservative), disodium ethylenediaminetetraacetate (stabilizer), sodium chloride, hydrochloric acid to adjust pH, and purified water. The pH range is 3.5 to 5.5.
Narcan - Clinical Pharmacology
Mechanism of Action
Naloxone hydrochloride is an opioid antagonist that antagonizes opioid effects by competing for the same receptor sites.
Naloxone hydrochloride reverses the effects of opioids, including respiratory depression, sedation, and hypotension. It can also reverse the psychotomimetic and dysphoric effects of agonist-antagonists such as pentazocine.
Pharmacodynamics
When naloxone hydrochloride is administered intravenously, the onset of action is generally apparent within two minutes. The time to onset of action is shorter for intravenous compared to subcutaneous or intramuscular routes of administration. The duration of action is dependent upon the dose and route of administration of naloxone hydrochloride.
Pharmacokinetics
In a pharmacokinetic study in 30 healthy adult subjects, the relative bioavailability (BA) of one nasal spray in one nostril, consisting of a 2 mg total dose (0.1 mL of 20 mg/mL naloxone hydrochloride solution) and a 4 mg total dose (0.1 mL of 40 mg/mL naloxone hydrochloride solution), and two nasal sprays administered as one nasal spray in each nostril, consisting of a 4 mg total dose (0.1 mL of 20 mg/mL naloxone hydrochloride solution in each nostril) and an 8 mg total dose (0.1 mL of 40 mg/mL naloxone hydrochloride solution in each nostril), were compared to a single dose of 0.4 mg naloxone hydrochloride intramuscular injection. For intranasal administration, the subjects were instructed not to breathe through the nose during administration of the nasal spray, and remained fully supine for approximately one hour post-dose. For intramuscular administration, naloxone was administered as a single injection in the gluteus maximus muscle. The pharmacokinetic parameters obtained in the study are shown in Table 1.
Table 1 Mean Pharmacokinetic Parameters (CV%) for Naloxone Following Narcan (Naloxone HCl) Nasal Spray and Intramuscular Injection of Naloxone HCl to Healthy Subjects
Parameter 2 mg– One Nasal Spray in one nostril 20 mg/ml (N=29) 4 mg – Two Nasal Sprays, one in each nostril 20 mg/ml (N=29) 4 mg – One Nasal Spray in one nostril 40 mg/ml (N=29) 8 mg –Two Nasal Sprays, one in each nostril 40 mg/ml (N=29) 0.4 mg Intramuscular Injection (N=29) tmax (h)† 0.33 (0.25, 1.00) 0.33 (0.17, 0.57) 0.50 (0.17, 1.00) 0.33 (0.17, 1.00) 0.38 (0.08, 2.05) Cmax (ng/mL) 2.91 (35) 6.30 (34) 4.83 (43) 9.70 (36) 0.88 (31) AUCt (hr.ng/mL) 4.60 (27) 9.64 (24) 7.87 (37) 15.3 (23) 1.75 (23) AUC0-inf (h*ng/mL) 4.66 (27) 9.74 (24) 7.95 (37) 15.5 (23) 1.79 (23) t½ (h) 1.85 (33) 2.19 (33) 2.08 (30) 2.10 (32) 1.24 (26) Dose normalized Relative BA (%) vs. IM 51.7 (22) 54.0 (23) 44.2 (31)†† 43.1 (24) 100
† tmax reported as median (minimum, maximum)
†† N=28 for Relative BA.
Figure 1 Mean ± SD Plasma Concentration of Naloxone, (a) 0-6 h and (b) 0-1h Following Intranasal Administration and Intramuscular Injection
(a) (b)
The median naloxone tmax after intranasal administration of Narcan Nasal Spray (one nasal spray in one nostril (2 mg or 4 mg) or two nasal sprays as one spray in each nostril (4 mg or 8 mg) was not significantly different compared to the 0.4 mg dose of naloxone hydrochloride intramuscular injection (Table 1).
The dose normalized relative bioavailability of one dose (2 mg or 4 mg) or two doses (4 mg or 8 mg) of Narcan Nasal Spray as compared to the 0.4 mg dose of naloxone hydrochloride administered by intramuscular injection was 52%, 44%, 54%, and 43%, respectively.
Distribution
Following parenteral administration, naloxone is distributed in the body and readily crosses the placenta. Plasma protein binding occurs but is relatively weak. Plasma albumin is the major binding constituent, but significant binding of naloxone also occurs to plasma constituents other than albumin. It is not known whether naloxone is excreted into human milk.
Elimination
Following a single intranasal administration of Narcan Nasal Spray (2 mg or 4 mg dose of naloxone hydrochloride), the mean plasma half-life of naloxone in healthy adults was approximately 1.85 (33% CV) hours and 2.08 (30% CV) hours; respectively, which was longer than that observed after administrations of a 0.4 mg naloxone hydrochloride intramuscular injection, where the half-life was 1.24 hours (26% CV). In a neonatal study of naloxone hydrochloride injection, the mean (± SD) plasma half-life was observed to be 3.1 (± 0.5) hours.
Metabolism
Naloxone hydrochloride is metabolized in the liver, primarily by glucuronide conjugation, with naloxone-3-glucoronide as the major metabolite.
Excretion
After an oral or intravenous dose, about 25-40% of naloxone is excreted as metabolites in urine within 6 hours, about 50% in 24 hours, and 60-70% in 72 hours.
Nonclinical Toxicology
Carcinogenesis, Mutagenesis, Impairment of Fertility
Carcinogenesis
Long-term animal studies to evaluate the carcinogenic potential of naloxone have not been completed.
Mutagenesis
Naloxone was weakly positive in the Ames mutagenicity and in the in vitro human lymphocyte chromosome aberration test but was negative in the in vitro Chinese hamster V79 cell HGPRT mutagenicity assay and in the in vivo rat bone marrow chromosome aberration study.
Impairment of Fertility
Male rats were treated with 2 or 10 mg/kg naloxone for 60 days prior to mating. Female rats treated for 14-days prior to mating and throughout gestation with the same doses of naloxone (up to 12-times a human dose of 8 mg/day (two Narcan Nasal Sprays) based on body surface area comparison). There was no adverse effect on fertility.
How Supplied/Storage and Handling
How Supplied
Narcan Nasal Spray 2 mg is supplied as a carton containing four (4) blister packages (NDC 69547-212-04) each with a single spray device and as a carton containing twenty-four (24) blister packages (NDC 69547-212-24) each with a single spray device.
Narcan Nasal Spray 4 mg is supplied as carton containing two (2) blister packages (NDC 69547-353-02) each with a single spray device.
Narcan Nasal Spray is not made with natural rubber latex.
Storage and Handling
Store Narcan Nasal Spray in the blister and cartons provided.
Store at room temperature 59°F to 77°F (15°C to 25°C). Excursions permitted up to 104°F (40°C). Do not freeze. Protect from light.
Patient Counseling Information
Advise the patient and family members or caregivers to read the FDA-approved patient labeling (Patient Information and Instructions for Use).
Recognition of Opioid Overdose
Inform patients and their family members or caregivers about how to recognize the signs and symptoms of an opioid overdose such as the following:
Extreme somnolence - inability to awaken a patient verbally or upon a firm sternal rub.
Respiratory depression - this can range from slow or shallow respiration to no respiration in a patient who is unarousable.
Other signs and symptoms that may accompany somnolence and respiratory depression include the following: Miosis. Bradycardia and/or hypotension.
Risk of Recurrent Respiratory and Central Nervous System Depression
Instruct patients and their family members or caregivers that, since the duration of action of most opioids may exceed that of Narcan Nasal Spray, they must seek immediate emergency medical assistance after the first dose of Narcan Nasal Spray and keep the patient under continued surveillance [see Dosage and Administration (2.2), Warnings and Precautions (5.3)].
Limited Efficacy for/with Partial Agonists or Mixed Agonist/Antagonists
Instruct patients and their family members or caregivers that the reversal of respiratory depression caused by partial agonists or mixed agonist/antagonists, such as buprenorphine and pentazocine, may be incomplete and may require higher doses of naloxone hydrochloride or repeated administration of Narcan Nasal Spray, using a new nasal spray each time [see Dosage and Administration (2.3), Warnings and Precautions (5.2)].
Precipitation of Severe Opioid Withdrawal
Instruct patients and their family members or caregivers that the use of Narcan Nasal Spray in patients who are opioid dependent may precipitate opioid withdrawal [see Warnings and Precautions (5.3), Adverse Reactions (6)].
Administration Instructions
Instruct patients and their family members or caregivers to:
Ensure Narcan Nasal Spray is present whenever persons may be intentionally or accidentally exposed to an opioid overdose (i.e., opioid emergencies).
Administer Narcan Nasal Spray as quickly as possible if a patient is unresponsive and an opioid overdose is suspected, even when in doubt, because prolonged respiratory depression may result in damage to the central nervous system or death. Narcan Nasal Spray is not a substitute for emergency medical care [see Dosage and Administration ( 2.1 )].
Lay the patient on their back and administer Narcan Nasal Spray into one nostril while providing support to the back of the neck to allow the head to tilt back [see Dosage and Administration ( 2.1 )].
. Use each nasal spray only one time [see Dosage and Administration ( 2.1 )].
. Turn patient on their side as shown in the Instructions for Use and call for emergency medical assistance immediately after administration of the first dose of Narcan Nasal Spray. Additional supportive and/or resuscitative measures may be helpful while awaiting emergency medical assistance [see Dosage and Administration ( 2.1 )].
and call for emergency medical assistance immediately after administration of the first dose of Narcan Nasal Spray. Additional supportive and/or resuscitative measures may be helpful while awaiting emergency medical assistance Monitor patients and re-administer Narcan Nasal Spray using a new Narcan Nasal Spray every 2 to 3 minutes, if the patient is not responding or responds and then relapses back into respiratory depression. Administer Narcan Nasal Spray in alternate nostrils with each dose [see Dosage and Administration ( 2.1 )].
. Replace Narcan Nasal Spray before its expiration date.
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Narcan® is a registered trademark licensed by Adapt Pharma Operations Limited.
Distributed by Adapt Pharma, Inc., Radnor, PA 19087 USA.
PATIENT INFORMATION
PATIENT INFORMATION
Narcan (nar´ kan)
(naloxone hydrochloride)
Nasal Spray
You and your family members or caregivers should read this Patient Information leaflet before an opioid emergency happens. This information does not take the place of talking with your healthcare provider about your medical condition or your treatment.
What is the most important information I should know about Narcan Nasal Spray?
Narcan Nasal Spray is used to temporarily reverse the effects of opioid medicines. The medicine in Narcan Nasal Spray has no effect in people who are not taking opioid medicines. Always carry Narcan Nasal Spray with you in case of an opioid emergency.
1. Use Narcan Nasal Spray right away if you or your caregiver think signs or symptoms of an opioid emergency are present, even if you are not sure, because an opioid emergency can cause severe injury or death. Signs and symptoms of an opioid emergency may include:
• unusual sleepiness and you are not able to awaken the person with a loud voice or by rubbing firmly on the middle of their chest (sternum)
• breathing problems including slow or shallow breathing in someone difficult to awaken or who looks like they are not breathing
• the black circle in the center of the colored part of the eye (pupil) is very small, sometimes called "pinpoint pupils," in someone difficult to awaken
2. Family members, caregivers, or other people who may have to use Narcan Nasal Spray in an opioid emergency should know where Narcan Nasal Spray is stored and how to give Narcan before an opioid emergency happens.
3. Get emergency medical help right away after giving the first dose of Narcan Nasal Spray. Rescue breathing or CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) may be given while waiting for emergency medical help.
4. The signs and symptoms of an opioid emergency can return after Narcan Nasal Spray is given. If this happens, give another dose after 2 to 3 minutes using a new Narcan Nasal Spray and watch the person closely until emergency help is received.
What is Narcan Nasal Spray?
• Narcan Nasal Spray is a prescription medicine used for the treatment of an opioid emergency such as an overdose or a possible opioid overdose with signs of breathing problems and severe sleepiness or not being able to respond.
• Narcan Nasal Spray is to be given right away and does not take the place of emergency medical care. Get emergency medical help right away after giving the first dose of Narcan Nasal Spray, even if the person wakes up.
• Narcan Nasal Spray is safe and effective in children for known or suspected opioid overdose.
Who should not use Narcan Nasal Spray?
Do not use Narcan Nasal Spray if you are allergic to naloxone hydrochloride or any of the ingredients in Narcan Nasal Spray. See the end of this leaflet for a complete list of ingredients in Narcan Nasal Spray.
What should I tell my healthcare provider before using Narcan Nasal Spray?
Before using Narcan Nasal Spray, tell your healthcare provider about all of your medical conditions, including if you:
• have heart problems
• are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. Use of Narcan Nasal Spray may cause withdrawal symptoms in your unborn baby. Your unborn baby should be examined by a healthcare provider right away after you use Narcan Nasal Spray.
• are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. It is not known if Narcan Nasal Spray passes into your breast milk.
Tell your healthcare provider about the medicines you take, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements.
How should I use Narcan Nasal Spray?
Read the "Instructions for Use" at the end of this Patient Information leaflet for detailed information about the right way to use Narcan Nasal Spray.
• Use Narcan Nasal Spray exactly as prescribed by your healthcare provider.
• Each Narcan Nasal Spray contains only 1 dose of medicine and cannot be reused.
• Narcan Nasal Spray comes in a 2 mg and 4 mg strength. Your healthcare provider will prescribe the one that is right for you.
• Lay the person on their back. Support their neck with your hand and allow the head to tilt back before giving Narcan Nasal Spray.
• Narcan Nasal Spray should be given into one nostril.
• If additional doses are needed, give Narcan Nasal Spray in the other nostril.
What are the possible side effects of Narcan Nasal Spray?
Narcan Nasal Spray may cause serious side effects, including:
• Sudden opioid withdrawal symptoms. In someone who has been using opioids regularly, opioid withdrawal symptoms can happen suddenly after receiving Narcan Nasal Spray and may include:
o body aches
o diarrhea
o increased heart rate
o fever
o runny nose
o sneezing
o goose bumps
o sweating
o yawning
o nausea or vomiting
o nervousness
o restlessness or irritability
o shivering or trembling
o stomach cramping
o weakness
o increased blood pressure
In infants under 4 weeks old who have been receiving opioids regularly, sudden opioid withdrawal may be life-threatening if not treated the right way. Signs and symptoms include: seizures, crying more than usual, and increased reflexes.
These are not all of the possible side effects of Narcan Nasal Spray. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. You may report side effects to FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088.
How should I store Narcan Nasal Spray?
• Store Narcan Nasal Spray at room temperature between 59°F to 77°F (15°C to 25°C). Excursions permitted up to 104°F (40°C).
• Do not freeze Narcan Nasal Spray.
• Keep Narcan Nasal Spray in its box until ready to use. Protect from light.
• Replace Narcan Nasal Spray before the expiration date on the box.
Keep Narcan Nasal Spray and all medicines out of the reach of children.
General information about the safe and effective use of Narcan Nasal Spray.
Medicines are sometimes prescribed for purposes other than those listed in a Patient Information leaflet. Do not use Narcan Nasal Spray for a condition for which it was not prescribed. You can ask your pharmacist or healthcare provider for information about Narcan Nasal Spray that is written for health professionals.
What are the ingredients in Narcan Nasal Spray?
Active ingredient: naloxone hydrochloride
Inactive ingredients: benzalkonium chloride (preservative), disodium ethylenediaminetetraacetate (stabilizer), sodium chloride, hydrochloric acid to adjust pH and sterile water
Narcan Nasal Spray is not made with natural rubber latex.
Distributed by Adapt Pharma, Inc., Radnor, PA 19087 USA.
For more information, go to www.Narcannasalspray.com or call 1-844-4Narcan (1-844-462-7226).
This Patient Information has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Issued: 02/2017
Instructions for Use
Instructions for Use
Narcan (nar´ kan)
(naloxone hydrochloride)
Nasal Spray
You and your family members or caregivers should read the Instructions for Use that comes with Narcan Nasal Spray before using it. Talk to your healthcare provider if you and your family members or caregivers have any questions about the use of Narcan Nasal Spray.
Use Narcan Nasal Spray for known or suspected opioid overdose in adults and children.
Important: For use in the nose only.
Do not remove or test the Narcan Nasal Spray until ready to use.
Each Narcan Nasal Spray has 1 dose and cannot be reused.
You do not need to prime Narcan Nasal Spray.
Howto use Narcan Nasal Spray:
Step 1. Lay the person on their back to receive a dose of Narcan Nasal Spray.
Step 2. Remove Narcan Nasal Spray from the box. Peel back the tab with the circle to open the Narcan Nasal Spray.
Step 3. Hold the Narcan Nasal Spray with your thumb on the bottom of the plunger and your first and middle fingers on either side of the nozzle.
Step 4. Tilt the person's head back and provide support under the neck with your hand. Gently insert the tip of the nozzle into one nostril until your fingers on either side of the nozzle are against the bottom of the person's nose.
Step 5. Press the plunger firmly to give the dose of Narcan Nasal Spray.
Step 6. Remove the Narcan Nasal Spray from the nostril after giving the dose.
What to do after Narcan Nasal Spray has been used:
Step 7. Get emergency medical help right away.
Move the person on their side (recovery position) after giving Narcan Nasal Spray.
Watch the person closely.
If the person does not respond by waking up, to voice or touch, or breathing normally another dose may be given. Narcan Nasal Spray may be dosed every 2 to 3 minutes, if available.
Repeat Steps 2 through 6 using a new Narcan Nasal Spray to give another dose in the other nostril. If additional Narcan Nasal Sprays are available, Steps 2 through 6 may be repeated every 2 to 3 minutes until the person responds or emergency medical help is received.
Step 8. Put the used Narcan Nasal Spray back into its box.
Step 9. Throw away (dispose of) the used Narcan Nasal Spray in a place that is away from children.
How should I store Narcan Nasal Spray?
Store Narcan Nasal Spray at room temperature between 59°F to 77°F (15°C to 25°C). Narcan Nasal Spray may be stored for short periods up to 104°F (40°C).
Do not freeze Narcan Nasal Spray.
Keep Narcan Nasal Spray in the box until ready to use. Protect from light.
Replace Narcan Nasal Spray before the expiration date on the box.
Keep Narcan Nasal Spray and all medicines out of the reach of children.
This Instructions for Use has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Distributed by Adapt Pharma, Inc. Radnor, PA 19087 USA.
For more information, go to www.Narcannasalspray.com or call 1-844-4Narcan (1-844-462-7226).
Issued: 02/2017
2 mg - 4 pack
NDC 69547-212-04
Blister
Carton Four Pack
2 mg - 24 pack
NDC 69547-212-24
Carton 24 Pack
4 mg - 2 pack
NDC 69547-353-02
Blister
Carton Two Pack
Narcan
naloxone hydrochloride spray Product Information Product Type HUMAN PRESCRIPTION DRUG LABEL Item Code (Source) NDC:69547-212 Route of Administration NASAL DEA Schedule Active Ingredient/Active Moiety Ingredient Name Basis of Strength Strength NALOXONE HYDROCHLORIDE (NALOXONE) NALOXONE HYDROCHLORIDE 2 mg in 0.1 mL Inactive Ingredients Ingredient Name Strength BENZALKONIUM CHLORIDE EDETATE DISODIUM SODIUM CHLORIDE WATER HYDROCHLORIC ACID Packaging # Item Code Package Description 1 NDC:69547-212-04 4 VIAL, SINGLE-DOSE in 1 PACKAGE 1 0.1 mL in 1 VIAL, SINGLE-DOSE 2 NDC:69547-212-24 24 VIAL, SINGLE-DOSE in 1 PACKAGE 2 0.1 mL in 1 VIAL, SINGLE-DOSE Marketing Information Marketing Category Application Number or Monograph Citation Marketing Start Date Marketing End Date NDA NDA208411 01/24/2017 Narcan
naloxone hydrochloride spray Product Information Product Type HUMAN PRESCRIPTION DRUG LABEL Item Code (Source) NDC:69547-353 Route of Administration NASAL DEA Schedule Active Ingredient/Active Moiety Ingredient Name Basis of Strength Strength NALOXONE HYDROCHLORIDE (NALOXONE) NALOXONE HYDROCHLORIDE 4 mg in 0.1 mL Inactive Ingredients Ingredient Name Strength BENZALKONIUM CHLORIDE EDETATE DISODIUM SODIUM CHLORIDE WATER HYDROCHLORIC ACID Packaging # Item Code Package Description 1 NDC:69547-353-02 2 VIAL, SINGLE-DOSE in 1 PACKAGE 1 0.1 mL in 1 VIAL, SINGLE-DOSE Marketing Information Marketing Category Application Number or Monograph Citation Marketing Start Date Marketing End Date NDA NDA208411 01/24/2017 Labeler - Adapt Pharma Inc (079673287)
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Medical DisclaimerIntel demonstrated the capabilities of the Vulkan API at the recent SIGGRAPH 2015 event. This weekend it made a video available featuring its Stardust graphics demo running on a Windows machine powered by an Intel quad-core processor, comparing the |
changing dao cannot be spoken of, but it does offer clues in the form of a variety of images that appear throughout its eighty-one chapters. Several of the descriptions associate dao with the feminine, maternal, or female “gate.” In this context, dao is given three important connotations. It is responsible for the origin of all things, it is all things, and it provides the patterns that they should follow. The comparison to a woman’s body and its function of generation (sheng) identify dao as feminine, and therefore speak to the power of the female. The Laozi can therefore be read as advocating that female powers and positions are superior to their male counterparts. In modern scholarship, this is frequently noted, and several scholars have attempted to use the Laozi to support Chinese and comparative feminist studies. Images in the text strongly support these investigations.
For example, the text speaks of the gushen, the “spirit of the valley,” which is said to “never die” and is called xuanpin, or “mysterious femininity” (ch. 6). The character for “spirit,” gu, originally meant “generation.” It is identified with sheng (part of the character for gender and tendencies), and its shape is sometimes taken to represent the female genitals. In other places, dao is referred to as the mother and said to have given birth to all things (ch. 52). Contemporary scholars also point out that there are no “male” images or traditionally male traits linked to dao in the Laozi. Dao’s characteristics, such as being “low,” “soft,” and “weak,” are all associated with yin and femininity, thereby forging a strong link between dao and the female.
Yin tendencies are not, however, exclusively valued. The Laozi offers a more balanced view, which is why it can be used as a resource of feminism, but is not necessarily feminist itself. For example, it says that all things come from dao and that they carry the yin and embrace the yang, and that their blending is what produces harmony in the world (ch. 42). Yin is arguably more basic, but is prized for its ability to overcome yang, just as the soft can overcome the hard and stillness can defeat movement. These notions are applied to many aspects of life, including sexual, political, and military examples. These examples revere female traits, arguing that yin should be acknowledged for its numerous strengths, but do not reject the importance of yang.
Taken as a political text, the Laozi argues that the ruler should take on more female than male traits in order to properly govern the world. This is supposed to allow him to remain “still” while others are in motion, ideally self-ordering. Although this confirms the usefulness of female virtue, it is not an argument for it being superior, or even equal to male counterparts. Rather, it demonstrates how female characteristics can be used to promote efficacy.
Given that sexist practices have largely be defended by reference to texts and scholars that self-identify with the Confucian tradition, it is easy to see why contemporary scholars have looked to the Laozi as one of the major sources for constructing Chinese feminism. It is certainly the first major Chinese philosophical text that explicitly promotes a variety of female traits and values, which allows room for feminist consciousness and discourse.
7. References and Further ReadingAs humans emit more greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the Earth continues to warm. When I use the term “warm”, I mean there is an increase in thermal energy (heat) contained in the oceans and atmosphere of this planet.
We can measure warming by measuring temperatures; however, obtaining an accurate reading of the Earth’s temperature is complicated. Temperatures change with seasons, with locations, and there are natural long term variations that move heat around. So, we don’t expect temperatures just to continue increasing at all locations and at all times. We do expect the long term trend to be upwards, however, and that is what we’ve observed.
But if you follow the conversation about global warming, and particularly if you listen to cable news or online bloggers, you might have heard that there has been a hiatus or a halt to global warming. I’ve written before on this site that there is no halt, there never has been one. However there has been a vigorous debate about whether the increase in lower atmosphere temperatures has slowed down.
A new paper, “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus” just published today in Science deals with this issue. In particular, the lead researcher Dr. Thomas Karl and his colleagues investigate the quality of the near-surface temperature records and ask whether they really show a slowdown.
Dr. Thomas R. Karl. Photograph: Eric Bridiers./U.S. Missions.
The scientists make a number of improvements upon existing information. First, they focus on ocean surface temperature measurements from floating buoys and from ship-board sensors. We know that temperatures measured by ship sensors are often warmer than temperatures measured by buoys, in part because of the heat generated by the ship engine. A more thorough accounting of this effect has been implemented in the Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature data set version 4. This accounting is utilized in the paper.
Second, there has been a historical change in how ships measure surface temperatures. Decades ago, temperatures were mainly measured by insulated buckets. Around the time of World War 2, there was a change from insulated buckets to temperature sensors contained within ship hulls. The ship hull sensors recorded warmer water temperatures compared to the bucket method. A more thorough handling of the changes from buckets to ship hull sensors was also included in the new paper.
Finally, the new study used more recent estimates of the land temperatures. The new estimates combine multiple temperature databases into a single integrated whole.
The end result is that the temperature trends over the past 17 or so years has continued to increase with no halt. In fact, it has increased at approximately the same rate as it had for the prior five decades. But the authors went further by trying to cherry-pick the start and end dates. For instance, they stacked the cards against themselves by purposefully picking a very hot year to start the analysis and a cool year to terminate the study (1998 and 2012, respectively). Even this cherry-picked duration showed a warming trend. Furthermore, the warming trend was significant.
I asked lead author Dr. Karl for his comments on the significance of the paper and he told me,
Considering all the short-term factors identified by the scientific community that acted to slow the rate of global warming over the past two decades (volcanoes, ocean heat uptake, solar decreases, predominance of La Niñas, etc.) it is likely the temperature increase would have accelerated in comparison to the late 20th Century increases. Once these factors play out, and they may have already, global temperatures could rise more rapidly than what we have seen so far.
So what does this all mean? Well we knew the globe was warming. The best evidence has always been by measuring the enormous amount of heat going into the oceans. But what this new paper shows is that the warming in the recent years has not stopped and has not even slowed down.
With 2015 so far running hotter than any year on record, and with May temperatures expected to be in the 0.79–0.84°C anomaly range, it becomes increasingly likely that we will set another all-time record this year. With hope, this will end the discussion of the so-called “pause” or “hiatus,” which never existed in the first place.Scientists today announced the discovery of an extraordinarily preserved "dinosaur mummy" with much of its tissues and bones still encased in an uncollapsed envelope of skin.
Preliminary studies of the 67-million-year-old hadrosaur, named Dakota, are already altering theories of what the ancient creatures' skin looked like and how quickly they moved, project researchers say.
Further investigations may reveal detailed information about soft tissues, which could help unlock secrets about the evolution of dinosaurs and their descendents, the scientists added.
For now, the team continues to examine the rare specimen, which included preserved tendons and ligaments, and to prepare scientific articles on the find for publication.
"This specimen exceeds the jackpot," said excavation leader Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at Britain's University of Manchester and a National Geographic Expeditions Council grantee.
Most dinosaurs are known only from their bones, which are seldom found joined together as they would be in real life.
But "we're looking at a three-dimensional skin envelope," Manning said. "In many places it's complete and intact—around the tail, arms, and legs and part of the body."
(The excavation is the subject of Dino Autopsy, a National Geographic Channel special airing December 9 at 9 p.m. ET/10 p.m. PT. The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News and co-owns the National Geographic Channel.)
Find of a Lifetime
The hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur, was discovered in 1999 by then-teenage paleontologist Tyler Lyson on his family's North Dakota property.
It was an extremely fortuitous find, because the odds of mummification are slim, researchers noted.
First the dinosaur body had to escape predators, scavengers, and degradation by weather and water. Then a chemical process must have mineralized the tissue before bacteria ate it. And finally, the remains had to survive millions of years undamaged.
"What usually would have been wiped out by the decay process—the mineralization has been so rapid that it is trapped and preserved," Manning said.
"It's such a unique preservational environment here that we'll be able to say, Well, you basically need these conditions to mummify a dinosaur," Lyson, now a graduate student in geology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, told a National Geographic reporter during a field trip to the excavation site.
"I think that's going to be pretty neat."
Big Rear, Fast Runner
Plant-eating hadrosaurs are often called the "cows of the Cretaceous"—the geologic period that spanned 145 million to 65 million years ago—Manning said. They had horny, toothless beaks but hundreds of teeth in their cheeks and a long, stiff tail that was likely used for balance.
Preliminary studies are revealing a surprising side to these reptiles, suggesting that Dakota—even though roughly 35 feet (12 meters) long and weighing some 3.5 tons—was no slowpoke.
With the aid of a large-scale CT scanner, the researchers determined how much muscle mass was packed between the bone and skin of Dakota's tail.
This allowed the researchers to infer the muscle mass of the dinosaur's rear end, which they calculated is about 25 percent larger than previously believed. A more muscular rear end means more powerful legs, Manning noted.
He plugged this new measurement into a computer model his team created to figure out how dinosaurs moved.
"Our models confirm this hadrosaur would have had potential to run faster than T. rex," Manning said.
The preliminary calculations suggest Dakota could run 28 miles (45 kilometers) an hour. Tyrannosaurus rex tops out at about 20 miles (32 kilometers) an hour, according to the model.
For Manning, the finding makes perfect sense. Hadrosaurs are believed to have been T. rex prey, so evolution would have favored a faster running speed.
"And that's what our initial findings support," he said.
John Hutchinson studies the movement of living and extinct animals at the University of London's Royal Veterinary College. He said caution is warranted for claims based on computer simulations, which he uses for his own work.
The margin of error for locomotion computer models can be greater than 50 percent, he noted—enough to wipe out the speed difference between a hadrosaur and a T. rex.
"Knowing the leg muscle mass would reduce at least one uncertainty," he commented via email. "That's progress, but there are still huge uncertainties left."
Showing Some Skin
Research into Dakota's fossilized skin is also yielding image-altering clues to how hadrosaurs may have appeared, Manning's team says.
Though the skin has lost its color, much of its texture is still intact, allowing scientists to map it in 3-D to see what Dakota might have looked like.
"There seems to be a variation in scale size that might possibly correlate—as it does in modern reptiles in many cases—with changes in color," Manning said.
"There seems to be striping patternations associated with joint areas on the arm," he added, "and there's interesting information we're looking at in the tail as well."
The 3-D preservation of the skin has also prompted the researchers to search for traces of unfossilized soft tissue in the hopes that it might yield protein.
This April, for example, two teams announced the successful extraction and analysis of collagen, a bone protein, from 68-million-year-old T. rex fossils. Those findings supported the hypothesis that modern birds are descended from dinosaurs.
Manning's team is currently unable to discuss specific findings, which are pending peer review for publication in a scientific journal.
But team member Roy Wogelius, a geochemist at the University of Manchester, said: "We have an array of chemical analysis techniques that we're applying to the organism—and not just to the skin."
Remains to Be Seen
Other experts remain tight-lipped about the potential of Dakota to yield similar information as the T. rex studies.
Mary Schweitzer, a North Carolina State University scientist who worked on one of those projects, declined to comment until formal publication.
And Peggy Ostrom, a zoologist at Michigan State University who also studies ancient proteins for clues to how organisms are related to each other, commented only in general terms.
"It's rare to find an articulated skeleton and even more so to find one with fossilized soft tissue," she wrote in an email.
"If such finds show extraordinary preservation, they tempt us to wonder about the possibility of finding [unfossilized] biomolecules that might be remnants of the ancient organism."One day in June 1986, after the Knicks had drafted Kenny Walker out of Kentucky as King’s presumed (and ultimately pedestrian) replacement, General Manager Scotty Stirling was asked about King’s progress in rehab. He didn’t know; he suggested to reporters that they go ask King, who was working out at Upsala College in East Orange, N.J.
I was by then reporting for The Daily News; a colleague, Filip Bondy, and I decided to take a shot. We planned to sneak into the college’s gymnasium early, hide and peek at King working out. We did not factor in his ritualistic dedication. He was already inside, working out with his trainer, when we arrived.
Perched in the bushes, we watched through a window, though King was at the far end of the court and the view was not good. Several times, he turned to look, while we ducked for cover.
Finally, King appeared from behind us, having slipped out the exit on the other side of the building, a flawless back-door play. He asked us what we thought we were doing. Stirling suggested we come, we said. He had choice words for Stirling but stopped short of the door.
“You want to see me work out?”
“That’s why we’re here.”
In that instant, King had decided to take advantage of the opportunity to send the Knicks a message: don’t count him out. Against a college player, he played one-on-one, ran the floor without any noticeable limp and polished his dormant jumper.
“How do I look?” he said afterward. Pretty darn good, we would go home to write.
Our exclusive was dimmed that day by the shocking, cocaine-related death of the Maryland all-American Len Bias, drafted that very week by the Boston Celtics. King had to know on some level that it could have been him.
He would play only six more games with the Knicks, though none with Patrick Ewing, at the end of the 1986-87 season. The young coach Rick Pitino, who will be inducted into the Hall of Fame with King in September, did not think King fit his defense. General Manager Al Bianchi would bear the brunt of the decision not to re-sign King one night in January 1991 when he returned as a Washington Bullet with his frightful game face to haunt the Knicks with 49 points while fans serenaded Bianchi with “Al must go.”
This is not to suggest that King has lived an incident-free life since that telephone call in 1980, because he hasn’t, far from it. But in the context of what had already happened, that 1991 night at Madison Square Garden all but completed his career circle, just one digit short of a well-rounded 50.Legal Pot Is Here, But Stash The Wallet For Now
Enlarge this image toggle caption Ed Andrieski/AP Ed Andrieski/AP
On Election Day, voters in Colorado and Washington state legalized the use of marijuana for recreational use. What's next?
No, really, what happens now?
Residents in the Mile-High State are already looking to buy, says William Breathes, a professional pot critic for the Denver alternative weekly Westword. (By the way, that's a pen name for reasons that may be obvious.)
"I was in a shop the day after the amendment had passed here, and the shop owners were getting calls left and right from people asking if they could just come in and buy marijuana legally," Breathes tells NPR's Jacki Lyden. "People are just expecting to be able to walk into these medical stores right away."
But they can't — at least not until next year. Like Washington, Colorado still needs to set up a regulatory framework to handle what is expected to be a big expansion of its marijuana market, even though the state already has more medical marijuana dispensaries than it has Starbucks.
The growth of that industry has been remarkable to watch, Breathes has written. Three years ago he was hard-pressed to find pot more potent than bud from a dedicated grower with a few basement lamps.
"But now you see some really beautiful product in the stores," he says. "Some really well-grown medicine. And also, prices have come down," from nearly $400 an ounce in 2009 to around $250 today.
When legalization is fully implemented, prices could fall even further.
"There's a big market for it. I think people really want to get out and get to these shops," Breathes says. "It's pretty interesting and really liberating to go into a store and purchase marijuana legally. It's just a matter of seeing who's going to step up and open the first recreational shop."
The State Of Marijuana In 1977 Enlarge this image toggle caption Bob Daugherty/AP Bob Daugherty/AP An ad from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws supporting Carter's call for more relaxed marijuana laws. YouTube
That's because it could open the door to a clash between the state and federal government, which still classifies pot as an illegal drug.
With lawmakers in Rhode Island and Maine planning to introduce legalization bills next year, Daily Beast reporter Tony Dokoupil says, the question of legalized marijuana across the nation is not whether, but when.
"2014," he says. "Big pot is here."
Rebounding From Reagan
The push toward legalization may seem like a modern movement. But Peter Bourne, who served as President Jimmy Carter's drug czar in the late '70s, says it's been a long time coming.
"The [Carter] administration's position basically was that the penalty for marijuana use did infinitely more damage to people and their lives than the drug did," he says.
So Carter asked Congress to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana and suggested states be free to legalize if they chose. Pro-legalization advocacy groups ran ads on television in support of the president. Legalization seemed inevitable.
Then came the Reagan administration.
President Reagan famously called pot the most dangerous drug in the United States, and by the end of the '80s, Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign had made the issue of legalization far less popular.
"To me," Bourne says, "[that's] equivalent to telling somebody who's depressed to have a nice day."
Reagan successfully changed the national conversation around marijuana use, Bourne says. But before that happened, big tobacco companies were poised to get in on the act.
"I was in fairly regular discussion with the tobacco people," Bourne says. "They very clearly had contingency plans that they developed to grow and market marijuana should it be legalized."
Big Weed And Room To Grow
Now that legal pot is here, will cigarette companies dust off their old plans for mass commercialization?
Tony Dokoupil, a reporter for Newsweek and The Daily Beast who has written about the changing legal status of marijuana, says they'd like to — if history is any indication.
In the '70s, he says, "there were high-level conversations about adding marijuana to tobacco, creating a line of marijuana cigarettes, and being ready to jump in and market this."
As recently as 1993, when it looked like France was poised to legalize marijuana, Philip Morris trademarked the name "Marley." But when the estate of Bob Marley complained, the company claimed it had nothing to do with the reggae singer.
"Philip Morris said, 'No no, it could be any kind of Marley,' " Dokoupil says, like Jacob Marley, the cheap, cantankerous teetotaler from A Christmas Carol.
Cigarette companies are staying mum on whether customers could see Marley-like products in the U.S. anytime soon. But Dokoupil says the regulatory market such products would enter into — once it was created — could look a lot like the for-profit regulatory model in Colorado now.
"There's a ban on advertising," he explains. "There are cameras that track the marijuana from bloom to end-consumer, so the diversion into the black market is limited. There are extensive background checks on people who are part of the marketplace — so if you want to open a marijuana shop, you have to go through an extensive background check."
Once that model is in place, the consumer side of things might look a lot like Starbucks.
"I think you will have a variety of products at different levels of intensity, exactly like Starbucks," Dokoupil says. "You might be able to walk in there and in the case they'll have 12 different strains of cannabis. Behind the counter there might be hash. There might be edibles, like fizzy drinks or brownies. There could be a hot dog wheel turning. You could put THC in anything."
And, according to Breathes, legal weed could even draw tourism to states that offer it.
"I got a lot of emails from people really excited about this, " he says. "They're looking forward to visiting Colorado now."The two leaders visited Berlin Zoo to see the pandas Meng Meng (Sweet Dream) and Jiao Qing (Darling), and give them an official hello to the city.
"I am convinced that these two can become new ambassadors of our friendship," President Xi Jinping said.
The animals appeared unfazed by their high-profile visitors, choosing to chew on bamboo as a curtain was drawn back to officially unveil them to the public. The pandas, which arrived in Germany in June, will go on show to the general public on Thursday after being given time to adapt to their new surroundings.
Meng Meng, and his pal Jaio Qing, have had a couple of weeks to adapt to their new life
"We have achieved a lot concerning economic and social issues and also in terms of contact between our people. We will keep working on it. And now we have two very charming ambassadors here, the panda bears. I think that Jiao Qeng and Meng Meng are going to be very special ambassadors for our countries, and hopefully delight many people," said Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The loan of the pandas to Germany, which will pay about 1 million euros per year to host the bears, is seen as a special gesture. "For China these bears are nearly holy, there aren't a lot of them and they're very very rare," said DW's chief political correspondent Melinda Crane. "Certainly it is a sign of deep friendship."
President Frank-Walter Steinmeier had greeted the Chinese president with military honors Wednesday at the start of a short but highly significant visit.
Xi then went on to his meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said it was a "good opportunity" to expand relations between Germany and China before what she called difficult negotiations coming up at the G20 summit later in the week. She said the two countries could help calm the "unrest in the world."
Opening of markets
Speaking after their morning meeting, Merkel said she would like to see a mutual opening of markets and wanted a quick signing of an investment treaty which could one day lead to a full free-trade agreement with China. Germany wants to be treated equally on business matters and granted market access, Merkel said, adding: "That is very important for our companies."
She said that there were options for deepening cooperation with China on fighting international terrorism and that cooperation with China in third countries in Africa and Afghanistan was a possibility. Merkel said that an agreement to jointly build a hydroelectric power station in Angola had just been signed.
Merkel also raised the issue of human rights in China. She said discussions on civil society with Xi had been held and that a human rights dialogue must be continued.
Chinese President Xi Jinping with Chancellor Angela Merkel
International issues
The meeting came within the context of a changed US administration and Tuesday's missile test in North Korea.
Writing in the German daily Die Welt on Tuesday, Xi called for an intensification of ties and for China and Germany to assume responsibility for peace, stability and prosperity.
Merkel had previously described Wednesday's meeting as pure "coordination" as she is known to prefer a broader global alliance for Germany on issues such as climate, trade and African development.
Presidents Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Xi Jinping
Although neither leader mentioned pro-democracy activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo in their comments, there was an announcement from Beijing on Wednesday. The Shenyang hospital treating Liu for cancer "will invite to China renowned international doctors from the EU, Germany and other countries" to join their medical team.
Merkel has also raised concerns over China's treatment of German businesses and efforts by Beijing to work individually with European states to further its economic aims.
One Belt, One Road
Germany has been trying to persuade China to make concessions on electric vehicle production. The Beijing government has set a target of 8 percent of automakers' sales to be battery electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles by 2018, rising to 10 percent in 2019 and 12 percent in 2020. German carmakers have complained the targets are too much too soon.
China's multibillion infrastructure and development project that reaches across Asia to Europe and to Africa has also raised concerns in Europe.
China has announced it wants to share "growth, development and connectivity" and "collaborate more closely on concrete projects" with the EU. But EU leaders have raised concerns over adherence to market rules and international standards.
COSCO's container ship Panama docked in Piraeus ahead of its voyage through the expanded Panama Canal
'16 + 1' in Europe
In 2012 China set up the "16+1" mechanism for annual meetings with the leaders of 16 countries, including EU members Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovenia, the Baltic states and non-EU members Serbia, Albania, and Montenegro.
A number of projects under "16+1" are underway. They include the high-speed rail line from Belgrade, Serbia, to Budapest, Hungary, which is being built by one of China's top state-owned enterprises, and Athens' Piraeus Harbor, now controlled by the China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO), which is investing in it to become one of the largest container transit ports in Europe.
In 2016, Chinese foreign direct investments in the EU reached 35 billion euros ($39.6 billion,) a 77-percent increase over the previous year.Arsenal supporters' group angered by Stan Kroenke's £3m withdrawal
An Arsenal supporters' group has raised concerns after the club's accounts showed majority shareholder Stan Kroenke has taken £3million out of the club.
Arsenal say the payment is for strategic and advisory fees from the American's company KSE, but fans claim that it is similar to the amount raised by ticket price increases this season.
The club have disputed that claim and have said that ticket prices at the Emirates have gone up on average by 1% a year, which is below inflation.
But Tim Payton, of the Arsenal Supporters’ Trust, believes that Kroenke still has things to answer for over the issue.
He said: “Arsenal have a history of custodianship and all money in the club going back into the club.
“For this to happen, and happen at a time when ticket prices are being pushed ever higher and are forcing the ordinary fan out of coming to watch Arsenal, we are certainly going to pick up on this issue and ask Stan Kroenke questions at the AGM on the 16th October.”
He added: “Reading the small-print, the worry in the way it’s phrased is if this is going to become an annual payment.
“People may say that £3million isn’t that much, it’s a fraction of a footballer, but it’s exactly the amount that was raised by the 3% rise in ticket prices and people are really struggling with those tickets.
“We think that it’s a lot of money and we are concerned that this money has gone out of the club.”Michael Appleton for The New York Times
Read the final version of this article that ran in the newspaper, as well as a profile of Dennis M. Walcott and an analysis of the mayor’s attempt to cut his losses.
Cathleen P. Black, a magazine executive with no educational experience who was named New York City schools chancellor last fall, stepped down Thursday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced.
Mr. Bloomberg called Ms. Black into his office Thursday morning and urged her to resign, officials said, ending a tumultuous and brief tenure for the longtime publisher. Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference that he and Ms. Black had agreed that a change was required.
Ms. Black’s resignation, which follows a series of high-level departures at the Education Department, was nearly as surprising as her appointment. When Mayor Bloomberg plucked her from her post as chairwoman of Hearst Magazines to run the nation’s largest public school system, people in New York and across the country — including some of the mayor’s closest aides — were stunned.
Ms. Black will be replaced by Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott, who has long aided the mayor in educational matters, Mr. Bloomberg announced at the news conference, at 11:30 a.m. at City Hall.
“I take full responsibility for the fact that this has not worked out as either of us had hoped or expected,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “But now it’s time to look forward, not back.”
Ms. Black’s time as chancellor was troubled from the start. During her three months on the job, she offended parents with an offhand joke about birth control and bewildered City Hall aides when she seemed to mock a crowd of parents protesting the closing of a school. Aides complained that she required intensive tutorials on every aspect of education policy. And on Monday, a NY1-Marist poll put Ms. Black’s approval rating at 17 percent, the lowest ever for a Bloomberg administration official.
Inside City Hall, mayoral advisers said, there was a growing sense that Ms. Black could no longer do the job. But Mr. Bloomberg is famously reluctant to dismiss members of his handpicked team, and Ms. Black remained resolute.
At a February town hall meeting of the District 14 Community Education Council, in Brooklyn, Ms. Black was booed and heckled, but told the parents and teachers in attendance, “I have a three-year term, and I am willing and excited to fulfill it to the absolute end.”
But eventually even Mr. Bloomberg agreed it was time for Ms. Black to go, the advisers said.
At the news conference, Mr. Bloomberg said he and Ms. Black had agreed that news about her handling of the school system had become overly distracting.
“Cathie and I decided that it would be better to have somebody else lead our education efforts,” he said. “We both agreed the story had really become about her and away from the kids, and that’s not good. We’ve got to focus on what’s good for the kids.”
Mr. Bloomberg praised Ms. Black, saying she had done “an admirable job pitching herself into the work” and that he had “nothing but respect and admiration for her and the work she has done.” Asked whether he blamed the news media for its coverage of her, he demurred, saying, “It is what it is.”
Mr. Walcott appeared at the news conference announcing the change, but Ms. Black did not.
Ms. Black’s resignation is a stinging setback for Mr. Bloomberg, who has made education a priority for his third and final term. It was also the latest sign of trouble inside an administration renowned for top-notch managers and high-function style.
In many ways, the episode seemed to confirm anxieties within City Hall about a third term, which has proved problematic for previous mayors.
When Mr. Bloomberg abruptly announced in November that Joel I. Klein, a former federal prosecutor who had spent more than eight years as chancellor, would be replaced by Ms. Black, he dismissed criticism that she was unqualified. “This is a woman who is eminently qualified,” the mayor said.
But on Thursday, Mr. Bloomberg made a point of noting Mr. Walcott’s numerous connections to the school system. Like Mr. Klein, Mr. Walcott attended city public schools and has spent years in public service. Mr. Walcott taught kindergarten for two years in Queens, Mr. Bloomberg said, and holds master’s degrees in education and in social work. Mr. Walcott also headed the Urban League for a dozen years, where he helped develop programs to prevent students from dropping out, the mayor said.
“For the past nine years, Dennis has been a key part of all our education reform issues,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “He has been involved in our schools at every level, as a student, as a teacher, as a parent and as a deputy mayor. His children, you should know, went to our public schools, and he has a grandson now in public schools. So I think there is no better person qualified to step into the job of chancellor at this point.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Walcott does not have all of the credentials required under state law, so before he ascends to the chancellorship he must get a waiver from the state education commissioner. In the interim, Shael Polakow-Suransky, the school system’s chief academic officer, will serve as acting chancellor, officials said.
Mr. Walcott, who grew up in Queens and whose grandparents immigrated from the Caribbean, said he was “very blessed” to lead the city’s schools, saying, “with my children, my grandson, we represent four generations of public school students.”
“To me, the great equalizer in society is ensuring that every child receives a quality education, especially a quality public education,” he said.
Early Thursday evening, Ms. Black briefly addressed a crowd of reporters who had gathered outside her Park Avenue apartment building.
“It’s been a great privilege to serve the city of New York and the mayor for three months,” she said. “I have loved the principals, the teachers and the kids. Dennis Walcott is a great guy. We have a wonderful relationship and I wish everybody the best.”
“I went out, I bought a new pair of running shoes today, so I’m off,” she added.
Ms. Black answered just one question: Asked how she felt, she replied, “I feel great.”
Robert Jackson, chairman of the City Council Education Committee, said his first indication that something was afoot came late Wednesday afternoon, when education officials asked to postpone a Council hearing on the school budget at which Ms. Black had been scheduled to testify. About 10:30 a.m, Mr. Jackson said, just before the news conference, Mr. Walcott called to tell him the news.
Mr. Jackson said he would have preferred a candidate with more experience as an educator but thought that Mr. Walcott would have the mayor’s ear. “Dennis is a seasoned diplomat,” he said. “But knowing Dennis Walcott, and knowing the role he has played as an advocate at the Urban League, and knowing he had children and has grandchildren in the public school system, I think that Dennis is on the ground.”
Jennifer Freeman, an Upper West Side parent leader who had been one of many to balk at Ms. Black’s lack of credentials, said, “I guess zero was not the optimal amount of education experience for a chancellor, after all.” She added: “While I am sure there will be many things to disagree with Walcott about, at least there will be a substantive base from which to have a discussion.”
Mr. Klein, in a statement, said Mr. Walcott was a “superb selection” who “knows the field of education” and is “a fighter for kids.” Mr. Klein’s predecessor, Harold O. Levy, also praised Mr. Walcott, describing him as a “class act” and “consummate listener.”
City Councilman Lewis A. Fidler, who represents Brooklyn, said Ms. Black’s tenure “was bad from the beginning,” adding, “It wasn’t properly vetted; it wasn’t properly thought out.”
Ms. Black, he said, “didn’t have either a unique qualification in education or a unique ability as a communicator in the public sphere.”MANSEHRA: A local jirga in Shamali area of Battagram has decided to marry off an eight-year-old girl to a 26-year-old man to settle a dispute between two families.
Local sources said that the jirga was held last week to settle a dispute, which was result of the second marriage of the father of the minor girl. They said that father of the minor girl eloped with a married woman few years ago.
The custom of handing over women to rival party for settling a dispute is called vani in the area. The practice is still common in remote parts of upper Hazara.
“We have registered an FIR against a cleric, who solemnised the marriage of Farnaz Bibi with Sadiq Shah, and 12 other people including family members of both the bride and bridegroom,” said Jehanzeb Khan,” the district police officer of Battagram, on Sunday.
He said that Meherban Shah, the father of victim girl, contracted second marriage with the wife of Sadiq Shah some three years ago and fled the area.
The official said that local elders convened a jirga to settle the feud in accordance with the local tradition last week. The jirga issued a decree to hand over the minor daughter of Meherban Shah to the former husband of his second wife, he said, adding the knot was tied in the same jirga.
The official said that Syed Mehboob Shah, the maternal uncle of the victim girl, approached police to register an FIR on Saturday.
He said that FIR was registered against 13 people including Maulvi Ghufran Shah |
can lay claim to have expanded the epistemic range of public debate. Ideas once thought unsayable have become acceptable. This year was when the crisis in economics caught up with the crisis in politics. But the future contains the biggest issue to face Britain since the end of the second world war. Mr Corbyn’s gnomic utterances on Britain’s long-term relationship with Europe were telling. Labour’s muddled thinking is obscured by the shambolic approach of a ruling Tory party fractured over Brexit. The Labour leader has proved he can lead a congregation. But he will need a broader message to convert the masses.Photo
If you’re sitting on a plane at the gate and reading this column on an electronic gadget, you’re about to hear eight dreaded words: “Please power down your electronic devices for takeoff.” But this time next year, you might hear something very different: “Please put your devices on ‘airplane mode’ for takeoff.”
According to people who work with an industry working group that the Federal Aviation Administration set up last year to study the use of portable electronics on planes, the agency hopes to announce by the end of this year that it will relax the rules for reading devices during takeoff and landing. The change would not include cellphones.
One member of the group and an official of the F.A.A., both of whom asked for anonymity because they were not allowed to speak publicly about internal discussions, said the agency was under tremendous pressure to let people use reading devices on planes, or to provide solid scientific evidence why they cannot.
As I wrote in 2011, travelers are told to turn off their iPads and Kindles for takeoff and landing, yet there is no proof that these devices affect a plane’s avionics. To add to the confusion, the F.A.A. permits passengers to use electric razors and audio recorders during all phases of flight, even though those give off more electronic emissions than reading tablets.
The F.A.A. declined to comment.
Last year, the agency announced that an industry working group would study the issue. The group, which first met in January, comprises people from various industries, including Amazon, the Consumer Electronics Association, Boeing, the Association of Flight Attendants, the Federal Communications Commission and aircraft makers. The group plans to introduce its findings by July 31.
The group has several goals beyond determining the safety of electronics on planes, according to an internal document that describes its objectives that was shown to The New York Times. Those include ensuring that flight attendants do not have to be the social police for which devices are acceptable during flight and determining what the term “airplane mode” really means. Finally, the group wants to ensure that whatever rules the agency announces apply to devices that are not on the market today.
The report also hopes to replace multiple regulations with a single, concise set.
To guarantee that the F.A.A. follows through with its promise to relax the rules, Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, said she planned to hold the agency accountable by introducing legislation.
In a phone interview, Ms. McCaskill said she had grown frustrated with the F.A.A.’s stance on devices after she learned that the agency now allows iPads as flight manuals in the cockpit and has subsequently given out devices to some flight attendants with information on flight procedures.
“So it’s O.K. to have iPads in the cockpit; it’s O.K. for flight attendants — and they are not in a panic — yet it’s not O.K. for the traveling public,” she said. “A flying copy of ‘War and Peace’ is more dangerous than a Kindle.”
In recent months, Julius Genachowski, chairman of the F.C.C., sent a letter to the F.A.A. urging it to allow more electronics on planes. Airline pilots unions, travel coalitions and travel agencies have also asked the agency to change the rules. There have also been more episodes of unruly passengers who have been arrested or removed from planes for refusing to turn off their cellphones or iPads.
Ms. McCaskill met this month with Mr. Genachowski, who said on Friday that he will leave the commission soon, to discuss the rule. After the meeting, she said, “The idea that in-flight use of electronic devices for things like reading a book poses a threat to the safety of airline passengers is baseless and outdated.”
The issue is only increasing in importance as more Americans board flights with wearable computers. People are flying with electronics like the Nike FuelBand, Jawbone Up and FitBit, all of which track your daily activity. But before long, there will be passengers with Google glasses and an Apple iWatch.
Can you imagine pilots mandating that people shut down their glasses before takeoff?
“We’re going to start drafting legislation that would dictate these changes,” said Ms. McCaskill, adding that the F.A.A. was moving too slowly. She said she was meeting with various parties and corralling bipartisan support for action in Congress. “Let’s hope it’s not necessary, but I will be looking for vehicles to get this changed.”How can you make sure a cow yields premium, high-quality beef? According to a French winemaking and cattle farming duo, it's by serving them wine. In 2011, winemaker Jean-Charles Tastavy decided to conduct an experiment to prove if studies that say happy animals produce better meat are true. He partnered with farmer Claude Chaballier and began their test on three cows.
They began by serving cows water mixed with dregs of pressed grapes. But in time, the duo started serving them real, locally produced wine that suited the cows' palates so much, Tastavy claims they "ate with enjoyment." The result? A Michelin-starred chef said the cows' meat exhibited a "very special texture, beautiful, marbled and tender, which caramelizes while cooking."
The project ended up being so successful that Tastavy and Chaballier decided to expand beyond their initial three-cow, four-month plan. Since serving one cow up to two bottles of wine per day propelled daily feeding costs from $6 per animal to $18, the duo's new Vinbovin — a portmanteau of the French words for wine and cow — beef brand will cost you a whopping $122 per 2.2 pounds.
[Image credit: Picnic with wine via Shutterstock]
[via Time]
This article was written by Mariella Moon and originally appeared on Tecca
More from Tecca:Marijuana decriminalization took another step forward in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, with the City Council voting to pass a bill that would reduce the penalty for possession of small amounts of marijuana.
Per council rules, the legislation will come up for a second vote in March. After that, it would head to the desk of Mayor Vincent Gray to be signed into law.
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Possession of any amount of marijuana is currently a misdemeanor offense, punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. Under the decriminalization bill, possession of up to an ounce of the drug would be lessened to a $25 fine with no criminal penalty.
The bill’s passage might seem like a landmark policy change, but supporters of the decriminalization effort weren’t entirely happy with the proposal.
The legislation was amended on Tuesday to add harsher penalties for smoking marijuana in public. Public toking would be a misdemeanor crime, punishable by a $500 fine or up to 60 days in jail. That’s tougher than the $100 fine initially laid out in the bill.
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Gray (D), who supports marijuana decriminalization, led a last-minute push to amend the legislation. The mayor voiced worries about public smoking in a letter to councilmembers.
“This legislation does not adequately address the competing interests of those residents who choose to use marijuana, and those who do not,” he wrote. “Children in our city should not have to smell or breathe secondhand smoke as they walk to school or play on a playground.”
The sponsor of the decriminalization bill, Councilmember Tommy Wells (D), thinks Gray’s position places him and his allies on “the wrong side of history.” But Wells added that he hopes to improve the bill before a second vote in March.
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The biggest problem, in his view, is that the smoking ban discriminates against residents who live in public housing.
“If you’re in public housing — that’s generally a federal program — you can be evicted if you smoke pot in your unit,” he said. “If you go outside and smoke, you can be evicted if you get a drug charge… It really puts a double whammy on folks.”
The ideological split between Gray and Wells comes as both men vie for the Democratic nomination for mayor this April. Gray is a favorite in the primary, according to a January Washington Post poll.
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The fight to reduce penalties around marijuana in D.C. is an outgrowth of concerns of a racial imbalance in arrests. While African Americans account for half of the city’s residents, they make up nine out of ten people arrested for marijuana possession. Government data shows whites and blacks use marijuana at roughly the same rates.
Civil-rights advocates believe the penalties around public consumption of marijuana will unfairly target those in government-subsidized housing, where a drug conviction can be devastating.
“We don’t want to discriminate against people that are a lower economic standing than everyone else,” Douglass Sloan, vice president of the local chapter of the NAACP, said on Tuesday. “Everyone in this city should have the same rights and privileges as everyone else.”
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For the majority of D.C. councilmembers, however, concerns about smoky streets outweighed the worries about discrimination.
“My constituents don’t like seeing people publicly consume alcohol and I think it would be more reactive if it were marijuana,” said Councilmember Jim Graham (D), who represents Ward 1, a rapidly gentrifying area. “While I favor the decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana, I think we’ve got to begin with a conservative approach to public consumption.”
Ted Hesson was formerly the immigration editor at Fusion, covering the issue from Washington, D.C. He also writes about drug laws and (occasionally) baseball. On the side: guitars, urban biking, and fiction.Greensboro police said Monday afternoon that they now believe as many as 50 to 60 guns were stolen during the semi-annual Gun and Knife Show. Investigators said the thefts were reported by security guards at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex who discovered the breach early Sunday before the event opened to the public. Earlier on Monday, police were able to identify about 25 of the stolen guns and enter them into a national database to alert law enforcement officials of their theft. Investigators said the guns, which include handguns and assault-type rifles, were taken from two vendors who had stored the weapons in their rented booths sometime between midnight and 5 a.m. Police said two rifles and one handgun taken during the heist were found in a bushy area on coliseum property. Police have not identified any suspects. Authorities caution people about buying weapons from less-than-reputable sources. Knowingly purchasing a stolen weapon is a class H felony. Anyone with information about the case is asked to contact Crime Stoppers at 336-373-1000 or text a tip to 274637 using the key word badboyz.
Greensboro police said Monday afternoon that they now believe as many as 50 to 60 guns were stolen during the semi-annual Gun and Knife Show.
Investigators said the thefts were reported by security guards at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex who discovered the breach early Sunday before the event opened to the public.
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Earlier on Monday, police were able to identify about 25 of the stolen guns and enter them into a national database to alert law enforcement officials of their theft.
Investigators said the guns, which include handguns and assault-type rifles, were taken from two vendors who had stored the weapons in their rented booths sometime between midnight and 5 a.m.
Police said two rifles and one handgun taken during the heist were found in a bushy area on coliseum property.
Police have not identified any suspects.
Authorities caution people about buying weapons from less-than-reputable sources.
Knowingly purchasing a stolen weapon is a class H felony.
Anyone with information about the case is asked to contact Crime Stoppers at 336-373-1000 or text a tip to 274637 using the key word badboyz.
AlertMeAccording to an interview conducted by Larry Chen at Speedhunters.com, it appears that Vaughn Gittin Jr. is very likely to miss Round 7 of the Formula Drift championship at Irwindale Speedway in October. This is due to his horrifying crash in Texas. The S197 chassis Ford Mustang is totaled after the hard hit with the k-rail at Texas Motor Speedway. (video)
The backup car he has is now on a crate heading to Japan, we are told, which eliminates its use for the Irwindale Speedway weekend. His new S550 demo chassis seen at events like Street Driven Tour X Hyperfest this year is a demo car and not built to Formula Drift legal specs eliminating another option for him. A tough break to end his 2015 season. He is also only one of three drivers left to run every single Formula Drift event since inception. He would be removed from the list if he fails to attend Irwindale Speedway later this year. Below is an exact recount of what he said. What are your thoughts on this?
Screen Capture of Important Part of Speedhunters Interview – Full Interview Found HereA sixth woman has claimed she was groped by George HW Bush, describing an incident when she was just 16 years old.
The former US president has already apologised after numerous reports that he inappropriately touched women while posing for photographs with them at public events.
Roslyn Corrigan said she posed for a photo with Mr Bush in 2003 at a gathering of CIA officers in Texas. She was just 16 years old at the time and attended the event with her mother and father, who was an intelligence analyst.
But while she stood for the picture with Mr Bush and her mother, the former president squeezed her bottom, Ms Corrigan told Time Magazine.
"He dropped his hands from my waist down to my buttocks and gave it a nice, ripe squeeze, which would account for the fact that in the photograph my mouth is hanging wide open,” she said.
Heather Lind, 34, claimed Mr Bush, 93, assaulted her four years ago while they posed for a photograph alongside the former president's wife More
“My initial action was absolute horror. I was really, really confused. The first thing I did was look at my mum and, while he was still standing there, I didn’t say anything. What does a teenager say to the ex-president of the United States?”
The magazine said it had spoken with seven people who had been told about the encounter by Ms Corrigan.
She is the sixth woman to accuse the 41st US president of touching them during photo calls. Actresses Heather Lind and Jordana Grolnick, author Christina Baker Kline, journalist Liz Allen and former politician Amanda Staples have all accused Mr Bush of similar incidents.
Three of the women claimed Mr Bush jokingly told them his favourite book was "David Cop-a-feel".
Christina Baker Kline, a British-born novelist, claims Mr Bush put his arm around her as they posed for a photograph before dropping his hand to squeeze her "butt" More
When the allegations emerged Jim McGrath, a spokesman for Mr Bush, said the former president apologised to "anyone he may have offended" but blamed his wheelchair for the impropriety.
“At age 93, President Bush has been confined to a wheelchair for roughly five years, so his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures,” said Mr McGrath.
“To try to put people at ease, the president routinely tells the same joke — and on occasion, he has patted women’s rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner."
But Ms Corrigan said the explanation had prompted her to speak out about her experience in 2003 — when Mr Bush was 79 years old and not using a wheelchair.CLOSE PSEG closed its last two coal-fired power plants in New Jersey this week, in Jersey City and near Trenton. The plants were victims of economic forces. The closures will improve air quality. James M. O'Neill / NorthJersey.com
The Hudson Generating Station was built along the Hackensack River in the late 1960s to replace an earlier coal-fired power plant on the site in Jersey City. (Photo: PSEG)
The power plant’s smoke stacks have loomed over the western edge of Jersey City for nearly half a century, spewing soot, heavy metals, and other toxic chemicals that impaired the air quality of nearby neighborhoods, the broader North Jersey region and New York City.
The coal-burning plant, which occupies a 250-acre site along the Hackensack River, had been a target of environmental activists for years, and the NAACP ranked it the third worst plant in the country in terms of its disproportionate impact on low-income people of color.
But on Thursday, the Hudson Generation Station, operated by PSEG Power, is being disconnected from the regional electric grid, and will go dark for good. The company is also closing a coal-burning plant near Trenton on the Delaware River.
“This is a win for New Jersey residents and the environment because it will reduce harmful pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions,” said Mary Barber, director for New Jersey clean energy with the Environmental Defense Fund.
The move leaves New Jersey with just one coal-powered plant, the B.L. England facility in Cape May County.
PSEG’s decision to shutter the two coal-fired plants mirrors a trend nationally, as the costs of coal and maintaining the aging plants are no longer cost-effective.
Coal would be shipped by barge up the Hackensack and Delaware rivers to PSEG's power plants in Jersey City and Mercer County. Here, a barge offloads coat at the Mercer Generating Station near Trenton. (Photo: PSEG)
Despite President Donald Trump's vow to bring back coal industry jobs, such plants have fallen victim to economic forces, including the declining cost of renewable energy such as wind and solar, as well as the influx of cheap, cleaner-burning natural gas used by newer facilities and the expense of keeping the old, inefficient plants operating reliably.
Since 2010, power companies across the country have shut or announced plans to close 253 coal-fired plants, according to a tally maintained by the Sierra Club.
“Coal continues to be uneconomic,” said Tom Schuster with the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. “These plants are aging and continue to be uncompetitive compared to renewables. Trump is unlikely to be able to reverse the trend even though he says he wants to.
CLOSE President Trump's is taking a stand for campaign promises: protecting coal. According to the AP, the move was in response to economic losses in the industry. Coal has increasing lost business to the renewables. on tuesday Trump began looking to roll back obama-era regulations like the Clean Power Plan, which seeks to reduce emissions from coal power plants. He also want to lift the moratorium on the sale of coal mining leases on federal lands. Trump's move to support coal mining is unlikely to spur a quick turnaround in the industry however. Coals biggest problem isn't regulation but competition from the natural gas industry. Wochit
“No one is building new coal-fired plants,” Schuster said. “The new capacity has been in wind and solar generation, and some natural gas. These companies are making decisions based on 20- to 30-year time scales.”
WIND POWER: Push for wind farms off Jersey coast loses steam
SOLAR POWER: PSE&G unveils plan to expand solar farms in New Jersey
CLIMATE CHANGE: Trump's unraveling of climate change policies could have big consequences in N.J.
The last day PSEG’s Jersey City and Trenton plants were operational was Wednesday. PSEG starts de-energizing the systems Thursday and disconnecting them from the grid. That process involves isolating the relays, transformers, motors and pumps, said company spokesman Michael Jennings. The company will also start a general environmental cleanup of the sites.
PSEG has been moving the remaining coal off the two sites into storage, and is looking for a buyer for it. When the plants operated, the coal would arrive on barges that were floated up the Hackensack and Delaware rivers.
PSEG said it has been approached by a number of people about future uses for the sites. “But we are long way from choosing a plan,” Jennings said. “We are at the beginning of that process and evaluating the alternatives.”
A few years ago, PSEG Power spent a combined $1.2 billion to add pollution control devices at the Jersey City and Trenton plants, after agreements prompted by state and federal investigations that the plants had been modified without installing the latest pollution control devices as required under the Clean Air Act.
The equipment, as well as the 2008 economic downturn and reduced use of the facilities, helped bring down emissions in recent years. In 2006 the Jersey City plant emitted more than 3 million pounds of toxic materials, such as hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid. By 2008 that had dropped 94 percent.
Likewise, in 2006 it emitted nearly 20,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, but that had dropped 99 percent by 2014. And it emitted nearly 7,460 tons of nitrogen oxide in 2006, which had declined 93 percent by 2014.
Carbon emissions have also declined dramatically.
Once delivered by barge, coal would be stockpiled in a huge mound some four stories high to await burning in the Hudson Generating Station along the Hackensack River in Jersey City (Photo: PSEG)
But PJM Interconnection, which oversees electric transmission for 13 Eastern states, has imposed new rules to ensure reliability of power plants serving the regional grid, and modernizing the two aging plants to meet the rules would be too expensive, said Bill Levis, PSEG Power's president and chief operating officer, when announcing in October that the two plants would close.
“The sustained low prices of natural gas have put economic pressure on these plants for some time,” Levis had said. “We could not justify the significant investment required to upgrade these plants.”
The closures drew praise from environmental experts, health advocates and politicians alike.
“Transitioning from coal means that sulfur dioxide, mercury, and other air toxins formed when burning this fuel will no longer be injected into the atmosphere that is shared by millions of people in New Jersey,” said Monica Mazurek, an expert on urban air pollution at Rutgers University. “It is heartening to know that a major New Jersey power-producing company is transitioning to cleaner fuels and at the same time reducing air pollution for the region.”
Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop agreed. “We worked with environmental groups over the past few years to advocate for the closing of this plant, as it was a contributor to pollution and dangerous air quality for residents in Jersey City," said Fulop. "The closure this week marks a move forward and toward an improved quality of life for those neighborhoods impacted and we commend PSEG."
Coal-burning plants emit a variety of pollutants that affect the environment and human health.
They emit carbon and other greenhouse gases, which contribute to climate change; and nitrogen oxide, a component of ozone, which can exacerbate asthma and other respiratory diseases, such as emphysema and chronic bronchitis. Some health experts compare inhaling ozone to getting sunburn on one's lungs. Exposure can increase the risk of premature death from heart and lung disease.
Power plants also emit heavy metals, small particles and other toxic substances that target the lungs, the brain or other organs, and affect the overall development of children and fetuses.
Some nitrogen oxide gets blown into New Jersey from coal-fired power plants in the Midwest. But even there, such plants have been closing because of cheap natural gas and the expense of improving older facilities.
“We know from modeling that when an air pollution source is located in population centers, even if there’s a large stack, the local area is going to be disproportionately impacted,” said Kevin Stewart, director of environmental health at the American Lung Association of the Mid-Atlantic.
“The economic and health consequences of using coal have been massive,” he said.
NEWSLETTERS Get the Breaking News newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Get breaking news from all around North Jersey delivered to your inbox as soon as it happens. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-888-282-3422. Delivery: Varies Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Breaking News Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters
“The Jersey City plant, despite pollution control devices, was bad for people’s health and for many years the external costs were borne by the public,” Stewart said. “The lung association wants the true costs to health to be recognized and accounted for when considering how energy should be generated and what facilities should be invested in.”
The Jersey City plant affected the environment in other ways. It used water from the Hackensack River to cool equipment. Fish and other aquatic life would get sucked into the system and killed.
Then, after cooling the facility's equipment, the water would reenter the Hackensack, often warmer than the river water, causing more harm to aquatic life, said Bill Sheehan, the Hackensack Riverkeeper.
In recent years PSEG Power has relied more on its large power plants in Ridgefield and Linden because they run on natural gas, which has become much cheaper to buy since production ramped up from the Marcellus Shale region of Pennsylvania. The company also operates a large gas-fired plant, the Bergen Generating Station, in Ridgefield.
The Jersey City and Trenton plants were each able to generate enough electricity to power about 600,000 homes.
PSEG Power is building a $600 million gas-fired plant in Woodbridge, as well as new plants in Connecticut and Maryland. The company also operates two nuclear facilities in Salem County, which produce close to 50 percent of the state’s electric output.
Read or Share this story: https://njersy.co/2rFuxJAInternal Market
Icesave: Iceland obliged to pay minimum compensation to British and Dutch depositors
PR(11)37
Iceland
is obliged to ensure payment of the minimum compensation to Icesave depositors in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, according to the Deposit Guarantee Directive. [1] This is the conclusion in a reasoned opinion the Authority sent to Iceland today.
The EFTA Surveillance Authority has the task to ensure that Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein comply with the terms of the EEA Agreement. The Deposit Guarantee Directive forms part of that agreement. According to the Directive, Iceland was obliged to guarantee for EUR 20.000 per depositor after Landsbanki and its Dutch and British branches, called Icesave, collapsed in October 2008.
While the Dutch and British authorities stepped in to compensate most deposit holders in Icesave's Dutch and UK branches, the Directive designates Iceland as being under the obligation to provide the minimum compensation of EUR 20.000 per depositor. By leaving the depositors in Icesave's Dutch and UK branches without that minimum guarantee, Iceland acted in breach of the Directive.
In May 2010, the Authority issued a letter of formal notice to Iceland, where it formally expressed this position. Iceland replied to that letter on 2 May 2011 and denies that the depositors in the Dutch and British branches of Icesave are entitled to any compensation under the Directive.
The Authority has now very carefully considered that reply. But it disagrees with Iceland and can only maintain its position.
“Iceland must comply with the obligations it has subscribed to under the EEA Agreement. It must ensure compensation of all depositors under the conditions prescribed by the Deposit Guarantee Directive and without discrimination,” says Mr Per Sanderud, president of the EFTA Surveillance Authority.
In its emergency response to the banking crisis in October 2008, the Icelandic Government made a distinction between domestic depositors and depositors in foreign branches. Domestic deposits continued to be available after they were taken over by New Landsbanki, whereas the foreign depositors lost access to their deposits and did not enjoy the minimum guarantee. It is not possible to differentiate between depositors to the extent they are protected under the Directive. By acting as it did Iceland failed to ensure that the depositors received the compensation to which they are entitled under the Directive.
The Icelandic Government is now requested to take the measures necessary to comply with this reasoned opinion within three months. Should Iceland not comply, the Authority will need to consider taking the case to the EFTA Court.
Read the Authority's reasoned opinion in full here.
Read the letter of 2 May 2011 from Iceland to the Authority here
Read the Authority's letter of formal notice of 26 May 2010 here
Read the Authority's Q & A here
For further information, please contact:
Mr. Xavier Lewis
Director of Legal and Executive Affairs
tel. (+32)(0)2 286 18 30
or
Mr. Trygve Mellvang-Berg
Press and Information Officer
tel. (+32)(0)2 286 18 66
mob. (+32)492 900 187https://www.rockislandauction.com/detail/1028/150
First patented in 1859 and sold as a sporting rifle before the Civil War (in calibers 32, 38, and 41 rimfire), Frank Wesson added a military model with a 24 inch barrel and chambered for.44 Rimfire. His carbine was simple and efficient - although too simple and efficient for most troops to like. Distinctive for its dual triggers, the Frank Wesson carbine was a single shot rifle with a barrel that tipped up for loading when the front trigger was pressed (the rear trigger fired the weapon).
The carbine’s major shortcoming was its lack of an extractor - meaning that removing a fired case required prying with fingernail or a knife in the best case, and using a cleaning rod down the bore in the worst case. Despite this, Wesson did succeed in selling 4-5000 of his military pattern carbines to state militias including Kansas, Indiana, Missouri, and Kentucky (and a paltry 150 to the Federal government). They did see use through the Civil War, and Wesson continued to improve the design (by adding an extractor, among other changes) and selling it commercially until 1888. The carbines found their way out West, and were used by Indians and settlers alike, thanks to their rugged simplicity.
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weaponsDeciding that two was not enough, Bushiroad has graced Great Nature with a third iteration of Grade 3 Bigbelly. Teacher’s Cane of Affection improved on some of the shortcomings of the original G era boss of Great Nature. Can this newer, bluer Bigbelly up his game once again?
[AUTO](VC/RC):Success 20000
[AUTO](VC)[1/Turn]:When this unit is placed on (VC), or when your G unit Stride, choose up to one card from your hand, call it to (RC), and it gets [Power]+4000 until end of turn. If you called a card, at the end of that turn, draw a card, and retire that rear-guard.
[AUTO](VC/RC)[1/Turn] Generation Break 1:[Counter Blast (1)] At the end of the battle that this unit attacked, if this unit is successful, you may pay the cost. If you do, choose one of your other rear-guards, [Stand] it, and it gets [Power]+4000 until end of turn.
At first glance, Astonishing Professor’s on-Stride ability looks like nothing but a straight upgrade from Teacher’s Cane. You still get to call something on-Stride, that thing still gets a power boost as well as an end-of-turn draw and retire, and this time what you call does not even need to have a Success ability, all for no cost. You can even do all of this on-Ride if you choose, though it is limited to once per turn, meaning you cannot do it twice if you Ride this unit and Stride in the same turn. Bushiroad loves to find strange ways to claim that they have balanced a card instead of completely power creeping them. In this case, you must give the power buff to the unit you called off of Bigbelly’s on-Stride skill instead of giving you a choice. However, since you will do quite a bit of retiring and need to refill key spots on your field anyway, you will likely want to be buffing the unit you called anyway. A restriction in theory, but not in practice.
The main takeaway, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, is that Astonishing Professor does what Teacher’s Cane did without using up a single one of your increasingly valuable Counter Blasts. Finally, about two years after the advent of Great Nature in the G era, we have received a Bigbelly that has what should have been our original on-Stride skill. Though late, having a Bigbelly with this skill is certainly not any less welcome.
The Counter Blasts come into play when looking at Bigbelly’s second skill. This newest wave of support for all clans has seen many retrains of previous on-Stride Grade 3s with abilities that work on Rear Guard and Bigbelly himself has not escaped that fate, though it is definitely for the better. On Vanguard circle or Rear Guard circle, Bigbelly becomes a Success-locked Tusk Master. After Bigbelly swings, a single Counter Blast will perform the majority of Crayon Tiger’s function for you. Stand a Rear Guard and give it 4000 power. Bigbelly does not need to be boosted and the targeted unit does not die at the end of the turn, but the tradeoff for that freedom of use is that using him will not net you a draw at the end of the turn. A small price to pay for running extra copies of Crayon Tiger that are, at the same time, incredible to ride as your Vanguard.
Prior to this set being revealed, I felt certain that it was time for Bushiroad to give us a reprint of Crayon Tiger. Crayon is becoming increasingly hard to find as its original printing moves farther and farther into the past and more and more new students join Cray’s most prestigious university. I was disappointed at the lack of announced Crayon reprints in this set, but now I see why. Even if you cannot afford to pick up Crayon Tigers, your new Vanguard has most of its ability built in. Bigbelly still likely will not eliminate Crayon from all players’ decks, but you may start to see Crayon being run at slightly lower numbers to make room for other valuable Grade 2s. This may even have the side effect of lowering Crayon’s secondary market price, but only time will tell on that front.
Overall, this new Bigbelly is a very solid card. No longer are Bigbelly decks locked into needing to cram as many Success-capable units into their deck as possible. Astonishing Professor allows you to run whatever you feel you need to in order to maximize your deck’s potential without sacrificing the consistency of his on-Stride ability. He does not necessarily elevate the Bigbelly archetype to a whole new level on his own, but he certainly does set the deck up to climb to new heights with more Rear Guards and G Units to be revealed.
Remember, if you want to keep up to date with past, present, and futures articles published on this website, we have a Facebook page that will update whenever something new is posted here. Give it a like or a follow to make sure you get a notification when important things happen in the world of Great Nature! Also, if you want to interact with your fellow Great Nature players, GNU has a Facebook Community where you can talk about tournament results, decks builds, and more!
Advertisementsboys will be boys
Toxic masculinity is probably destroying the planet.
A recent article in Scientific American shed light on why some men aren’t embracing eco-friendly behaviors. It may have less to do with what they think about the environment, and more to do with gender roles.
After conducting a series of studies with more than 2,000 participants in the U.S. and China, researchers found a cognitive link between greenness and femininity. Basically, eco-friendly behaviors like shopping with a reusable grocery bag are perceived as more feminine, so men are less inclined to do them.
This could be part of the reason why women have done more to reduce waste and curb global carbon emissions than men.
So is eco-friendly behavior just not macho enough? To get guys to go green, the researchers suggest using “men-vironmentally-friendly” (*shudder*) marketing with “more masculine fonts, colors, words, and images.”
Or we could, you know, choose to redefine what it means to “be a man.” After all, some of the impulses deemed “masculine” — like exerting power over others — are also behind the exploitation of women’s bodies and the earth’s resources. If gender roles are toxic for people and the planet, it’s time to rethink them.From time to time, politicians and other rulers-of-men like to categorize the natural world not according to biology, but rather for convenience or monetary gain. Take, for example, the tomato. The progenitor of ketchup is a seed-bearing structure that grows from the flowering part of a plant. It is, by definition, a fruit. In 1893, however, the US Supreme Court ruled in the case of Nix v. Hedden that the tomato was a vegetable, subject to vegetable import tariffs. Even if the tomato is, technically, a fruit, it tends to be treated in American cuisine as a vegetable, wantonly littering our salads with its jelloey gooeyness.
Corn and rice are another good example. The Bible forbids Jewish people from eating chametz - foods made from wheat, barley, spelt, rye, or oats - on Passover. Ashkenazi Jews consider corn, rice, and legumes, a class of foods called kitniyot, as forbidden on Passover as well. It isn't that they're forbidden, per se, but that they're easily confused for the real thing. As I learned in my high school Talmud class, the medieval Rabbis decided to forbid these not-technically-forbidden grains because of a principle called marit ayin, which literally means "what it looks like." The Wikipedia explanation is quite good: "While not against the laws of passover to consume kitniyot, a person might be observed eating them and thought to be eating chametz despite the law, or erroneously conclude that chametz was permitted. To avoid this confusion, they were simply banned outright."
Still, neither the Supreme Court's reclassification of the tomato is a fruit, nor the medieval Rabbis' designation of corn and rice as forbidden grains, is the most |
infrastructure needs to come alongside the tower infrastructure," Cressy said. "It should not be towers before social infrastructure. They should come on board at the same time."
The plans for the schools, community and child-care centres at CityPlace. (ZAS Architects)
Marj Poole has lived in CityPlace for seven years, and now has a 14-month-old daughter. When she moved in and saw the empty lot, she assumed high towers would be going in.
She said she likes raising her young family at CityPlace, with amenities like grocery stores within walking distance. A Toronto Public Library branch opened at Fort York Boulevard and Bathurst Street opened in 2014.
Poole was happy to learn that two schools are planned for the area.
"I'd love to send her there," she said of her daughter. "It would be so convenient."Let’s face it, most fan theories suck.
It’s fun in our heads to come up with a lot of ideas about the universes we love so much. I’d love to imagine Finn and Poe from The Force Awakens having a gay relationship while Rey does her own thing.
Maybe she even does solo-poly or some shit.
But I don’t dedicate entire blogs to it. I mean…I could.
…But I don’t!
…You’re welcome.
Sadly, we don’t get the same courtesy from James Douglas who wrote an article back in 2015 (credit to Joel Schlosberg for finding it!) called The Pixar Theory of Labor. At first I was happy it wasn’t such a long article because I thought that might make it easier for me to read and I’d have less things to analyze, etc.
So basically I was looking at it from a slacker perspective.
Shocking, I know.
Well, it ended up being the case that the length of this article is its biggest downfall.
It’s simply too short to really make its case that the entire Pixar universe is unified by a common theme of glorifying work at the expense of anything else. And some of its examples are just laughably short. Brave is a pro-work movie because the daughter has to work out issues with her parents? And because to do that she has to prove her independence?
Look, just because someone has to do something doesn’t make it work. Just because characters are put into roles or are put on quests or whatever else doesn’t mean the movie is about work. More generally, the definition that Douglas is working here at times jumps from one place to another.
First a movie is about work because it glorifies competition through “taking it easy” (more on this later, this is actually one of the better definitions for the record), another is because it relies on employees trying to be good at their jobs, another is because a character has issues taking it easy during retirement, etc.
The last example is possibly the most insulting example, the movie being discussed there is Up.
Now to be clear, I am all biased as all get out. I cried three times during Up and I would sure as hell watch it again. I quote Dug, the talking dog in the movie, who says, “Hello, I have just met you and aI love you!” all the fucking time.
So yeah, I’ve got some bones (no pun intended) to pick.
Really, to reduce the movie to how “even elderly widowers must find a new vocation” is overly-simplistic to say the least.
Elle, Carl’s wife tells him to go on a “new adventure” not to “go back to work” and taking up a vocation shouldn’t be confused with work either. Having a new hobby or something that animates your life isn’t necessarily the same thing as work. Hell, it’s often the opposite of whatever you happen to be doing for a living.
And this…this argument is just ridiculous:
In Finding Nemo and Brave, Pixar even managed to render family dysfunction as something more like a Human Resources issue. Both films represent an emotional crisis between parent and child as a managerial problem: Wayward child Nemo wants to venture out into the Great Barrier Reef, but anxious father Marlin wants to keep him at home; wayward teen Merida want to venture out into the moors of Scotland, but strict mother Elinor wants to keep her in the castle. Each conflict is resolved when the parent witnesses their child’s independent capabilities outside of the domestic sphere. Is there anything about these stories that couldn’t have been short cut by handing both parents this Business Insider article on the “8 Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers”? (“Empower your team and don’t micromanage.”)
Well of course a Business Inside article could fit snugly into a Pixar film. It could fit snugly within almost any film because those kinds of lists/clickbait articles often can! And that corporate empowerment quote could as well. That’s what it’s supposed to do. Corporate speak is often newspeak and doesn’t have to necessarily relate to anything in particular. Which leads for the precision of it to be, of course, determined in large part by those in charge.
So Douglas is just giving even more power to the concept of work here. He’s giving the bosses what they want in some sort of fan-theory enabled attempt to give Pixar the finger. And it just doesn’t work in most of the places.
Right, most.
There’s a few places where Douglas absolutely nails it.
And these moments, while few and far between, are the moments that really make the article for me.
Here’s one of them:
As do other techgiants (and the less so), Pixar positions working at the company as something more like a lifestyle choice than mere employment, with a corporate environment that houses a constellation of “perks” geared to ensure maximum employee satisfaction. On a visit to the Emeryville campus for a company profile for the New Yorker, Anthony Lane describes a weights room, cardio room, massage room, breathing room, free cereal bar, and two secret cubby holes, Lucky 7 and the Love Lounge, which are accessible through a passage concealed by a bookcase and a mini door that visitors must crawl through, respectively. Headquarters also house Pixar University, where employees can take courses in filmmaking and other skills.“Why are we teaching filmmaking to accountants?” is the rhetorical question former Pixar University head Randy Nelson poses to Lane. “[I]f you treat accountants like accountants, they’re going to act like accountants.” Accountants must not act like accountants; Pixar expects its employees to not merely deliver on the jobs they have been contracted for, but also to provide something more. This excess, epitomized as the complete entanglement of an individual’s private life with their employment, is at the core of Pixar’s conceptualization of what it is to be a person: In every Pixar film, the protagonist’s arc is oriented toward the ultimate goal of being an efficient, productive worker—whether employment has been thematized as being a father, princess, robot janitor, toy, ant colonist, harvester of screams, adventurer in South America, or otherwise. For Pixar, to live is to work. Cars is a film about an ambitious racecar who is forced to chill out and not be so competitive, except he really just learns that chilling out and not being so competitive is the key to being an even better competitor. This is coming from a workplace culture that, under the guise of compassion, has erased the distinction between free time and labor time, and expects their employees not to notice that they working that much harder. After all, free cereal! That means you can start work early enough for breakfast. In his New Yorker piece, Lane talks with voice actor John Ratzenberger, who remarks on the company’s “get up and go to work” ethos. “They really should be running Western civilization,” Ratzenberger says, a sentiment that scans as amusing at first and then sort of sinister.
This nails so many things on the head, it’s hard to know where to start.
So let’s start from the beginning.
When I was five…wait, wrong place…
This conflation of work with lifestyle is something I’ve touched on before with Google. Google wants to make you feel like your job is just a sort of play. There’s nothing of humongous consequence going on. Capitalism is fine. It’s perky and fun and your boss wants you to have fun too! Don’t worry about the taxes that are coming out of your paycheck, stolen from you. Don’t worry about the imbalances of power that exist at work whether your boss extends casual Fridays to Mondays. Don’t worry about the cabal of co-workers who are looking to report you for the least infraction possible, just so they can get themselves up the hierarchy and get more for themselves.
Don’t mind any of that! Why? Because work is fun!
And it’s so fun that you should stay here and study, work out, train to become a part of the company you may never even get the chance to. Accountants should study film! Filmography folks should study accounting! …Actually I doubt that works both ways, but let’s just give Pixar the benefit of the doubt just for the fun of it.
The point is, there’s no room fro a life outside of work for these companies. Whether they’re big tech companies or some of the startups who try to make work as “fun” as possible. And let me be clear, I’m not against whatever you do in your life for money to be a little fun. But it should be fun that’s created for yourself and by yourself.
Having “fun” dictated from the top down is fun that’s not actually intended to make people happier but instead just more productive. What the bosses are doing is replacing their sense of happiness with a sense of purpose. And it doesn’t really matter that the purpose is based on something the workers wouldn’t actually rather doing.
Here’s the next part in which Douglas knocks it out of the park:
With Inside Out, Pixar offers audiences the closest thing yet to a real world version of the stresses that accompany their protagonists’ fixation on work. Riley’s dad uproots his family from a comfortable middle-class existence in Minnesota and moves them to San Francisco for his startup, because that’s where the industry is. While there, he spends little time with his family, but is constantly running business on his phone, or heading off on errands. Riley is isolated from her friends, and has difficulty pursuing her normal physical activities. Meanwhile, the family’s possessions have been delayed by a wayward moving company. Although he causes all this, and at no small cost to his daughter’s mental health, Riley’s dad is not depicted as a villain. He loves his family, they love him, and together they work through the deprivations caused by the move. The narrative does nothing to condemn this state of affairs; indeed, it is Riley’s burden to accept them. Inside Out suggests that accommodating the pressures of capitalism is simply part of growing up.
Now, I don’t know if I agree with his conclusion but I like the rest of the argument. Ya know, in part because it’s an actually fleshed out argument and not a one-liner about a near-universally loved film like Up.
Regardless I did like Inside Out but this point still resonated with me. Did the mother and father ever consider the effects it would have on their daughter? She clearly didn’t get much of a say but why? She lost her friends, her familiar surroundings, her favorite spots to be, her entire existence was changed. I mean, for a company that markets their films to kids it does seem awfully anti-youth to have a move built at its very foundation on not taking their emotions, feelings or perspectives important when it comes down to the big decisions in life that impact the rest of theirs.
It’s even more ironic that this is a film dedicated to taking the emotions of not just children but people as well. It offers a chance for us to appreciate sadness as well as happiness and learn that sadness can be its own sort of joy. It can help us breathe a little easier and live a little more and love longer. Either for ourselves, for others, both or more.
But Inside Out is actually foundationally built on treating someone’s emotions very non-seriously: Riley’s!
And so I actually see the film, from the thread that Douglas is coming at as not only reverberating within pro-work lines (we must sacrifice everything to work, our children’s happiness even!) but also being against youth empowerment in some way. After all, Riley’s thoughts or feelings are never really considered. She’s just said to be “dealing” with the move and “adjusting poorly” and there’s never a serious conversation about how she felt about all of this shown.
And of course, it if it had been shown it would have been a comedy scene. We all know it would have. A child challenging parents authority on such a “high-minded” topic such a geographic repositionining? How could they even have thoughts on that! How could a child ever have anything productive or useful when it has to come to things that involve personal finances, or the changing of locations or anything that the adults have to discuss?
But of course, kids are people too.
This shouldn’t be a goddamn radical statement but it is.
And it’s time society starts treating children like they actually matter. Like they’re often more interesting than adults (and they are). They have so much capacity for love, creativity and energy and we squander all of this when we put them in situations where their voices are unilaterally dismissed because “the adults are talking right now”.
Fuck that.
…Sorry, where was I?
Right, so Inside Out is an excellent movie all of that aside. If you can push aside the foundational issues of having Riley’s positions on these matters consistently disregarded then the movie is delightful. And of course I’m sure there were big financial decisions to be made and it wasn’t exactly a situation her parents took lightly.
Still, in the end we must have the tired father who never spends time with his family.
The family who hardly gets a say in what the father wants for the family.
And a company gets to promote itself as forward-thinking in certain areas (mental illness, emotions, etc.) while never owning up to their very conservative (or standard) positions on things like work and youth empowerment.
But I dunno, most fan theories are shit, right?
If you enjoyed this fan-theory you can help me not do future ones by donating to my Patreon!
Wanna hear some of my thoughts on prisons? Here’s a recent op-ed by me at C4SS!
Remember, you can donate for as low as $1 a month on my Patreon now. $5 donations are great too!Broadway.com is pleased to announce A Month of Mormon, an exclusive daily video series about the making of The Book of Mormon, the new Broadway smash hit that just earned 14 Tony Award nominations and was named Best Musical by the New York Drama Critics' Circle.
In A Month of Mormon, Broadway.com viewers will get an inside look at the creation of the acclaimed musical from the show's authors Trey Parker (also co-director), Matt Stone and Robert Lopez, co-director/choreographer Casey Nicholaw, stars Josh Gad, Andrew Rannells, Rory O’Malley, Nikki M. James and Michael Potts as well as set designer Scott Pask, costume designer Ann Roth, lighting designer Brian MacDevitt, sound designer Brian Ronan and orchestrators Stephen Oremus and Larry Hochman.
The 28-video series will premiere on Wednesday, May 11, with new episodes launching daily.It's a couple of years after Summer Rose's disappearance. Ruby is still not coping well with the loss, and Yang is at her wits end trying to help the young girl move past nightmares and self doubt. Finally, she strikes on an idea. She tells Ruby that on all Hollow's Eve, it is possible to contact their mother wherever she is. After their father goes to bed, they sneak down to the living room with the board Yang had borrowed from a friend. She had prepared a small message that she would use to make it look like their mother was contacting them. Nothing could have prepared her for the shock that came at the stroke of midnight--Summer Rose reached through the veils of worlds and gave them a final message of encouragement. Ruby was so happy to hear from their mother. Yang struggled to hide the tears that their mother's final words evoked.Decided to go ahead and join the Halloween Contest at the group. Done in photoshop--maybe 30 hours.As a side note--I choose to refer to Summer Rose as their mother because even though she didn't birth Yang, she raised her. That, to me, makes Summer Rose her mother.Happy Halloween!Plot Edit
Lucy is a 25-year-old American woman living and studying in Taipei, Taiwan. She is tricked into working as a drug mule by her new boyfriend Richard, whose employer, Mr. Jang, is a Korean mob boss and drug lord. Lucy delivers a briefcase to Mr. Jang supposedly containing paperwork, but it actually contains four packets of CPH4, a highly valuable synthetic drug. After seeing Richard shot and killed, she is captured and a bag of the drug is forcibly sewn into her abdomen and that of three other drug mules who will also transport the drug for sale in Europe. While Lucy is in captivity, one of her captors kicks her in the stomach, breaking the bag and releasing a large quantity of the drug into her system. As a result, she begins acquiring increasingly enhanced physical and mental capabilities, such as telepathy, telekinesis, mental time travel, and the ability not to feel pain. Her personality also changes into a more ruthless and emotionless one. She kills off her captors and escapes. Lucy travels to the nearby Tri-Service General Hospital to get the bag of drugs removed from her abdomen. The bag is successfully removed and Lucy is told by the operating doctor that natural CPH4 is a volatile substance produced in minute quantities by pregnant women during their sixth week of pregnancy to provide fetuses with the energy to develop. Lucy is fortunate to have survived with such a large amount introduced into her body. Sensing her growing physical and mental abilities, Lucy returns to Mr. Jang's hotel, kills his bodyguards, assaults Mr. Jang, and telepathically extracts the locations of the three remaining drug mules from his brain. At her apartment, Lucy begins researching her condition and contacts well-known scientist and Professor Samuel Norman whose research may be the key to saving her. After Lucy speaks with Professor Norman and provides proof of her developed abilities, she flies to Paris and contacts a local police captain, Pierre Del Rio, to help her find the remaining three packets of the drug. During the plane ride, she starts to disintegrate as her cells destabilize from consuming a sip of champagne, which made her body inhospitable for cellular reproduction. Only by consuming more CPH4 is she able to hold off her total disintegration. Her powers continue to grow, leaving her able to telepathically incapacitate armed police and members from the Korean drug gang. With the help of Del Rio, Lucy recovers the drug and hurries to meet Professor Norman. Alongside Professor Norman and his colleagues, she agrees to share everything she now knows after Professor Norman points out that the main point of life is to pass on knowledge, something for which she now possesses an infinite capacity. Jang and the mob also want the drug and a gunfight ensues with the French police. In the professor's lab, Lucy discusses the nature of time and life and how people's humanity distorts their perceptions. She tells the scientists that time is the only true measure of human life and of existence. At her urging, she is intravenously injected with the contents of all three remaining bags of CPH4. Her body begins to change into a bizarre black substance which behaves like nanites, spreading over computers and other electronic objects in the lab, as she transforms these into an unconventionally shaped, next-generation supercomputer that will contain all of her enhanced knowledge of the universe. She then begins a spacetime journey into the past, eventually reaching the oldest discovered ancestor of mankind, implied to be Lucy. She touches fingertips with her, then goes all the way to the beginning of time and witnesses the Big Bang. Meanwhile, back in the lab, after an M136 AT4 anti-tank weapon destroys the door, Jang enters and points a gun at Lucy's head from behind. He shoots, but in the instant before the bullet strikes, Lucy reaches 100% of her cerebral capacity and disappears, moving into the spacetime continuum. Only her clothes, Louboutin shoes, and the black supercomputer are left behind. Del Rio enters and fatally shoots Jang. Professor Norman takes a star-filled black, presumably highly advanced, flash drive offered by the advanced supercomputer, after which the computer disintegrates. Del Rio asks Professor Norman where Lucy is, immediately after which Del Rio's cell phone sounds and he sees a text message: "I am everywhere." With an overhead shot, Lucy's voice is heard stating "Life was given to us a billion years ago. Now you know what to do with it."
Cast Edit
Scarlett Johansson as Lucy Miller, an unwilling drug mule who is accidentally dosed with a drug that activates a myriad of pre-encoded genetic conscious capabilities: The role of Lucy called for "an actress who could be believable as extremely vulnerable, as well as superpowered, when her exposure to an illicit substance inadvertently makes her acquire incredible skills." Impressed by Johansson's discipline, Besson considered her for the role, stating that she was immediately precise and professional, and he "enjoyed the way she talked about the film." He said, "She was excited for the right reason, which was the story. At that moment, it was a done deal for me. She was definitely the one."[9] Angelina Jolie is widely reported to have been originally cast as Lucy,[10][11][12] and as having dropped out of the role prior to filming.[13] Although Jolie was in "serious talks" with Besson since 2011 to star in his next directorial effort, then-untitled,[14][15] he stated that she was not his first choice for the role of Lucy.[10] Morgan Freeman as Professor Samuel Norman: Producer Virginie Silla, stated that given Freeman's experience portraying a character of wisdom, "it was pretty obvious that he was the perfect actor" for the role of Professor Norman.[9] Choi Min-sik as Mr. Jang: Besson said that Mr. Jang is the "best villain" he scripted since Gary Oldman's character, Norman Stansfield, adding that "Whereas Lucy is the ultimate intelligence, Mr. Jang is the ultimate devil." Besson and his film team "had to go and meet [Choi] in Korea, talk with him and discuss the story. And it was only at the very end that he said, 'Okay, I'm interested, I want to be in.'"[9] Amr Waked as Pierre Del Rio: Besson stated that "Del Rio represents the audience; he's basically you and me," adding that when Lucy has "lost all her emotions by being exposed to the drug," there exists "a tiny spark of emotion that's still there" when she is with Del Rio. Waked said that Besson having written the script was enough for him to want to star in the film.[9] Julian Rhind-Tutt as the polite British 'baddie' [9]
Pilou Asbæk as Richard [9]
Analeigh Tipton as Caroline [9]
Nicolas Phongpheth as Jii[9] Speaking of Besson's "interest in making the film one about the way we interact with our environment, and socially as well," Silla said that one of the goals was to bring together a diverse cast to show the planet's diversity and a mixture of the different cultures. She stated, "So we have Scarlett Johansson, who is Caucasian, Morgan Freeman, who is African-American, Min-Sik Choi, who is from Korea, and Amr Waked, who hails from Egypt."[9]
Production Edit
Marketing Edit
Several print and digital posters were issued by the distributor Universal Pictures for Lucy, with the theatrical release poster including the tagline: "The average person uses 10% of their brain capacity. Imagine what she could do with 100%."[34] On August 15, 2014, Universal Pictures released two advance posters for the upcoming comedy film Dumb and Dumber To that spoofed the theatrical release poster for Lucy, also a Universal Pictures-distributed film.[35] The two spoof posters were made public via Tweets from the Twitter accounts of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels.[36] On April 2, 2014, the first trailer for Lucy was released.[37] It was described as having "hit the Internet with the force of a punch to the head,"[38] with reviewers stating that it is "promis[in]g a wild ride with Johansson rendering people unconscious with a flick of her wrist,"[39] "awesome" as "the girl who was once exploited becomes very, very dangerous,"[40] and "wonderfully insane as Johansson goes from a drug mule at the mercy of her captors to a superhuman with remarkable control over her body and a diminishing capacity for mercy."[41] James Luxford of The Guardian described a common theme evident in the trailer that has run through Johansson's past three films: characters who "evolve, mutate or vanish altogether".[42] After the film premiered, however, its trailers were categorized as being starkly different than how the film actually plays out; for example, the film not being as action-packed.[43] A behind-the-scenes preview of the film was released on July 10.[44] In his 2014 book titled Great Myths of the Brain, Christian Jarrett quotes directly from the film poster, dismissing it and the film's portrayal of the potential for "mastering all knowledge and hurling cars with her mind" as being fully speculative fiction.[45]
Release Edit
Graphic novel and Possible sequel Edit
Hollywood journalist Nikki Finke reported in a July post on her film industry blog that: "In August, a Lucy graphic novel will be released online with four chapters appearing every other day for one week."[79] The first chapter of the semi-animated graphic novel was published on the international version of the movie's official website and features the same story material as seen in trailers with picture elements that move as scrolling takes place.[80] In an April 2014 WonderCon interview, Besson was asked about the possibility of a Lucy sequel and stated, "With Lucy, you'll see the end of the film. I don’t know how we can make a sequel, but if the film is huge, then I will think about it."[81] In August, while promoting the film in Taipei, where scenes were shot, Besson commented further about the possibility of a sequel: "I don't see how we can do one. It's not made for that. If I find something good enough, maybe I will, but for now I don't even think about it."[82][83] In June 2015, it was announced a sequel is in development.[84] In October 2017, it was rumored that Besson had completed the script,[85] but, on October 5, he announced on his Facebook page that he is not working on a sequel for Lucy.[86]
See also EditDue to the success of Paul Tough’s book “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character,” the corporate reformers seized on the idea that what is needed for academic success is not just strict discipline and constant test prep, but GRIT. Grit, meaning perseverance.
As Alfie Kohn writes, the original interest in noncognitive skills focused on emotional intelligence.
He writes:
“Education experts have long known that there is more to success — in school or in life — than cognitive ability. That recognition got a big boost with science writer Dan Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence in 1996, which emphasized the importance of self-awareness, altruism, personal motivation, empathy, and the ability to love and be loved.
“But a funny thing has happened to the message since then. When you hear about the limits of IQ these days, it’s usually in the context of a conservative narrative that emphasizes not altruism or empathy but something that sounds suspiciously like the Protestant work ethic. More than smarts, we’re told, what kids need to succeed is old-fashioned grit and perseverance, self-discipline and will power. The goal is to make sure they’ll be able to resist temptation, override their unconstructive impulses, and put off doing what they enjoy in order to grind through whatever they’ve been told to do. (I examined this issue in an earlier essay called “Why Self-Discipline is Overrated.”)
“Closely connected to this sensibility is the proposition that children benefit from plenty of bracing experiences with frustration and failure. Ostensibly this will motivate them to try even harder next time and prepare them for the rigors of the unforgiving Real World. However, it’s also said that children don’t get enough of these experiences because they’re overprotected by well-meaning but clueless adults who hover too close and catch them every time they stumble.”
Grit is the new term for an emotional disposition to comply, obey, do the job no matter how unpleasant. Persevere.
Now, perseverance is a good trait. Teachers have always taught children to persevere. But the US DOE is now trying to figure out how to measure grit. Another opportunity to measure, rank, and rate kids.
A few months ago, Paul Tough wrote a gripping story about a commercial fisherman who fell off the boat at 3 a.m,, with no life preserver, forty miles from land. It was a cover story on the Néw York Times magazine. The man ingeniously came up with strategies of survival, and he miraculously stayed afloat until he was found by a helicopter rescue team.
I sent an email to Paul to tell him how much I enjoyed reading the story. I added, “that guy really had grit, but how were his test scores?” Paul responded that he did indeed demonstrate grit, and he doubted his test scores were very high.
What can we learn from this story?WINNIPEG — Massive changes are on the way for Winnipeg emergency rooms.
Global News has learned three emergency rooms in Winnipeg could soon be converted to different types of health care facilities.
Further details are to be announced at a Winnipeg Regional Health Authority (WRHA) media conference Friday.
The drastic changes stem from a report ordered by the previous NDP government and co-authored by Dr. David Peachey. It called for the conversion of three community hospitals.
RELATED: Winnipeg continues to have Canada’s worst ER wait times
Peachey has been invited by the health minister to come to Winnipeg and will be at the media conference Friday to help explain how the changes could work. He does not know how many of the recommendations will be acted on or which hospitals could be impacted.
“Our understanding is that this [the report] has been reviewed by both the minister and the WRHA,” Peachey said. “And that they’re going to be making more specific announcements tomorrow [Friday].”
Winnipeg currently has four community hospitals: Concordia Hospital, Grace Hospital, Victoria General Hospital and Seven Oaks General Hospital.
The announcement comes days before Brian Pallister’s provincial budget, which will be tabled April 11.
READ MORE: ‘Manitoba is staring down a $1 billion deficit’: Finance Minister
Peachey said the changes could mean converted emergency rooms would no longer be “full-fledged” emergency departments. They would be converted to “urgent-care centres” that deal with rehabilitation and chronic care, he said.
This means, if you go to a Winnipeg hospital that is no longer an emergency room, then staff would send you to another location.
“It is a change…and people are uncomfortable with change. But this a change we are absolutely convinced is for the better,” Peachey said.
Peachey said he is unaware if there will be any job losses.
He also does not know if the province will save any money with the changes.
RELATED: Manitoba prepared to stand alone in health care fight with Ottawa
“We did not do a costing on this on this,” he said. “There could be so much upfront costs but down the road there could be saving costs, whether is be prevention or a different types of service.”
Emergency room wait times
There are currently seven hospitals in Winnipeg.
Concordia Hospital
Grace Hospital
Victoria General Hospital
Seven Oaks General Hospital
St. Boniface Hospital
Health Sciences Centre
The Children’s Hospital
Concordia Hospital had the longest wait time in the country in 2016, according to numbers released by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI).
The release stated three Winnipeg hospitals were the worst in the country when it comes to emergency department wait times.
Concordia Hospital had the longest wait time in the country at 6.8 hours. Victoria General Hospital has a wait time of 6.7 hours and St. Boniface General Hospital has a wait time of 6.5 hours – compared with a national average of 3.1 hours.
WATCH: Winnipeg continues to have Canada’s worst ER wait times
Peachey believes people should not be concerned about the emergency room changes.
“The goal here is to improve access quality and types of services that are available,” he said. “People will get a different type of care as it will be very patient-centred and have more rapid service.”Down a rutted street in a quiet suburb of south Kabul lives a man the CIA once locked in a cage for months as an enemy combatant.
Seven years later, Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakkil, 38, who served as foreign minister when the Taliban ran Afghanistan, may prove to be President Barack Obama's best chance of ending the gruelling war in Afghanistan - by enabling negotiations with America's enemies.
Such a prospect would have seemed far-fetched only a year ago; but now, as Mr Obama grapples with difficult Afghanistan decisions, faced with a faltering Kabul government and a spreading insurgency, all options are on the table.
Some of them may seem distinctly unsavoury for a president elected as a liberal idealist - in particular the notion of doing deals with Taliban commanders, and empowering former warlords and tribal leaders who have blood on their hands and in many cases hatred in their hearts.
But America's desperation to regain the initiative in an increasingly unpopular war has already produced some remarkable changes, and uncomfortable moral compromises are now on the agenda.
Among them, the Obama administration has indicated that it intends to make a fresh attempt to engage more moderate Taliban groups in talks with the Afghan government - in a determined effort to woo at least some of them away from the fighting that is claiming increasing numbers of American and other Nato forces' lives.
Mullah Mutawakkil, once a confidant of the one-eyed Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was held at a US base in Kandahar in 2002 after he gave himself up to American troops.
Now he is being politely wooed by a stream of senior US officials who make discreet visits to his villa, which is guarded by armed police, to hear his thoughts on what the Taliban mood is like and whether any of its leaders are ready for talks.
A soft-spoken and intelligent man who was one of the Taliban regime's youngest ministers, Mullah Mutawakkil is cautious about what can be achieved, but even so his thinking is music to tired Western ears.
He believes that the Taliban would split from what he called their al-Qaeda "war allies" if a deal was within reach. Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph in the guest room of his Kabul home, he insisted that a settlement to end the war was possible – and that it would be the West's best chance of stopping terrorists from turning Afghanistan back into their base again.
"If the Taliban fight on and finally became Afghanistan's government with the help of al-Qaeda, it would then be very difficult to separate them," he warned.
But there is, he says, another option. Taliban leaders are looking for guarantees of their personal safety from the US, and a removal of the "bounties" placed on the head of their top commanders. They also want a programme for the release of prisoners held at the notorious Bagram US air base in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay.
In return, he says, the Taliban would promise not to allow Afghanistan to be used to plan attacks on America – the original reason for American invervention, and the overriding aim of US policy in the region.
"The United States has a right to be confident that every government, whether Taliban or any other kind of government, would guarantee not to threaten America," he said.
The former foreign minister believes the Taliban understands that Afghanistan has changed since they were driven from power. They want a nation governed by strict Islamic laws but realise they cannot turn the clock back, he said.
He cautioned that negotiations would not be easy. "I am not an optimist. But talking would be better than war," he said.
The new American thinking is that what they deem the "nationalist" Afghan Taliban may be divided from its more extreme elements - and also from al-Qaeda, whose cohorts of foreign fighters are interested almost exclusively in jihad against the West.
Mr Obama is expected to announce up to 45,000 more US troops and an accompanying surge in spending on development projects, as part of the battle to win "hearts and minds".
But after eight painful years American officials have come to recognise that military and financial might are not enough to prevail in a land of baffling ethnic and tribal complexity. Some form of political reconciliation is needed as well.
"If you don't have both a military and a political strategy, you can't have either," a Western official said, describing the new thinking.
With that in mind, President Obama has recently spoken of al-Qaeda and "extremist elements" as America's main problem - not the Taliban. Such careful language seems aimed at opening a door to talks.
When Mullah Mutawakkil was a member of the Taliban government, he was respected by many ordinary Afghans and regarded by Western diplomats as a "moderate" who wanted to open the fundamentalist regime to the outside world.
As one of the few senior Taliban figures to be reconciled to the new Afghan way of government, he is in touch by telephone with old comrades who are still fighting. His contacts with officials from the US Embassy in Kabul and from the office of US special envoy Richard Holbrooke have increased in recent weeks.
"They come and listen carefully, but at the moment they don't say much," he said with a wry grin. "Until the US wants peace, there will be no peace."
This weekend, America's efforts - and those of other countries engaged in Afghanistan - are focused on forcing the pace in frantic negotiations over how to end the almost two-month impasse over the presidential election. It is widely expected to be announced over the next few days that too many of Mr Karzai's votes were fraudulently cast for him to be the outright victor.
Afghanistan's constitution requires that if no candidate secures more than |
certainly jarring. Remember, this is an application apparently targeted at law enforcement and national security agencies, not at ordinary individuals. Given this, it sounds to me like the video is suggesting that Riot could be used as a way to schedule a black-bag job to plant spyware on someone’s laptop.)
At the end of the video, there’s also a brief visual showing how Riot can use such data to carry out a link analysis of a subject. In link analysis, people’s communications and other connections to each other are mapped out and analyzed. It first came to the attention of many people in and out of government via an influential 2002 slide presentation by data mining expert Jeff Jonas showing how the 9/11 hijackers might have easily been linked together had the government focused on the two who were already wanted by the authorities. As Jonas later emphasized in the face of attempts to make too much of this:
Both Nawaf Alhamzi and Khalid Al-Midhar were already known to the US government to be very bad men. They should have never been let into the US, yet they were living in the US and were hiding in plain sight—using their real names…. The whole point of my 9/11 analysis was that the government did not need mounds of data, did not need new technology, and in fact did not need any new laws to unravel this event!
Nevertheless, link analysis appears to have been wholeheartedly embraced by the national security establishment, especially the NSA, and to be justifying unconstitutionally large amounts of data collection on innocent people.
We don’t know that Raytheon’s software will ever play any such role—it just appears to aspire to do so. As with any tool, everything depends on how it’s used. But the fact is, we're living in an age where disparate pieces of information about us are being aggressively mined and aggregated to discover new things about us. When we post something online, it’s all too natural to feel as though our audience is just our friends—even when we know intellectually that it’s really the whole world. Various institutions are gleefully exploiting that gap between our felt and actual audiences (a gap that is all too often worsened by online companies that don’t make it clear enough to their users who the full audience for their information is). Individuals need to be aware of this and take steps to compensate, such as double-checking their privacy settings and being aware of the full ramifications of data that they post.
At the same time, the government has no business rooting around people's social network postings—even those that are voluntarily publicly posted—unless it has specific, individualized suspicion that a person is involved in wrongdoing. Among the many problems with government “large-scale analytics” of social network information is the prospect that government agencies will blunderingly use these techniques to tag, target and watchlist people coughed up by programs such as Riot, or to target them for further invasions of privacy based on incorrect inferences. The chilling effects of such activities, while perhaps gradual, would be tremendous.
Finally, let me just make the same point we’ve made with regards to privacy-invading technologies such as drones and cellphone and GPS tracking: these kinds of tools should be developed transparently. We don’t really know what Riot can do. And while we at the ACLU don’t think the government should be rummaging around individuals’ social network data without good reason, even a person who might disagree with us on that question could agree that it’s a question that should not be decided in secret. The balance between the intrusive potential of new technologies and government power is one that should be decided openly and democratically.Share. IDW has adapted everything from Dead Space to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. IDW has adapted everything from Dead Space to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
With comic maker IDW Publishing celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, we spoke with IDW founder and CEO Ted Adams about the legacy of his company, as well as where it's headed in the future. IDW has made comics for video games, TV, and movies in addition to creating its own original hits.
Read on to hear Adams take you on a journey from the company's start to where it is now, visiting its biggest wins, hardest losses, and most iconic properties.
IGN Comics: Because we're talking about IDW's 15th anniversary -- congratulations, by the way -- why don't you start by reflecting on how IDW got its start. How did it come to be known for adapting popular properties like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers?
Ted Adams: It didn't start with us doing things like Turtles or Transformers. We started with much smaller properties. Our first licensed comic book was based on the TV show CSI. At the time, that was a hugely successful TV show. This was quite some time ago, and we were able to get those rights because of the relationship we had with CBS. Even though that was a really successful TV show, at that time, people weren't really doing comic books based on those kinds of shows.Certainly, Dark Horse was doing Star Wars, and there were other licensed comics here and there, but nobody was doing something based on a TV show like CSI. So it gave us an opportunity to come in and try something new. We were fortunate that we had success with that. Then over time our catalog of licensed properties grew and grew.
The first really big property that we took on was probably Transformers. In between CSI and Transformers we did a few other licensed properties like 24 and Angel and The Shield and a few other things here and there. But Transformers was the really big giant one that I think introduced us to a lot of comic fans in a way that we probably been before, because Transformers is such a giant worldwide brand.
IGN: What are some notable video games you've adapted that have been a big hit with fans?
Adams: We've been doing video game adaptations for quite awhile. Our first batch were all with Konami. I don't remember the exact order they came out, but we did Castlevania, Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid -- all with Konami. Metal Gear Solid was great because we actually got to spend quite a bit of time with the game creator of Metal Gear Solid, and he was very hands-on in the development of those comic books. Almost all of those books were drawn by Ashley Wood, who's one of the first creators to start working with IDW. Those were some really terrific comics.
On Silent Hill, which we were doing around that same time, some of those books were actually drawn by Ben Templesmith, who did 30 Days of Night for us. So those books were amongst the earliest licensed books that we were doing. Probably in most cases those were also kind of pre-Transformers in IDW's history. So those were certainly a big deal for us.Honestly, the Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill books continue to sell quite well today, because those properties are still hugely successful in the world of video games. We actually have a new Silent Hill comic that's coming out later this year. That'll be the first time we've done a new Silent Hill book in a couple years. So we're excited about that.
But for some time we were also EA's publishing partner, so we did quite a few graphic novels with them. Probably the bestselling there was Dead Space. We've done Duke Nukem. We've had great success with Borderlands. We actually have another Borderlands series that's going to be an ongoing series that launches this summer as well.
Video games are really something that have been in our blood from the very beginning. Even before we were publishing comic books, we were doing what's called "creative service work," meaning that we were doing art and design for entertainment companies. Many of our clients were video game companies.
IGN: When you see a popular video game pop up, like lets say Skyrim or Last of Us, do you think, "Oh, that would make a good comic book"? What's your approach to developing a comic book for a popular video game that you see out there?
Adams: Well, typically it's discussing it internally with the editorial team and finding out if anybody has a good idea for the way that the comics could be done. So that's really step one for us, is making sure that we feel like we have a good creative approach to the content. Then, once it's something we think we can do right, the next step would be, on the business side, for a deal to get done with the rights holder. In most cases, the video game developers own the rights themselves, so we would actually be doing a deal with them directly.
IGN: What's the strategy when you have a property -- let's say Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for example -- that's beloved by fans and has a legacy? How does IDW bring in old fans as well as get new readers?
Adams: Well, with something like Turtles, which it's the 30th anniversary of Turtles, so there have literally been comics based on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for 30 years. There's a huge, huge amount of material that already existed before we started publishing comics. For us, it's really a multi-pronged approach.
One is to do nice deluxe editions of the original comics by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. We've done a series of books called Ultimate Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles, which collects the Eastman/Laird comics in oversized hardcover editions. So we're really supporting the legacy of their work and bringing that out in a format that never existed before. So that's an important part of what we do.
Then we also have our own new version of the Turtles, which are the entry point for modern comic book readers. We take notes from the original material and from the things that have come before -- we're really putting our own spin on those. So those are actually plotted with Kevin Eastman, who of course is one of the creators of the Turtles, and written by Tom Waltz, who is our senior writer. So those comics are the ones that the modern comic readers, even if they weren't familiar with what had come before, could be introduced to the world of the Turtles.
Then the other thing that we do is we actually produce comics based on the Nickelodeon cartoon, and we call those The New Animated Adventures. So those are the comics that would be directly aimed at those kids that are watching the new cartoon.
IGN: Very cool. Just a side note: I absolutely love the ongoing Ninja Turtles series by Eastman and Waltz. It actually made our list of Top 10 Indie Comics That You Should be Reading.
Adams: I saw that, yeah. That was really nice to see. Yeah, I think Kevin and Tom and all the artists who work on that book have really -- it's a really fun series. I think it's nice because you don't really have to know the 30-year history of the Turtles to enjoy that comic. But if you do know the 30-year history, you're going to see a lot of easter eggs in there that are kind of fun.The proposal is avidly supported by Angangueo’s local government and most of its residents, who would benefit most directly from the low-wage jobs the mine would bring — at first a few hundred jobs, and ultimately perhaps several thousand.
Elsewhere in the region, however, many are wary. Silvestre Chávez Sánchez, the elected leader of another community near the monarch reserve, told me, “We know that no mining project in Mexico has ever brought lasting development for local people, but has always had problems associated with natural resource destruction.”
Grupo México’s track record is not encouraging. In 2014, a huge copper mine it operates in the northern state of Sonora was the site of one of the worst environmental disasters in Mexican history. About 10 million gallons of toxic copper sulfate acid breached a dam at the mine and spilled into two rivers that supply water to more than 24,000 people.
In Angangueo, Grupo México wants to process up to 1,200 tons of ore daily, and says it will do so in an environmentally sensitive way, said María Isabel Ramírez, a geographer who studies monarchs at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Morelia. But the company has been frustratingly vague on some key issues, including how much water and acid will be needed to extract copper, zinc, lead, silver and gold from all that ore, and where the resulting waste will be dumped. Nor has Grupo México fully explained where and how it plans to expand the old tunnel network that snakes beneath nearby mountains — the same mountains where monarchs roost every winter.
Ms. Ramírez worries that the huge volumes of water used by the mine will dry up mountain springs and threaten the viability of the oyamel fir trees where the butterflies roost. “We have many concerns about it,” she said, noting that the firs are already stressed by climate change and illegal logging, which persists despite years of efforts to stop it.
You might think that the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, which operates an active program within the reserve, would be leading the opposition. But the organization, which actively seeks corporate contributions, has been quiet so far, though the W.W.F.’s chief local representative gave me a blunt assessment. “My professional and personal position, W.W.F. aside, is that opening up the mine could have terrible implications ecologically and economically,” said Eduardo Rendón-Salinas, who heads W.W.F.-Mexico’s Monarch Butterfly Program.
The W.W.F. and other nonprofits, with some support from the Mexican government, are trying to develop alternate economic models for the region based on ecotourism, sustainable farming and logging, and native crafts, but funding has been limited and progress slow in a region where poverty is all but inescapable. The mine proposal, by contrast, offers a faster route — but to where, exactly? As Mr. Martínez told me: “It will provide work for a small group of people, but the cost may not be worth the benefit. We feel strongly that something like this may be catastrophic for the reserve.”
In Angangueo, memories are still fresh from the last catastrophe: the floods of 2010, when three days of heavy rain and hail produced mud slides and caused the local river to overrun its banks. After hours of gradual flooding, something suddenly gave way — no one is sure what — and sent a wall of water hurtling down the town’s main street. At least 30 people were killed, and hundreds were left homeless. Some locals blamed the honeycomb of mine tunnels above the town, but an official investigation absolved the mine and blamed the heavy rain — just another calamity for a community that has endured so much for so long.In the preseason, everything matters besides the final score. In the regular season and playoffs, it’s almost the exact opposite: Just about nothing matters but the score when the final whistle blows.
The Los Angeles Rams got a feel for that on Sunday when they came away with an ugly 27-17 win over the Jaguars, scoring just seven points on offense. Special teams provided the additional 20, proving to be the difference in the game for Sean McVay’s squad.
The first-year head coach praised John Fassel’s unit after the win, saying it was the difference in the game.
“It’s huge. It ended up winning the game for us,” McVay said. “Can’t say enough about those guys. Great job by Pharoh Cooper to start out the game, then we get the blocked punt – Malcolm Brown’s able to finish it. So John Fassel and Tyrone McKenzie did a great job with those guys, getting them ready for an excellent opponent. Can’t say enough about their effort and that was the difference in the football game today.”
The Rams’ special teams unit scored 20 points on Cooper’s kickoff return to open the game, Cory Littleton’s blocked punt and two field goals by Greg Zuerlein – one of which was from 56 yards out. His 29-yarder in the final minutes iced the game for the Rams, sealing the victory in the waning moments.
McVay is absolutely right when he says special teams won the game for L.A. with the offense struggling against an elite defense.
“It’s nice to have special teams and defense play well enough for us to win that football game. I think they did a great job,” McVay said. “Offensively, it was not good enough. … We’ve got to do a better job of capitalizing on some opportunities in the pass game, and that’s going to be a point of emphasis moving forward because we have to improve there.”
Related Watch Sean McVay fire up the Rams in locker room speech after win
McVay did credit the Jaguars for having “one of the top defenses in the league,” but the offense can’t continue to sputter the way it has. In the last two weeks, the Rams’ offense has generated just 14 points in the last two weeks. Special teams has outscored L.A.’s offense, which is a troublesome trend.
Facing a resurgent Cardinals team in London won’t do the Rams any favors, but a week off after that should help Jared Goff’s unit get back on track.While developing Ångström, the unit converter for the iPhone (check it out!), Alex Babaev and I have come up with the Ångström Style System.
ÅSS (hey, why not) is a JSON-driven styling engine for Cocoa with Dropbox synchronization and shake-to-refresh. It is a great way to separate the code of the app from its look and feel. It helped me try out different aspects of the color scheme, the fonts, the spacings and, most importantly the animations, without making Alex rebuild the app every time I wanted to change something.
Playing with the text caret
One of the many things we were obsessing over in Ångström was the text caret animation:
This is an animated gif, make sure to download the app and look at the real thing.
I wanted the caret to stick out much below and above the text. I wanted it to move like an elastic and bouncy string (whatever that is). I wanted to make it stretch and squeeze, not just blink. There was no way I could explain this in technical terms to Alex. How far the line should stretch? How fast the animations should be? Who knows. I needed a way to play with all the parameters until it felt right.
So I wrote Alex a letter explaining my idea in vague terms. I asked for a way to control the length and the opacity of both the long and the short states of the caret and the transition times between them. After having played with this parameters for some time I figured out I could not make the caret behave exactly as I wanted. Six variables were not enough. We have gradually added the variables for animation easing, the delays and the caret width.
This is the final “stylesheet” for the caret, after hours of tweaking:
"cursor": { "showTime": 0.2, "hideTime": 0.2, "color": "@colors.textNumberColor", "period12": 0.4, "timingType12": "linear", "period21": 0.2, "timingType21": "easeOut", "height1": 48.0, "width1": 2.0, "delay1": 0.3, "alpha1": 1.0, "height2": 78.0, "width2": 1.0, "delay2": 0.1, "alpha2": 0.33 },
This fragment is actually about 3% of the whole Ångström’s stylesheet.
Dropbox sync and shake-to-refresh
The two things that make ÅSS particularly awesome are Dropbox sync and shake-to-refresh.
Moving the style variables from the code to an external file is a useful idea all by itself: I could have been playing with the parameters and rebuilding the app having no clue about Objective-C. As far as I understand, this is how Brent Simmons’s DB5 works.
But we wanted to make ÅSS a real pleasure to use (no pun intended), eliminating the need not only to rebuild, but even to restart the app. Here is how the process of refining something looked for me thanks to ÅSS:
Open the app on my iPhone and go to the screen I want to adjust. Open the app’s ÅSS stylesheet from the Dropbox folder with Sublime Text on my Mac. Change the parameters in the file and save it. Shake my iPhone to see the change immediately.
So this is literally live tuning of a running app.
There is a different approach to styling: put sliders with the parameters to the Settings app during development. While this may look nice, we think it is very counter-productive. You don’t want to be constantly switching between the app you are designing and the Settings app. You don’t want to be scrolling through tens or hundreds of variables on the iPhone screen. You don’t want to struggle entering a color’s #rrggbb value on the iPhone keyboard. Sublime Text on a computer synced with the iPhone via Dropbox works so much better.
Alex has written a post on the internals of the system, check it out. It explains the architecture and features some code examples.Graceful Losers Triumph, In Spite Of Defeat
Enlarge this image toggle caption AP AP
I have a special respect for political losers. Losing can reveal a candidate's character in a humbling, vulnerable moment.
An Ohio politician who lost a race for governor once explained to me that most politicians are used to being popular. They were often class officers and top athletes as kids, who become lawyers, professors, or business owners. They get used to people listening to them, and laughing at their jokes.
"So when thousands or millions of people who know you by name reject you," the Ohio pol told me, "that's an earthquake. You want to shout, 'Impossible! You know me! I'm popular. There's some mistake!'"
Losers don't get inaugural balls or government limos. But they can lose with a grace that honors the decision of the people, even — or especially — after a contentious campaign.
Congressman Mo Udall used to tell of an old Arizona pol he said once conceded defeat by saying, "The people have spoken — the bastards."
Adlai Stevenson was a little smoother in 1952 when he lost the presidency and told his supporters, "I urge you all to give Gen. Eisenhower the support he will need to carry out the great tasks that lie before him. I pledge him mine. We vote as many, but we pray as one."
"The people have spoken and we respect the majesty of the democratic system," President George H.W. Bush said when he lost to Bill Clinton in 1992.
Al Gore fought hard for a recount of Florida ballots and their hanging chads in the disputed election of 2000. But when the Supreme Court upheld the state for George W. Bush, Al Gore declared, "Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it...
"I also accept my responsibility, which I will discharge unconditionally, to honor the new president elect and do everything possible to help him bring Americans together."
And when John McCain lost to Barack Obama in 2008, he said his sadness mingled with pride that the United States had elected its first African-American president.
"Tonight, more than any night, I hold in my heart nothing but love for this country and for all its citizens," he said. "I wish Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president."
People who lose with grace win respect, and can go on to do great things. Even — or especially — in defeat, they serve their country.Xbox and PC game Titanfall was originally prototyped running on a Ratchet & Clank engine, it was revealed in journalist Geoff Keighley's newly released The Final Hours of Titanfall feature. In the extensive and fascinating feature, it's revealed that Insomniac Games founder Ted Price called Respawn Entertainment cofounder Vince Zampella in July 2010 to tell him he could freely use Insomniac's "Luna" engine to make the game that would become Titanfall.
Price and Zampella were already friends and were both in similar situations, working on games to be published by Electronic Arts. (Insomniac's game was the co-op shooter Fuse). Because of their existing friendship and because Price wanted to help Respawn succeed, he offered up the engine, which powered Ratchet & Clank: A Crack In Time, and Respawn prototyped Titanfall--then known as R1--for a period of one year using that technology.
It's also revealed in the feature that EA offered to let Respawn use the technology behind Lord of the Rings Conquest and The Saboteur from the since-closed studio Pandemic Studios. Respawn also considered using Epic Games' Unreal Engine, but decided against it because developers feared they would not be able to achieve 60fps in that engine. EA finally switched over to Valve's Source Engine, which runs the final version of Titanfall.
The Final Hours of Titanfall also touches on many other interesting facts about the game's development. It's revealed in the the feature that after learning the specs for Microsoft's Xbox One, Respawn reached out to Sony in hopes of finding out how the PlayStation 4 would compare. However, Sony was not willing to talk specs yet and instead offered to help Respawn make a PlayStation Vita version of Titanfall. That, of course, never happened.
We also learn in the Titanfall feature that the version of the game you know and (maybe) love today wasn't always structured as you now know it. In fact, in an earlier version of Titanfall, players would begin rounds in titans, only to transition to a pilot as an "extra life." But in February 2013, just 13 months out from release, Repsawn changed the game so that you began as a pilot and could call in your titan from above, leading to the name Titanfall.
The full Final Hours of Titanfall hits on subjects like the rift between Respawn founders Jason West (who is no longer with the company) and Vince Zampella that grew as a result of the massive Call of Duty lawsuit, Titanfall's prototyped single-player mode, and how the game came to be an Xbox and PC exclusive. It also features some neat concept art of the various in-development versions of Titanfall, and shows off some early prototype videos of the game.Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE has claimed a decisive victory over rival Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE among Democrats living aboard.
According to the Democratic National Committee, Sanders defeated Clinton 69 percent to 31 percent, winning 23,779 votes to Clinton’s 10,689.
All told, 34,570 registered Democrats living outside the United States participated in 150 voting events around the world.
Sanders scored an early win in the first contest, held on March 1 in Wellington, New Zealand.
The victory gives Sanders nine pledged delegates, and Clinton will add four delegates to her commanding lead.
Despite Sanders’s overwhelming margin of victory, three of the Democrats abroad superdelegates have committed to supporting Clinton for the nomination at the party's national convention in July. Only one is backing Sanders.
And four other superdelegates from the Democrats abroad group remain uncommitted.Beloved Boston sportscaster Bob Lobel is going bionic to fulfill his dream of walking easily again.
Pool workouts, weight training and hobbling around on crutches just wasn’t cutting it. So the 69-year-old sports maestro and his therapists turned to the magic packed into the $40,000 AlterG Bionic Leg.
The battery-operated robotic smart-leg — that wraps around an injured limb (think “RoboCop”) — beeps, buzzes and propels the patient up stairs and down hallways. The company rents out the skintight exoskeleton for $700 to $1,000 a month, depending on hours of use.
“I enjoy using the machine, other than the fact it’s weird and makes sounds; it gives you that feedback, audio feedback, of doing it correctly or not correctly,” Lobel told the Herald as he took a test stroll at the Whittier Rehabilitation Hospital in Westboro.
“I could probably beat David Ortiz down first base with this,” he said. “I think I’m a lot stronger than I used to be.”
The indestructible local TV legend said he longs to walk freely again. “I dream about walking and I get up and say ‘I’ll just go from this dream to the world,’ but it doesn’t happen that way,” he said, adding he’s determined to at least use the new gadget to walk his 18-year-old daughter down the wedding aisle when that day comes.
It was at Super Bowl XLII in 2008 that Lobel says “things started to get dicey. I basically couldn’t walk.” The Patriots lost to the Giants (17-14) and Lobel lost his ability to walk with ease.
Soon after, he was diagnosed with spinal stenosis — a narrowing of the spinal column that resulted in weakness in both of his legs.
“I ignored it. ‘This isn’t that bad a deal. It will go away,’ but it didn’t,” he said. “I couldn’t walk without crutches. I said: ‘I have to fix this,’ but it wasn’t fixable.”
Lobel has been undergoing therapy at Whittier where his therapist, Michelle Diebler, says he’s a model patient. “He keeps coming back. He works hard,” Diebler said. “He takes everything we throw at him.”
After three back surgeries, Lobel also suffered a setback after falling three times in the past three years — but he’s not quitting.
“Pain is not the issue. It’s strength, control and balance,” Lobel said.
The technology is also being used to help stroke patients and could assist Boston Marathon bombing victims.
But for now, Lobel has one goal: “I go from two crutches to one crutch. Two canes to one cane. If I get to using one cane, I’ll be a satisfied guy. I’ve got to somehow fix this.”Area 51
Complexity Theory Conspiracy Theories
Graham Steel is a member of Team Prosecco at INRIA Paris-Roquencourt in France. He along with Romain Bardou of the related SECSI team at INRIA, and Riccardo Focardi, Yusuke Kawamoto, Lorenzo Simionato, and Joe-Kai Tsay in other countries, have written a paper to appear at CRYPTO 2012 that shows how to break RSA tokens in record time. The INRIA team names combine to say that dry white wine is sexy, which makes us think of spy movies, which often involve conspiracies.
Today Ken and I want to talk about possible conspiracy theories that involve computational complexity.
We learned of this through my Georgia Tech colleague Chris Peikert being quoted in the New York Times article on the story. The RSA secure token system is is a hardware device that is widely used by industry and governments. They have at least dented the system if not destroyed it. Of course following research crypto etiquette they have published their results, rather than keep them secret. But what if they had decided to keep them secret? What if we did not know that the RSA token system is breakable? Indeed.
The 2012 film “Travelling Salesman” has a similar premise. Four mathematicians have found a polynomial-time algorithm for TSP, so that not only all other NP-complete problems but also Factoring and related crypto problems have polynomial-time algorithms. They wrestle with the government officials’ desire to keep their discoveries secret. Although the film has been out for two weeks, its Wikipedia page currently lists its only critical reaction as coming from … us. And neither of us has seen the movie yet. What do you do when life becomes a house of mirrors?
All this sets us thinking hard about possible conspiracy theories. Were the sexy wine people the first to discover the RSA token flaw? Did others know about it for years and not announce their results? This detailed blog post by Matthew Green shows trouble brewing for years. But then why involve Chris, who isn’t even cited in the paper or any other coverage we’ve seen? Is all this a warning for us to go underground, to be seen only as “Pip”? One can get a pretty neat conspiracy theory started here. Hence this discussion.
Conspiracy Theory Theory
Conspiracy theories come in “historical” and “futuristic” flavors. Historical ones try to explain some real world events as having been caused by a covert group or group-within-a-group, which by definition is unknown to most of us. Futuristic ones postulate something that is currently unknown, and the group concerned may even be known.
Our friends at Wikipedia have a list of prominent theories here. It is interesting to note that Katherine Young states
“…(t)he fact remains, however, that not all conspiracies are imagined by paranoids.”
And we add, not all conspiracy theories are wrong either. It is incontestably true that a US President was assassinated by conspiracy in the ’60s: Lincoln. How might we possibly tell which are which?
One of the most fun recent conspiracy theories is based on the upcoming London Olympic Games. Their logo is:
Go here for an amusing, we think, discussion of how school children actually designed the logo via tangrams. This is a nice example of a fun theory.
Well there is also a non-fun theory: Iran threatened to boycott the Games based on the rumor that the logo really spells “Zion”—as if the Illuminati were behind it. The main supporting argument is that the little central diamond cannot be part of “2012,” but goes neatly as the dot for the ‘i’ in “Zion.”
However the tangram aesthetic has something to say here. How many of you like us have doodled during lectures or meetings, the kind of doodle where you make a 2-coloring where regions touch at points? The diamond similarly holds the other parts of the London 2012 logo together.
With historical conspiracy theories the known event E is presumed unlikely without the conspiracy as explanation—but usually the conspiracy itself should be presumed unlikely. When an alternative explanation is natural enough to have higher prior likelihood, such as we claim for the logo’s diamond, that’s concrete evidence against the theory. In the futuristic case the relevant “prior probabilities” may be harder to judge, but current expertise may enable one to gauge them.
Ten Theory Theories
Let’s turn now to computer and complexity based conspiracy theories. We are kidding here—let us repeat, we are just having fun. We do not really believe any of these on our “Top Ten” list—or do we?
Quantum Computers Already Exist. Notwithstanding—cool to use that word—our recent many columns on quantum computers, some believe that they already exist. Certain agencies here and elsewhere might be running one right now—how could we know?
Now to test our framework, is it true that those skeptical of quantum computing are the ones who assign the lowest “prior” to this unknown postulate? Or does the allegedly conspiratorial nature of the skepticism correlate positively with it? On the other hand, does a technological advance like this one with ion traps enhance the postulate?
Factoring Really Is Easy. This is similar to the last, but now they can factor in polynomial time on a laptop, rather than need a quantum computer. Ken and I think this one has a much higher prior, almost on the order of “Breaking Engima Really Is Easy” in 1939.
John von Neumann’s Proof. Recall that Kurt Gödel’s letter to von Neumann was never answered. Or was it? The problem solving ability of von Neumann is legendary, so could he have actually proved it long ago? He worked for various secret government agencies, so would they tell us if they really had a proof?
The Supercomputer Fraud. Actually hardware is mostly lights and fakes. Inside is one laptop running a secret very clever algorithm that can solve huge systems of equations fast… OK, here’s another principle: sometimes a special case of a conspiracy theory can be taken seriously.
The Memory Chip Fraud. The number of atoms in the observable universe is believed to be less than, while Planck instants gives a generous 300 billion year timespan for our pocket of the cosmos. Thus every act of storing something to memory in the whole history of our pocket can be coded within 500 bits. Just doubling that leaves a lot of room for error correction and hashing and mirroring. The mathematics involved here has been known since Claude Shannon in the 1940’s. Hence no computer needs more than a single 1K memory chip, let alone Bill Gates’ 640K. The rest is for sales pitches—come on, you don’t really believe your cheap digital camera is storing millions of individual bits in the time it takes to press a button, do you?
OK, this is a joke, but it leads into the next two, which aren’t.
No True Randomness. Every string we write down or read is compressible to, say, 500 or 1,000 bits. That is, all our computing and instrumentation works within the range of strong pseudo-random generators, perhaps in blocks. Strong PRGs are commonly believed to exist. How could we tell the difference? One computer scientist who believes this is Jürgen Schmidhuber.
The Simulation Argument. This is legion in popular culture from “The Matrix” and “Inception” and other sci-fi, so we’ll just refer you to Nick Bostrom’s formulation of it. In theory we could tell the difference if something happened in the manner of The Truman Show where a light labeled “Sirius” falls from the sky. But are there any such events?
We offer one complexity-related observation. Although it is routine to say that classes like and have universal simulation, this isn’t strictly true. The universal function for doesn’t belong to —if it did, then would be in some fixed polynomial time bound, which it isn’t. Although proving this is technically murkier for “random” or “promise” classes like, the essential idea holds for any reasonable complexity class. Thus a universal simulation involves dropping down to a lower grade than the resources on which you draw. If our universe is convincingly universal, perhaps this is a well-motivated reason to reject the argument.
Computer Chess Fraud. Ironically the highest-level accusation wasn’t against a human for cheating with a computer, but |
added black French tips to give the manicure an edge.
Show: Kate Spade
The Look: Celebrity manicurist Deborah Lippmann painted hundreds of press-on almond-shape nails in advance of the presentation using Fade to Black and then “hap-haphazardly” applied dots with I’m Not Innocent, an opaque peach shade.
Miss fashion week? Don’t worry. You can catch up by checking out all of our fall 2012 coverage here.But Bronx residents like Oscar Rivera, a father of three in Mott Haven, say that while there is plenty of produce at his supermarket, Western Beef, the quality can be so poor — mushy tomatoes and brown bananas — that he does not want to eat it. His wife tried to order from FreshDirect as an alternative only to discover that it did not deliver to their address.
Mr. Rivera, 35, said they might give FreshDirect another try. “If it’s too expensive, we can’t get it,” said Mr. Rivera, who was laid off from his maintenance job last month.
Myrna Maldonado, 45, who is diabetic, also said she would consider using FreshDirect for food that she cannot usually find in her Morrisania neighborhood: Granny Smith apples, seedless tangerines and specialty pears. “But if I can get it cheaper elsewhere, I’ll go there,” Ms. Maldonado said.
Photo
Jason Ackerman, chief executive at FreshDirect, would not say how many orders had come in during the first few days of the expanded service. But he said that the company’s prices would be “very competitive” in the Bronx, and that certain foods may cost less than in Manhattan.
By the end of the year, he said, the company will also accept food stamps from some customers in a pilot program meant to reach more people in poor neighborhoods. The standard delivery charge of $5.99 (and a fuel surcharge of 47 cents) will be waived for those using food stamps, but not for other Bronx customers.
In the past, FreshDirect served some affluent neighborhoods in the Bronx, like Riverdale and Woodlawn. Mr. Ackerman said he saw the expansion of service to the rest of the borough as a small, first step toward helping residents eat healthier. “It’s not just access,” he said. “It’s also knowing what to buy and getting people in the right mind frame.”
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But critics say FreshDirect’s efforts do not justify the $128 million subsidy it received for its new headquarters in the Bronx, which the company said would employ residents for a third to a half of the 3,000 jobs there. Critics say the money FreshDirect is getting could have been used to help many poor families.
“FreshDirect didn’t come here to help the people of the Bronx,” said Heidi Hynes, executive director of the Mary Mitchell Family and Youth Center, which started a food-buying club this year to provide $25 bags of fresh produce and grains to the community. “They came here because they got a subsidy, and they’re only serving the Bronx because the people got mad,” Ms. Hynes said. “It’s insufficient to need.”
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At green carts and produce stands around the Bronx, many shoppers said they had not heard of FreshDirect. Some said it was not an option because they did not have a computer with Internet access. Others said it could not match the bargain prices in the Bronx.
“This is my FreshDirect right here,” said Ali Rivera, 56, a former cook who spent $3 for four pears and five nectarines at a stand in Fordham Plaza.
A bustling green cart at East 167th and Gerard Avenue in the western Bronx looked more like a dollar store this week, with offerings like a bag of five tomatoes and a bunch of extra-large carrots. Frances Sosa, a green cart worker, said she had more than 100 customers a day, about half of whom use food stamps.
“Every day, the same people buy here,” she said. “In supermarkets, you get it for $5, here it’s $1, where are you going to buy?”Exhausted traveler Johnny Sigmon, center, waits in line at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport after his American Airlines flight to Las Vegas is canceled.
Passengers may soon be seeing more cancellations on airport departure boards.
Several airlines, including Fort Worth-based American and Houston-based Continental, say they will cancel flights rather than risk paying stiff penalties for delaying passengers on the runway.
Continental's CEO told investors Tuesday that the airline will opt to cancel flights rather than chance being fined.
Aviation consultant Denny Kelly expects other airlines to follow suit.
Federal Fines for Delays Will Mean More Cancellations
AA says it will cancel flights rather than risk paying big fines for tarmac delays. (Published Wednesday, March 10, 2010)
“I think all of them will cancel flights,” he said. “They'll do it partially because they think they are going to punish passengers, and if they punish them, someone will get this legislation removed.”
Under new federal guidelines that take effect next month, airlines can be fined up to $27,500 per passenger if a plane is stuck on the tarmac for longer than three hours.
“How can they say there is nothing wrong with having someone sit on a seat and run out of water and everything and sit on there for three, four, five hours? That's ridiculous,” Kelly said.
Weird News Photos: Holiday Edition
With the new fines, a delayed MD-80 could cost American Airlines close to $4 million, and a fine for a full 757 could cost more than $5 million.
“It's unavoidable that more flights will be canceled to avoid fines,” said American Airlines spokesman Steve Schlachter. “It's one of the unintended consequences of a bill that has no flexibility.”
A spokesman for the U.S. Transportation Department said airlines can avoid fines by doing a better job of scheduling flights and crews.
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"Carriers have it within their power to schedule their flights more realistically, to have spare aircraft and crews available to avoid cancellations" and to rebook passengers when there are cancellations, said Bill Mosley, a department spokesman.
Frequent flier Dave Wooldridge said he plans to punish airlines that cancel flights by taking his business elsewhere.
“I won't fly that airline again,” he said. “They risk losing a lot of people if that's what they become known for, canceling flights.”
Traveler Andrea Ramirez also didn't agree with the airlines' tactic.
“I would definitely rather be late than not go at all,” Ramirez said. “That's for sure.”
The fines are scheduled to take effect April 29.If you thought Hillary Clinton would stop talking any time soon then think again.
The defeated presidential candidate told a fundraiser for a youth program that the best way to stop terrorism was to “understand” other cultures and their food.
Yes, really.
Hillary defended London Mayor Sadiq Khan, the man who once represented 9/11 Al-Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui, called moderate Muslims “Uncle Toms” and said terrorism was “part and parcel” of living in a major city.
Clinton said that Khan, who has called for Donald Trump to be banned from entering the UK for a state visit (while actual terrorists from Syria are free to return), had shown “steady, determined leadership”.
Hillary said the best way of combating terror was to “reach out to the world” in order to “understand” people living in foreign countries.
“Getting to know one another. Learning about the experiences, the lives, the cultures, the religions, the food,” she added.
One wonders what kind of “cultures” Clinton is referring to? Maybe the ‘culture’ of Bacha bāzī, where elderly Muslim men dress up young boys as girls and then rape them? Or could she be referring to female genital mutilation? Another expression of Islamic ‘culture’ now endorsed by imams living in America.
“This is not a time to lash out, to incite fear or to use tragedy and terror for political gain,” said Clinton, a comment obviously aimed at Donald Trump and anyone else who has correctly identified political correctness and tolerance of Islamism as creating a fertile ground for terrorist attacks in the west.
Maybe Hillary is right. Maybe we don’t need to arrest the thousands of jihadists who walk our streets. Maybe we don’t need to stop terrorists who have fought alongside ISIS in Syria and Iraq from returning to the west.
Maybe we just need to get a better grip on the dietary habits of Muslims.
Who knew it would be this easy to stop suicide bombers, rampaging knifemen and jihadists who plough vehicles into crowds of people?
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.A relative carries the body of a newborn child from B.C. Roy Memorial Hospital for Children in Kolkata in 2011. Photo by Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images
Each Friday Roads & Kingdoms and Slate publish a new dispatch from around the globe. For more foreign correspondence mixed with food, war, travel, and photography, visit their online magazine or follow @roadskingdoms on Twitter.
KOLKATA, India—The route to B.C. Roy Memorial Hospital for Children in Kolkata is a pilgrimage nobody wants to make. But many of West Bengal’s poor have little choice. Parents and their sick children camp on the hospital’s grounds like refugees, waiting to see a doctor. Lines of would-be patients snake through every corridor. In the intensive care unit, every incubator is occupied by a newborn in critical condition.
The overburdened government hospital is West Bengal’s largest pediatric care center, and after a series of high-profile deaths in recent years, it has become a public symbol of India’s ongoing struggle with infant mortality. But the story of B.C. Roy often portrayed in the national media paints an incomplete picture. In fact, the hospital’s case points to a larger system that is failing India’s newborns. In 2012, India recorded 44 infant deaths per 1,000 berths, according to a report by the World Bank. (By contrast, Luxembourg, which tops the list, reported an average of just two.) The problem is particularly severe in poor states such as West Bengal, which includes Kolkata.
Many parents, having sought treatment at inadequate hospitals in remote regions, are bringing their children to B.C. Roy already at death’s door. And the number of infants dying in West Bengal is likely even higher than reported: Nobody knows how many babies die in the seats of cars or crowded buses on the lonely, truck-dominated highways that reach Kolkata from the outer reaches of West Bengal. Indian newspapers write only about the babies who die after they already arrive at their destination, but logic dictates that just as many, if not more, die while still en route.
The state of infant care in West Bengal is in stark contrast to the birth of my own child in Breach Candy Hospital, one of Mumbai’s highly regarded private hospitals, in May. Six nurses tended to him, and my wife’s room featured a wide-angle view of the blue waves of the Arabian Sea crashing against the city’s shoreline.
As I investigated West Bengal’s hospital system, I was constantly reminded of the drastic difference between the lives of India’s rich and poor. And the division between those two worlds can often be a matter of life and death.
The story of B.C. Roy, according to newspaper accounts, begins in June 2011, when 18 babies died at the hospital over the course of two days. The news was first reported locally, but the outrage spread beyond Kolkata’s city limits. On national television, newscasters labeled B.C. Roy a “hospital of death.”
Hoping to blunt a politically poisonous scandal before it spun out of control, Mamata Banerjee, the state’s chief minister, or head of government, who doubles as minister of home, health and family welfare, established an inquiry into the infant deaths. Heading the inquiry was Dr. Tridib Banerjee, a private practice pediatrician (who is of no relation to Mamata Banerjee), and is known as the pediatrician to the state’s wealthy and elite.
Dr. Banerjee created the High Level Task Force, comprised of a group of health care professionals, to recommend things like the allocation of new equipment, the hiring of new doctors, and anything else that might prevent future incidents of infant mortality at the state’s many government hospitals. As a result, the intensive care unit at B.C. Roy was expanded, and carefully vetted hires were made.
But the worst was yet to come. In September, two years after adding modern equipment that Banerjee assured me was “as good anyone would find in the best American hospitals,” an astounding 41 babies died in the span of six days.
The national media pounced on the story; B.C. Roy was again featured at the top of evening news programs. Considering the failure of the High Level Task Force, the Mamata Banerjee regime had few other recourses other than to express regret over the tragedy and wait for a new scandal to cast the spotlight elsewhere. In India, scandals are as common as mosquitoes, and before long the cameras left the hospital.
But the chances of another headline-grabbing story coming from B.C. Roy are high. According to Dr. Banarjee, the shocking rate of infant deaths experienced in September only represents an increase of about 20 percent over the regular rate at the hospital. In fact, it’s not uncommon for B.C. Roy to lose four or five babies on consecutive days.
While pundits allege patient neglect or medical incompetence, no one in the Indian press has so far identified the cause. So the question remains: Why are so many babies dying at B.C. Roy?
According to Dr. S.K. Ghosh, the head of pediatric medicine at the hospital, the answer can be found along those lonely highways that drift in and out of Kolkata from the rural parts of the state.
Ghosh, 51, has the kind of soft, avuncular demeanor and tired eyes that evoke sympathy. A typical day for Ghosh involves telling parents their infant has died. Speaking in his office at the end of a dimly lit hallway painted with murals of Disney characters, he explains that he was hired in the wake of the hospital’s first reported wave of infant deaths in 2011, after Banarjee’s High Level Task Force was formed. Since then, Ghosh’s primary responsibility has been to ensure that lives are saved and that the hospital’s death rate doesn’t spike again.
But Ghosh can’t control the circumstances that dictate the infant mortality rate at the hospital. “This hospital has become media prone,” Ghosh says. “But look instead at the bigger picture. We accept so many patients from other places, and they arrive to us in an already deteriorated state of health.”
By “other places,” Ghosh is referring to what doctors call peripheral hospitals. These are generally government-run university medical centers or smaller, primary health centers that serve specific villages or rural communities. “People sometimes bring their sick babies here from seven or eight hours away,” Ghosh says. “We do everything we can for them, but eventually the patient load becomes too high for us to cope.”
Ghosh’s explanation is common among the private doctors I interviewed in West Bengal. While the media was tarring B.C. Roy as the hospital of death, relatively few parents actually complained of negligence on the part of the doctors. Most of them, in fact, arrived desperate for their children to be seen by anyone at all.
Infrastructure in West Bengal, like much of India, is extremely weak, and it grows weaker as it spreads out from major urban centers, like Kolkata, into smaller, more remote regions of the state. In these unseen places, parents may seek immediate treatment for their sick or malnourished infant and find nothing but endless lines of other patients or doctors who lack the proper equipment to assist them with their son’s or daughter’s needs. Only then, after all avenues have been exhausted and a state of emergency has been reached, do parents begin the long and expensive journey to Kolkata.
I visited B.C. Roy in February and spoke to parents of ailing babies. One father, Sujiauddin Saji, a 23-year-old house painter, first took his 4-month-old son Suraj to the local hospital in a district 30 miles north of Kolkata to treat illnesses related to malnourishment. The boy developed severe hypothermia while at the local hospital, and the family traveled to Kolkata looking for help. Members of the Saji family, including Sujiauddin, camped out on the B.C. Roy lawn for five days, waiting for the boy to be nursed back to health.
In Saji’s village, no one had heard of the hospital’s spate of infant deaths.
“I came here because this is a very famous children’s hospital,” Saji explained through a translator. “The last hospital where we were put him in this condition.”
According to Dr. Banarjee, the hospital conditions in Saji’s district, where his son caught hypothermia, are not even the worst in the state. Banarjee toured the state’s peripheral hospitals in 2011, as a response to the original media firestorm. The worst conditions he found were at Burdwan University Medical Center, a place he called “worse than a roadside toilet.” He and other government officials have tried to rescue Burdwan by recommending new equipment and more hospital beds.
After seeing Burdwan for myself, however, I cannot imagine that resources alone will make much of a difference. The first thing I noticed at the hospital, besides the overpowering stench of urine in the hallways, was the number of people waiting to be seen. They numbered in the hundreds, crammed into every hallway, burrowing themselves into dirty staircases, and clustering along garbage-strewn lawns. Families slept on bedding made from connected, uncut sheets of Chips Ahoy and Airhead candy wrappers, which are printed for import in a nearby factory. A local entrepreneur was selling excess or throwaway stashes of the candy wrappers outside of the hospital for 40 rupees, or 60 cents apiece.
The foil sheets were in treatment wards as well. There, 140 metal beds were aligned side by side with no curtains between patients. In places where there were no bed sheets, women nursed their babies while lying on Nutter Butter and Oreo cookie wrappers. Beneath the wrappers, the mattresses were stained with feces and blood.
Dr. B. Biswas, 34, an assistant professor at the medical college who works in the hospital’s newborn intensive care unit, explained that sometimes he has no choice but to advise parents to make the trip to Kolkata and visit B.C. Roy. “Our patient loads are impossibly high,” he explained. “We don’t have the space or the manpower to treat everyone here who needs our help.”
As Biswas spoke, several emaciated newborns were being sustained on machines brought in on the advice of Banarjee’s High Level Task Force. The babies’ frail bodies quivered under a deep purple, ultraviolet light. Bishwas said that with a ratio of 15 babies for every one doctor, the help provided by West Bengal’s government isn’t enough.
“It’s better than nothing of course, but we have doctors working 24-hour shifts,” Biswas said. “A few machines can’t help us double or triple our manpower.” Biswas explained that the bulk of his patient load comes from primary health centers that are supposed to function as a first response in villages here but are often unequipped to meet that challenge.
One such place is Block Primary Health Center in Barsul, a 15-minute drive from Burdwan, where there are only two doctors serving a population of roughly 150,000 people. Electricity at the Block Primary Health Center goes out every few hours. That would theoretically be a problem for performing complex surgeries, but the center’s lone operating room has been boarded up for several months, sitting empty and abandoned, collecting dust. But electricity issues are a problem for delivering babies, and according to the doctor on duty that day, 350 babies are born per year at Block.
The hallways and toilets in Block are filthy, and most of the metal beds in the maternity room are slanted or broken. Many of the babies born here arrive malnourished or premature, making them immediately susceptible to disease. When such babies are born, if one of the two rented ambulances in the area is available to take them, they are then dispatched to Burdwan in the hope that they can be saved. If Burdwan can’t help, the babies are eventually sent to Kolkata for a last-ditch effort to save a life. Too often, those efforts fail.
I felt uneasy as my driver took me across West Bengal’s sprawling Grand Trunk Road back to Kolkata. Any sense of charm I might have gleaned from the roadside dhabas eateries or rice farms was overshadowed by sense of disgust. I thought of my own son’s birth, and then I imagined this brutal journey played out over and over again by agonized parents fruitlessly hoping that their sick child might somehow survive.Here is half of the De Atramentis Pearlescent range. The range consists of ten colours – each colour has four metal finishes – Bronze, Silver, Gold and Copper. Here we have Cyan Blue, Brilliant Violet, Carnelian Red, Whiskey Brown and Amber Yellow and their compliment of metal finishes. Apart from one colour – Whiskey Brown Bronze which shows a hint of character, I found these inks boring and surprisingly unstable. Of crucial concern for handwriters is that all of these inks bleed – some very badly – even on Rhoda dot paper! But why so many metal finishes for a single colour? Copper and red for example, why bother, you can hardly see the shimmer? AND… once dry, the metal dust lifts off straight away at the slightest draught or touch! I don’t think that this was a very well thought out concept. If this was a rushed effort to jump on the Shimmer Ink band wagon, then these have failed… miserably.
NOW! De Atramentis Ebony or Apricot or Olive Green or Adular with a metal or metals would be worth getting excited about! De Atramentis are, without doubt, very good ink makers but these Pearlescents are VERY disappointing.
Both the Herbin 1670 range and The Diamine Shimmertastic range are far far better, more interesting, dynamic, beautiful and creative. In my honest opinion, if metallic inks are your thing, Diamine Shimmers are the best value on the market, and with the poor value of Sterling, what are you waiting for! Check out my Shimmer Ink reviews here and here>
All tests on Bockingford 200lb watercolour paper using a Desiderata Daedalus and a Noodler’s Ahab.
Many thanks to Amber Lea for the samples.
Just for the record – I do this for myself, I receive no remuneration what-so-ever and I tell it exactly how I see it.Sinn Féin’s European election candidates have said the arrest and detention of party president Gerry Adams in connection with the abduction and murder of Jean McConville has not had a negative effect on their campaign.
Senior party figures criticised the timing of the arrest, just weeks before the local and European elections in the North and the Republic, with Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness describing the issue as “political policing”.
However, Sinn Féin’s Dublin candidate for the European elections, Lynn Boylan, said the matter “hasn’t been coming up on the doors”.
“The only thing people would question is the timing, but it’s not an issue,” she said at the launch of the party’s European election campaign in Dublin.
“What people are saying is that it’s a change they want. They want a little bit of fairness from their Government and they are deeply disappointed with Fine Gael and Labour. ”
Ireland South candidate Liadh Ní Riada said the arrest was “upsetting”, but that people she met were more concerned with water charges and “the fact they can’t really afford to live”.
Matt Carthy, who is contesting the Midlands North West constituency, said his experience had been similar to Ms Ní Riada’s and that the development had highlighted how popular the peace process was in the region.
Martina Anderson MEP, who is contesting the Northern Ireland constituency, said people she spoke to had seen the arrest as “an attack on the peace process and on democracy”.
Sinn Féin is performing well in opinion polls, with all three candidates in the State seen as having a chance of taking a seat.
Ms Anderson is expected to hold the seat she took when Bairbre de Brún stepped aside two years ago for health reasons, but Mr Adams said there was “no guarantee any of our candidates will be elected”.
“These are all very tight contests and we won’t take any of that for granted,” he said.
Mr Adams said he did not know whether potential Sinn Féin voters would view his arrest as “good, bad or indifferent”.
“I do know that in terms of being about my own constituency and being with all of these candidates in recent days that the Sinn Féin organisation has been galvanised,” he said.
The party president said Sinn Féin candidates, if elected, would “stand up against austerity”, work for “a social Europe” and robustly defend the peace process, which he said other parties had failed to do.
Mr Adams said some opponents had portrayed Sinn Féin as anti-European, but he insisted this was not the case.
“I make the case all the time that Irish republicanism is essentially a European philosophy and we’re internationalists. The EU is not Europe, it’s only a part of Europe, but what we want is a social European Union and our view…is shared by millions and millions of other people throughout the European Union.”A REPORT COMMISSIONED by the Joint Committee on Environment, Culture and the Gaeltacht has recommended, amongst other things, that at least 10% of public workers in each department of government should be proficient in the Irish language.
The report on the Official Languages Bill 2014 was announced yesterday on Raidió na Gaeltachta by Senator Labhrás Ó Murchú, a vice chairman of the 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language 2010-2030.
Labhras Ó Murchú Source: Photocall Ireland
Other recommendations made within the report include that the visibility of Irish on both official online resources and social media be greatly increased, and that all official documents should be published bilingually in a single document.
Contrary to popular perception, the total number of people who can speak Irish in this country has increased slightly in recent years, with a 7% increase in number of speakers between the two most recent censuses in 2006 and 2011.
Percentage of Irish speakers by county, 2011 Source: CSO
Speaking to TheJournal.ie, General Secretary of Conradh na Gaeilge Julian de Spáinn thinks the 10% figure is very achievable, but doesn’t think the report goes far enough in other ways.
“The figure of 10% regarding Irish-speaking, it would take a number of years to implement,” he said.
But really all you’re talking about is having 30% of new hires to public service as being proficient. It’s not that much to ask, they’re already being taught the language in school, this would simply be making good on that investment.
The PSNI took a very similar approach when it came to balancing out the ratio of Catholics to Protestants in the police service, so I see no reason why the same principle can’t be applied here.
And far from costing the Government money, which is their usual bugbear, this would save money when you consider the amounts to be saved on the outsourcing of translating duties and that kind of thing.
De Spáinn is also heavily in favour of Ireland adopting the approach of the Welsh to their national language, primarily through a standardised system regarding what level of service people should be able to expect from the public service in their native language.The City of Vancouver has taken its battle with Airbnb to B.C. Supreme Court — petitioning to stop the nightly rental of a two-bedroom townhome in Fairview Slopes.
The lawsuit targets East West Investments, the company registered as the owner of the unit, as well as Heather Chang, a doctor listed as the company's director. Chang declined comment on the court filing.
The petition cites Vancouver's zoning bylaw as a rationale for prohibiting the rental of a home or apartment for a period of less than one month unless it's part of a hotel or bed and breakfast.
'Elegant 2BR in Fairview'
It's believed to be the first time the city has gone to court to take on the online short-term rental company, which local politicians have claimed is partly responsible for eating into Vancouver's diminished supply of affordable housing.
The B.C. Supreme Court petition claims a Vancouver city employee booked a unit through Airbnb which the city now wants to shut down. (Tina Lovgreen/CBC)
According to the petition, a city employee booked a listing for an "elegant 2BR in Fairview" on Airbnb Sept. 6 for a two-night stay starting the next day.
The reservation confirmation gave the address as an apartment in the 700 block of West 7th Avenue with the host of the premises listed as Flatbook Team, a property management company.
"The city employee had received instructions... that she would find a lockbox attached to the front gate of the premises and she was given the code to the lockbox in order to access keys to the door," the claim reads.
"The premises was a three-level townhome with two-bedrooms, and items such as towels, toiletries, and cooking utensils were provided."
The petition says the property manager contacted the city employee several times during her stay via text message and email to ensure she hadn't encountered any problems. She checked out of the apartment on Sept. 9.
According to the court documents, the city employee observed the unit listed on Airbnb on three dates after she checked out. The petition says the apartment is still listed as available for periods under one month.
Order to stop short-term rental
The city is seeking an order from the court to force East West Investments and Chang to cease offering the unit for periods of less than one month. The petition also calls for costs.
As a legal basis, the petition cites the zoning and development bylaw that restricts the use of dwelling units for less than one month to hotels and bed and breakfasts.
Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson recently proposed new rules that would allow homeowners to get a licence for short-term apartment rentals. (Rafferty Baker/CBC)
The petition also claims that the defendants are contravening a bylaw that requires them to have a business licence.
Airbnb would not comment on the lawsuit itself, but said in an emailed statement that the vast majority of Vancouverites who list properties on the website "do so a few nights each month to earn a modest, supplemental income that helps pay the bills."
Spokesman Christopher Nulty said the company is working with the City of Vancouver.
"Our goal is to ensure a healthy home sharing community for Vancouver and to help the city develop fair and sensible rules that support home sharing," Nulty said.
"We believe we can partner with the city to find the right policy solutions, including addressing any unwelcome commercial operators."
Last month, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson proposed a system that would require people to get a business licence for Airbnb and other short-term rentals. He estimated the move would put up to 1,000 homes back into the long-term rental pool.
The new rules would allow homeowners to get a licence for their principal dwelling, but not for secondary units such as basement suites and laneway homes.
The new rules would not allow the owners of investment properties to get a licence for short-term rentals.
Robertson said short-term rentals may be subject to a tax, which would be used to fund affordable housing initiatives.
City staff are expected to draw up the final regulations by early next year.
None of the allegations in the petition has been proven in court.
Read the court documentsAn Overview
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, as amended, 15 U.S.C. §§ 78dd-1, et seq. ("FCPA"), was enacted for the purpose of making it unlawful for certain classes of persons and entities to make payments to foreign government officials to assist in obtaining or retaining business. Specifically, the anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA prohibit the willful use of the mails or any means of instrumentality of interstate commerce corruptly in furtherance of any offer, payment, promise to pay, or authorization of the payment of money or anything of value to any person, while knowing that all or a portion of such money or thing of value will be offered, given or promised, directly or indirectly, to a foreign official to influence the foreign official in his or her official capacity, induce the foreign official to do or omit to do an act in violation of his or her lawful duty, or to secure any improper advantage in order to assist in obtaining or retaining business for or with, or directing business to, any person.
Since 1977, the anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA have applied to all U.S. persons and certain foreign issuers of securities. With the enactment of certain amendments in 1998, the anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA now also apply to foreign firms and persons who cause, directly or through agents, an act in furtherance of such a corrupt payment to take place within the territory of the United States.
The FCPA also requires companies whose securities are listed in the United States to meet its accounting provisions. See 15 U.S.C. § 78m. These accounting provisions, which were designed to operate in tandem with the anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA, require corporations covered by the provisions to (a) make and keep books and records that accurately and fairly reflect the transactions of the corporation and (b) devise and maintain an adequate system of internal accounting controls.
For particular FCPA compliance questions relating to specific conduct, you should seek the advice of counsel as well as consider using the Department of Justice's FCPA Opinion Procedure, found here.
Contact us Regarding the FCPA
By Mail
Correspondence relating to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) may be sent to:
Fraud Section, Criminal Division
U.S. Department of Justice
ATTN: Chief, FCPA Unit
950 Constitution Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20530Alderweireld 'fully committed' to Spurs – Pochettino
The Belgium international is under contract until 2019 but there has been speculation that Chelsea and Man City are interested in him
Mauricio Pochettino has poured scorn on speculation Toby Alderweireld is unhappy at and looking for a transfer away from the club.
The international's future has come under increased scrutiny in recent days after reports emerged suggesting the defender was displeased with his current deal.
Spurs 11/10 to win at Everton
Alderweireld's contract runs until 2019 with Tottenham holding the option to extend that by an extra year.
Talk of the player being unsettled led to links with and, but Pochettino is adamant the 28-year-old has no intention of leaving.
"It is true, there have been a lot of rumours in the last few days," Pochettino told a media conference. "He was talking with me in my office this morning [Thursday]. He is happy, he wants to make fully clear his position that he is fully committed to the club.
"He is happy with his contract – two years plus one – but it is not easy.
"I recognise that in the last few days there have been some rumours but he is so happy and so calm.
"His idea is to try and play here and he has no reason to move."
Another player Pochettino says has a future at Spurs is Vincent Janssen, despite the striker being left out of their squad and seeing Fernando Llorente arrive as another alternative to Harry Kane.
"Yes, of course, he has a future," he added on Janssen. "We only had 17 Champions League places to include players.
Article continues below
"It is him and Erik Lamela who miss out.
"In January we can check again and decide to see if or not we change the names in the squad.
"So yes, he has a future as a player here."Amazon announced this morning that it’s making restaurant delivery an option via its one-hour delivery app Prime Now. The news confirms earlier reports which indicated Amazon was staffing up a new restaurants division to compete with services like GrubHub with hires in both Seattle and New York. However, the new food delivery service is initially debuting in select Seattle ZIP codes, with plans to expand to additional neighborhoods, then later, to new markets where Prime Now operates.
The service will allow Amazon Prime members to view the menus from participating restaurants, and place orders in the app. Similar to the order-tracking available today in Prime Now, customers will also be able to track their food delivery order in real-time as it’s prepped by the restaurant then as the driver hits the road, heading their way.
Amazon says that customers will see their food delivered within an hour or less with no additional charges or delivery fees.
That’s slightly different from how Prime Now works today, which involves free two-hour deliveries but a $7.99 fee for one-hour deliveries. In fact, the company notes that the food delivery service’s lack of fees in general, as well as the fact that it’s not marking up the prices for restaurant menu items, will be a competitive advantage.
The company also says that, for its restaurant partners, the service will allow them to tap into Amazon’s “best” customers – that is, those who pay $99 per year for Amazon Prime and who maintain payment information in Amazon’s Wallet.
At launch, Prime Now is working with dozens of local restaurants on a rev-share basis, including Cactus, Wild Ginger, Skillet, Marination Station, Re:public, Café Yumm, Ten Mercer, Mamnoon and many more. But while there are no larger chains working with the company today, Amazon says that’s still an option. However, the company did indicate that it has a “high bar” for which restaurants it’s choosing to offer through its Prime Now service, which hints that it may be trying to compete on restaurant quality over breadth.
The announcement follows recent sightings of online job listings on |
or reach out to them in some other way that would be meaningful to them personally. Not out of pity, but out of recognition that they are bearers of something that you desperately need. If you're not sure what that is, this week is a great time to find out.
For that is what you are. You are a mother to your very core, and we see it. We see it in the way you nurture animals, the way you nurture the earth, the way you nurture us through hard times, the way you nurture our children. You give and you give and you give of yourself and it is not unnoticed, though it may feel that way. You open yourself wide for love, you pour yourself out for those dear to you; we see it. And we call you what you are: mother.But more than that, you are a mother to your very own child who is not yet with you. However they come, if you still believe they will, then we still believe with you. And if you need us to believe it on the days when you just can't, well we're here for that too. The beauty, the purity, the agony with which you long for them has already made you their mother. Motherhood is nothing if not subjecting yourself to being unspeakably flattened by love, and you're already doing that.We don't always know what to say to your pain. You are stronger than we've ever had to be. But there are a few things you need to hear, even if we can't say them as well as you deserve.You suffer in secret, or around a very select few. Most people don't know the deepest longings of your heart. Many even make ignorant assumptions or ask insensitive questions. You bear a grief that is largely unseen by the rest of the world, and you bear it for years. You don't even get to work through the stages of grief, because it is never final, never done. It is an ongoing cycle of hope and pain, and you never get a break from it. You are so incredibly strong, my dear. So incredibly beautiful.Sometimes your strength lies in knowing when to take care of yourself first. Sometimes it means not attending our baby shower because you've already co-hosted three this year and you know you can't bear another. Sometimes it means crying on our shoulder even though you feel like you've done it too many times before. Sometimes your strength is in your silence, sometimes in your openness. But it's always there, and we see it even when you don't.You are allowed your own journey. This is your story,. We do not know better than you what it will look like, and we certainly cannot offer you any advice that you haven't already thought of a million times over. We love you and we want to take your pain away and sometimes we say stupid things. Forgive us.Some do and some don't, but again, this story is yours alone. If you bring children into your family through adoption, we understand that sometimes you may grieve not carrying them inside of you or not knowing what labor feels like. That doesn't mean you love them any less or that you are any less their real mother. We recognize that, and we are not afraid to hear the hard stuff.When you're ready to speak, that is. We need you to share your story, we need to gain from your wisdom, we need to change our own paradigm from your experience. We don't want to pressure you and we don't want you to speak until the time is right, but when it is, we desperately need to hear what you have to say. We need to hear that suffering produces character. We need to hear that children are only and ever a treasure. We need to hear that human beings are worth hoping for; we need to hear that life is worth fighting for.Florida Man Suffers Injuries While Attempting to Shoot Squirrel With Bullet Taped to BB Gun
A Florida man attempting to shoot a squirrel for dinner by taping a.40-caliber cartridge to a BB gun was instead hospitalized after the cartridge exploded, according to Gainesville police.
William Daniel Lloyd, 31, was taken to a local hospital for non-life threatening injuries, which, according to a report of the incident by the Gainesville Sun, included injuries to Lloyd’s upper arm and lower leg. The injuries occurred after Lloyd fired the BB gun, causing the BB to strike the cartridge’s primer.
The cartridge discharged, striking Lloyd in his arm and leg.
“Lloyd stated he knew he had been hit, but did not know how badly,” an officer wrote in the report.
Although relatives stated Lloyd has since been released from the hospital and has resumed work, the Florida man won’t be able to put the embarrassing incident behind him anytime soon.
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A sworn complaint has been filed against Lloyd for discharging a firearm in public in addition to a charge of possession of ammunition by a convicted felon, Officer Ben Tobias stated in a press release.
Florida’s Department of Corrections website indicates Lloyd served prison time for grand theft and trafficking stolen property back in 2009. He was later released in November of 2011.
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Lloyd told police he was trying to shoot a squirrel with a Pumpmaster 760 BB gun.
His girlfriend told responding officers that Lloyd mentioned he was trying to shoot a squirrel for dinner, according to officers.
Lloyd reportedly told police he knew he was not allowed to possess ammunition and that he found cartridges while “scrapping” – looking for scrap metal.
Sources: The Gainesville Sun
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Join Date: Jan 2008 Posts: 7,170 Norway Norway Location: Vestfold
War of the Factions Tournament Commander Signups! Commander signups
The commander signups are open!
Commander Signups!
The commander plays a crucial part in organizing and running the team, and in this instance the commander will be key to getting a team up and going. We are looking for someone who is capable of committing a lot of time and effort, and has excellent skills in communication, organization, structure as well as training. The commanders will also need to be a bit of a strategist. Once you do apply for the commander position, we will interview you on Teamspeak, or ask you a few questions in your application, which you will have access to once you apply.
WF Commander Application
Make sure you are willing to spend many late nights on this, as well as be willing to learn. We are looking for a good, dedicated person with a lot of time on their hand. The commander signups will end on the 6th of August.
Campaign Information
The War of the Factions tournament features a 2-dimensional campaign "map", where two teams are facing off, with the ultimate goal to push the other team off the line. For the sake of balance, the further away you push the enemy team, the more tickets they'll start with, while you'll start with less tickets. However, any remaining tickets at the end of the round will be carried over to the next (see illustrations below).
Layout of the campaign map, or line. Starting point is in the middle.The maps per node is just for showing what it may look like. The final map distribution might look completely different.
Depending on who wins, the battles might go from node to node, or just switch between the same nodes (happens if the teams are even).
Winning a battle pushes the enemy team further away from the middle. The ultimate goal is to push him completely off the line. However, the further away you go, the more difficult victory is to achieve.
Here's a example of how this will work:
For the first battle, both teams have agreed to have the initial battle somewhere in Russia, more specifically on the Iron Ridge map. Since this is the first battle, both teams start off with 1000 tickets each, which can be used to purchase assets for the battle. Team 1 decides to play as US Army, using the Mechanized doctrine (more info on doctrines can be found here), while Team 2 picks Russian forces, with the Armored doctrine. Here's the respective teams asset lists, with costs:
Quote: Team 1
Faction: US Army
Doctrine: Mechanized (IFV at normal cost, other vehicles twice as expensive) 1 M1A2 Abrams, 100 * 2 tickets / asset = 200 tickets
tickets 3 M2A2 Bradley, 60 * 1 tickets / asset = 180 tickets
tickets 2 Logi trucks, 10 *2 tickets / asset = 40 tickets
tickets 3 Transport trucks, 5 * 2 tickets / asset = 30 tickets Remaining tickets: 1000 - 450 = 550 tickets Quote: Team 2 Faction: Russian Forces
Doctrine: Armored (MBT and light tanks at normal cost, other vehicles twice as expensive) 3 T90, 130 * 1 tickets / asset = 390 tickets
tickets 3 Logi trucks, 10 * 2 tickets / asset = 60 tickets
tickets 2 Transport trucks, 5 * 2 tickets / assets = 20 tickets Remaining tickets: 1000 - 470 = 530 tickets After a long and fierce battle, Team 1 wins with 50 tickets remaining. Moving on to the next battle, Team 2, the loser of the first battle, choose one out of three different maps, along with the starting location on the map. In our example, the CO chooses to fight on Operation Marlin.
Tournament status after the first battle has been fought. Note that the loser from the previous battle chooses the map for the next battle. In this case, Team 2 chose Operation Marlin, getting 1100 tickets to buy assets with and use during the battle, while Team 1 gets 950, of which 50 are carried over from the previous victory.
Depending on the outcome of the second battle, the tournament will either move to the right, back to the middle node (happens if Team 2 wins), or further to the left (happens if Team 1 wins). If one team manages to push the other team all the way back to the left-/rightmost node, and win that battle, that team wins the tournament. If no team achieves such a victory within a certain amount of rounds, the team that have pushed the other team furthest away from the middle is declared winner of the tournament.
Doctrines
Every commander has to choose a doctrine for their faction. There are 4 doctrines to choose from and each faction will be binded to certain doctrines. Some factions have no vehicles avaible for certain doctrines, so they will be unavalible to that doctrine. The prices will be increased from their "base" value, by adding a significant percentage of their original price. All vehicles will still be avalible regardless of what doctrine you choose, but some will be more expensive. The mechanized doctrine lends itself to the tracked armored transports, which are dedicated infantry fighting vehicles ("IFV"). Any transport vehicle, which has armor, tracks and a sizable gun on top will be considered an IFV.
doctrine lends itself to the tracked armored transports, which are dedicated infantry fighting vehicles ("IFV"). Any transport vehicle, which has armor, tracks and a sizable gun on top will be considered an IFV. The armor doctrine will make vehicles such as tanks and light tanks much cheaper.
doctrine will make vehicles such as tanks and light tanks much cheaper. The air doctrine is more leaning towards supreme air power, with cheaper transport helicopters, jets and attack helicopters of all kinds.
doctrine is more leaning towards supreme air power, with cheaper transport helicopters, jets and attack helicopters of all kinds. The motorized doctrine will give you much cheaper cars, trucks and armored personnel carriers ("APC"), as well as any vehicles that are role dedicated, such as anti-air vehicles ("AAV"), anti-tank vehicles and recon vehicles.
New staff
We have had more people signup after the latest announcement. Here is a list of our new staff, please help us welcome them!
Tournament Admin - FFG
Australia 17
Tournament Technician - Temexter
Finland 48
Tournament Technician - Clund
Germany 18
Tournament Technician - Tobi
Germany 36
Tournament Contributor - Camel
Finland 34
Tournament Contributor - Steckdose
Germany 23
Tournament Contributor - X-alt
USA 14
Tournament Contributor - Midnight
France 25
Tournament Contributor - iSmall
Lithuania 18
Australia 17Finland 48Germany 18Germany 36Finland 34Germany 23USA 14France 25Lithuania 18 We have had more people signup after the latest announcement. Here is a list of our new staff, please help us welcome them!
We are very grateful for the help we are getting from the community thank you so much! If you are also interested in helping out, please consider applying;
WF - Tournament Admin Application WF - Contributor Application
WF - Technician Application WF - Moderator Application
What comes next?
After the commanders have been choosen, and they have a good grip on what lies ahead, we will present the teams. Shortly after comes officer signups, followed by grunt signups.
We hope to see a good amount of people coming to join us in this tournament!
Stay tuned for more information! The commander plays a crucial part in organizing and running the team, and in this instance the commander will be key to getting a team up and going. We are looking for someone who is capable of committing a lot of time and effort, and has excellent skills in communication, organization, structure as well as training. The commanders will also need to be a bit of a strategist. Once you do apply for the commander position, we will interview you on Teamspeak, or ask you a few questions in your application, which you will have access to once you apply.Make sure you are willing to spend many late nights on this, as well as be willing to learn. We are looking for a good, dedicated person with a lot of time on their hand. The commander signups will end on theofThe War of the Factions tournament features a 2-dimensional campaign "map", where two teams are facing off, with the ultimate goal to push the other team off the line. For the sake of balance, the further away you push the enemy team, the more tickets they'll start with, while you'll start with less tickets. However, any remaining tickets at the end of the round will be carried over to the next (see illustrations below).Depending on who wins, the battles might go from node to node, or just switch between the same nodes (happens if the teams are even).Here's a example of how this will work:Every commander has to choose a doctrine for their faction. There are 4 doctrines to choose from and each faction will be binded to certain doctrines. Some factions have no vehicles avaible for certain doctrines, so they will be unavalible to that doctrine. The prices will be increased from their "base" value, by adding a significant percentage of their original price. All vehicles will still be avalible regardless of what doctrine you choose, but some will be more expensive.We are very grateful for the help we are getting from the community thank you so much! If you are also interested in helping out, please consider applying;After the commanders have been choosen, and they have a good grip on what lies ahead, we will present the teams. Shortly after comes officer signups, followed by grunt signups.We hope to see a good amount of people coming to join us in this tournament!Stay tuned for more information!Code reviews are intended to find mistakes overlooked at any time during the development phase of a software in order to improve its quality. This article gives you the keys to start based on how code reviews are done at TailorDev.
Code reviews are one of the best tools to improve quality of software without requiring too much effort compared to other processes including audits, training and maintenance. Yet, it is simple to fall into the trap of thinking that only a few people can perform code reviews. Here is our first advice: everyone can (and should) do code reviews. We have worked with people from different backgrounds and code reviews became our silver bullet to involve them. Usually, people become more engaged and efficient when you trust them.
Formal vs lightweight code reviews
You may also wonder when and how to review code. Should you do code reviews at the beginning of the project? At the end? How many times during the development phase? Should it be formal? There is not a single answer to these questions but we recommend to start reviewing the code as early as possible, and to schedule many lightweight code reviews thereafter. Code reviews do not have to be formal to be very effective. You do not need to book a meeting-room and invite the whole team: a code review is not an “exam”. It should rather be seen as a best practice like writing tests or updating the documentation. Hence, code reviews must not be sanctified. Just do it™.
Git flows
Yet, it can be costly to perform a code review, especially when you do not rely on the right tools or when you do not have any or too few guidelines. Repository managers such as GitHub and GitLab significantly helps here, thanks to the concept of Pull/Merge Requests (PRs/MRs), i.e. proposing code changes. By adopting PRs/MRs, you actually adopt a (git) “flow”, which favors code reviews. Pull/Merge Requests are created on GitHub/GitLab, and visualizing what has changed and leaving comments on any line could not be easier.
Recommendations
At TailorDev, we have defined a set of recommendations to perform code reviews in an efficient manner. The next sections will describe different points anyone doing a code review should be aware of and respect.
1. Ask. Do not tell.
Always ask for clarifications when you do not understand a line or a design decision. Do not be too direct by making demands. Instead, ask:
I would not have done this that way, what about using X from lib instead? Not sure to understand. What do you want to achieve here?
2. Be nice, positive, factual, helpful
Do not undermine the author(s) of the PR/MR. Be constructive and factual to avoid misinterpretations and/or personal attacks. Most of the time, you are part of the same team, or at least of the same company, which means both of you are in the same boat.
Be as nice as possible, especially when working remotely. It is very complicated to convey emotions, tones and intents within a web page full of comments. Use Emoji for that. Additionally, it would be wise to avoid jokes and sarcasm for the exact same reasons.
Being positive and helpful is very important too. Suggest alternatives by asking questions (cf. First recommendation). Be explicit to avoid communication issues. Reviewing code is not an easy task, but so do is to collaborate with other humans. Using a tool between is not an excuse to forget that you are working with other people. Never write something you would not say in front of that people.
3. What is under review was the best option at the time of writing
Never assume the authors did not do their best to provide the work you are reviewing. They are intelligent and good people. They used/relied on everything that was available to us when they worked on this Pull Request. That is also why the two previous points are essential.
Now, your job is to engage a discussion with the authors to reach a consensus between your expectations (and opinions) and what you are reviewing now. It is always a matter of trade-offs, but be sure not to waste time.
4. Focus on the important parts, not on the details
You may be familiar with the citation below, which we find very accurate. Let’s be honest, reviewing hundreds of changes is very complicated and I’ll get back to that in Section 6.
Ask a programmer to review 10 lines of code, he'll find 10 issues. Ask him to do 500 lines and he'll say it looks good. — Giray Özil (@girayozil) February 27, 2013
What is really important here is to ignore all the cosmetics changes you would make. This does not mean coding standards are not important, but this is not something you want to discuss during a code review. I will get back to that in Section 7 too.
Once you understand the purpose of the changes and why it is necessary, be sure that the code actually works and is covered by tests. Think about (realistic) edge cases and ways to simplify the code. If you start commenting every line of code, stop, step back and get in touch with the authors by Slack or Appear.in for a live code review session. Then, leave only one comment with the minute of this discussion.
You may have to review code that do not fit your minimum quality threshold at all. Stay focused on the algorithms and the code actually solving the problems. Open new issues to refactor the rest later. You can use these issues to teach the authors about a specific topic (e.g., exceptions handling in Java). We do not mean to accept everything all the time, but you may have forgotten the joy and satisfaction of seeing her work merged
5. Do it often
At the beginning of this article, we introduced this concept of “lightweight” code review. The more you do, the better it is. Use a Git flow and stick to it. Each code change should imply a Pull Request and someone has to review it.
You should not wait for the complete feature to be pushed in a branch to review code. We advice to open pull requests as early as possible so that anyone can start reviewing code before it gets too big or it is too late to change things.
6. Review small changes
Reviewing small changes allows to avoid the trap mentioned in Section 4. As a general rule of thumb, we recommend around 300 changes for a single Pull Request. It may vary, for instance depending on the programming language, but this figure has worked well for us so far.
In any case you should spend more than 25 minutes on a code review. If it takes more time, break it in multiple sessions. GitHub has introduced a feature where you can start a code review and send all the comments at once. That is particularly useful in such a situation.
7. Automate trivial checks
In order to focus on the essential, you should avoid to comment on coding standards, style, and all other things a tool could do on your behalf. No matter which programming language you use, google for “static analysis $LANGUAGE”, and you should find something like Sonar, Eslint, CPD, PHP CS Fixer, etc.
This is quite important to stay focused and avoid too many comments too. These tools are good for your project and your team, you should use them!
A note for the authors
In this article, we use the term “authors” to refer to the people who created the changes provided in a Pull/Merge Request. You should not be afraid of getting your code reviewed. If the reviewers follow the previous recommendations, they will not make you feel bad!
In this case, be grateful and take each comment as a way to improve both your work and yourself. Reply to each comment with as much context and details as you can provide. Then, address all the requested changes in different commits and ping the reviewers for another round.
Thereafter, one may ask you to squash your commits. This is useful to avoid merging commits with message like “Fix blablabla” or “Fix again”. Last but not least, either the reviewer will merge the Pull Request herself or you are free to do it, if and only if you get a.k.a. Pouce Driven Development (Thumb Driven Development). GitLab has a great “approval” feature by the way.
References
We are open source contributors and maintainers of different projects. These recommendations are the result of several years in the Open Source community, but we have also been inspired by many other companies and great people. You will find notable articles on code reviews below:Introduction
Cilk is an algorithmic multithreaded language. The philosophy behind Cilk is that a programmer should concentrate on structuring the program to expose parallelism and exploit locality, leaving Cilk's runtime system with the responsibility of scheduling the computation to run efficiently on a given platform. Thus, the Cilk runtime system takes care of details like load balancing, paging, and communication protocols. Unlike other multithreaded languages, however, Cilk is algorithmic in that the runtime system guarantees efficient and predictable performance.
To give you an idea of how simple it is to write parallel programs in Cilk, here is a Cilk implementation of the familiar recursive Fibonacci program in which the recursive calls are executed in parallel:
cilk int fib (int n) { if (n < 2) return n; else { int x, y; x = spawn fib (n-1); y = spawn fib (n-2); sync ; return (x+y); } }
Notice that if you elide the three Cilk keywords (shown in red, you obtain a C program, called the serial elision or C elision of the Cilk program. Cilk is a faithful extension of C in that the C elision of any Cilk program is always a valid implementation of the semantics of the Cilk program.
The current Cilk release is Cilk-5.3. This release is designed for symmetric multiprocessors (SMP's), and the release can be configured for several multiprocessor platforms, including Sun Microsystems Ultra SMP's, SGI Origin 2000, Linux PCs, etc. Earlier Cilk prototypes run on a wider variety of platforms, including massively parallel computers, symmetric multiprocessors, and networks of workstations. The Cilk distribution contains a runtime system and the cilk2c compiler, a type-checking preprocessor that translates Cilk into C. The runtime system should be fairly easy to port to most SMP's. An effort to design a distributed version of Cilk that spans clusters of SMP's has lead to a prototype implementation of distributed Cilk-5.1. The cilk2c compiler accepts the Cilk language (a superset of ANSI C), and it generates portable C code with hooks for the runtime system.
A highly successful Cilk application is the Cilkchess computer chess program, which won first prize in the Dutch Open Computer Chess Championship in November 1996, and almost defended its title in 1997. Its predecessor *Socrates parallel chess program placed second in the ICCA 8th Computer Chess World Championship in Hong Kong, May 1995.
Cilk grew out of work in both theory and implementation. The theoretical input to Cilk comes from a study of scheduling multithreaded computations, and especially of the performance of work-stealing, which provided a scheduling model that has since been the central theme of Cilk development. These results led to the development of a performance model that accurately predicts the efficiency of a Cilk program using two simple parameters: work and critical-path length. More recent research has included page faults as a measure of locality. An overview of the Cilk model of computation and of its theory can be found in Scheduling Multithreaded Computations by Work Stealing, by Robert D. Blumofe and Charles E. Leiserson. Experimental results and details on the implementation can be found in Cilk: An Efficient Multithreaded Runtime System, by Robert D. Blumofe, Christopher F. Joerg, Bradley C. Kuszmaul, Charles E. Leiserson, Keith H. Randall, and Yuli Zhou.
The earlier Cilk-3.0 release featured a novel coherence model for shared memory called ``dag consistency''. In dag consistency, the memory model is defined only in terms of the computation dag, rather than of actions of physical processors (which are not part of Cilk's model). Dag consistency and its implementation are described in Dag-Consistent Distributed Shared Memory, by Robert D. Blumofe, Matteo Frigo, Christopher F. Joerg, Charles E. Leiserson, and Keith H. Randall. A paper describing the theory of dag consistency appeared in the 1996 ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA). A generalization of dag consistency has led to the theory of computation-centric memory models.
For the current release Cilk-5, we have completely reimplemented the runtime system for speed and portability. A paper describing the Cilk-5 implementation appears in the 1998 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI). The overhead in spawning of a parallel thread in Cilk-5 is typically about 4 times the cost of an ordinary procedure call, so Cilk programs ``scale down'' to run on one processor with nearly the efficiency of analogous C programs.
Cilk features a novel debugging tool called the ``Nondeterminator'' which finds data races in program executions. The Nondeterminator is unique in that it guarantees to find bugs quickly and efficiently. A paper describing the original Nondeterminator appears in the 1997 ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA). The more recent Nondeterminator-2 finds race bugs in Cilk programs that use locks.Team New Zealand has confirmed its 2021 America's Cup defence will be sailed in monohull yachts rather than the foiling catamerans which raced in Bermuda. Former Team NZ skipper and America's Cup veteran Chris Dickson joins us to discuss the plan.
Team New Zealand have confirmed reports that the America's Cup is heading back to monohulls.
Luna Rossa boss Patrizio Bertelli, the Italian Challenger of Record, broke news of the move away from catamarans in an interview with La Stampa on Monday (NZT).
Bertelli said the return to monohulls, albeit radical foiling ones, was a condition of Luna Rossa helping Team New Zealand win the last America's Cup in Bermuda.
GETTY IMAGES Patrizio Bertelli, team principal of Luna Rossa, Agostino Randazzo, president of the Yacht Club Sicilia; and Steve Mair, Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron commodore shake hands after Emirates Team New Zealand beat Oracle Team USA to win the 35th America's Cup in Bermuda.
Team New Zealand sent out confirmation of Bertelli's comments on Monday evening.
READ MORE:
* TNZ to strengthen nationality component
* Protocol for next America's Cup 'basically done'
* Is this what the next Am Cup boat will look like?
* Design boss indicates intention to stay
* 'Cyclors cool once, but never again
* Dennis Conner's bold Cup predicdtions for 2021
"Currently there are a team of designers, lead by Emirates Team New Zealand design coordinator Dan Bernasconi working on various exciting monohull concepts which will eventually help shape the AC36 Class Rule," they said in a statement.
VOLVO OCEAN RACE Concept Drawing: A design image of the new foiling monohull to be used in the 2019-20 Volvo Ocean Race.
"Emirates Team New Zealand have been consulting with a number of potential challengers and there is an overall desire to have a spectacular monohull yacht that will be exciting to match race, but also one that the public and sailors can relate to as a sail boat that really challenges a full crew of professional yachtsman around the race track."
Team New Zealand were set to unveil the protocol for the 2021 America's Cup in Auckland later this month, but when La Stampa asked Bertelli on Monday (NZT) if the Cup would still feature catamarans, he replied: "No, you're back to monohulls."
"It was the condition for Luna Rossa to help them with men and means in the last edition."
ROSS GIBLIN/STUFF Team New Zealand will officially reveal their plans for the defence of the America's Cup in late September.
He said the new monohulls "will be very powerful boats" without going into details of the foiling capabilities.
Bertelli confirmed there would also be tighter nationality rules, as indicated by Team New Zealand.
He said there would also be pre-America's Cup racing held in Italy.
STUFF Luna Rossa skipper Max Sirena, seen here with Patrizio Bertelli was a key figure in team New Zealand's America's Cup success in Bermuda.
Luna Rossa withdrew from the last America's Cup early in the Bermuda cycle, unhappy at the constant rule changes implemented by then holders Oracle Team USA.
But they handed Team New Zealand a test boat and the services of several sailors and technical staff, including skipper Max Sirena who became Team New Zealand's technical advisor and part of the syndicate's management.
The move helped the cash-strapped Kiwis with their successful development programme and kept the Italians in the game. It also continued a strong partnership between the New Zealand and Italian syndicates that included the Kiwis handing them design data for the 2013 Cup in San Francisco.
Foiling catamarans have featured at the last two America's Cup.
Luna Rossa, under the Circolo della Vela Sicilia yacht club, were signed up as the Challenger of Record within minutes of Team New Zealand beating Oracle in this year's Cup match in Bermuda in late June.
Emirates Team New Zealand boss Grant Dalton told Stuff last mont that the protocol for 2021 was "basically done" and they were only tweaking details.
A move to a foiling monohull was widely speculated in the aftermath to Bermuda.
The 20-19-20 Volvo Ocean Race will feature foiling monohulls with the revolutionary 60-foot boats the brainchild of Emirates Team New Zealand designer Guillaume Verdier.
It's expected they will be able to foil at speeds of 35-40 knots in 20 knots of wind, hinting at the possibilities of an America's Cup monohull.
The top speeds achieved by the catamarans at the last two Cup was 47.57 knots by Team New Zealand in their giant 72-footer in San Francisco.
Team New Zealand said further details of the protocol for the 36th America's Cup will be announced at the end of the month.A/N: I'll try not to make any promises I can't keep, but I should have more writing time in the future.
xxXxx
So maybe Elsa's fear isn't as consuming as Anna first thought it to be, but it at least feels that way coming through their bond.
If there's one thing Anna's learned over the past week of Elsa being open, it's that this whole mental thing takes a lot more stamina than she imagined it would. It feels like her mind is being stretched every day just to make more room for Elsa. They're not even exchanging anything significant, haven't even gone near Elsa's past or memories yet, but by the end of each day Anna's more than ready to collapse on the nearest soft surface and just turn everything off.
The first few days were exciting, she could hear Elsa's dumb thoughts just as much as Elsa could hear hers, and she'd know when she was upset, and for the most part why she was upset. But the first few days Elsa was just testing the water, must have been, because after that it's like everything intensified. Anna's actually found herself briefly entertaining the idea of going back to how things were before.
It's just that keeping up with Elsa is almost as draining as it is rewarding. Everything she feels takes three times as much energy for Anna to feel. When she's angry, Anna can't feel anything else. When she's sad, Anna can't get herself to focus until she fixes the problem. She thinks so intensely, which is probably just normal for her, but it's a lot to handle for Anna. When Elsa's not filtering, all her thoughts and feelings come in full speed like a slap to the face, and more than once Anna's found herself bracing against a wall just to keep from being thrown off balance.
And normally she wouldn't complain about it — because it's progress, and she's not exactly fizzing out, just being generally exhausted and pushed and overwhelmed, and she can deal with that — but the past couple days have been particularly awful. To the point where she has to take the pills for tension headaches multiple times a day. To the point where she's losing her interest in going to work, because her body feels like it's shutting down. To the point where she can't hide how she feels anymore, and that leads to Elsa silently staring at her from the kitchen as she shifts from shoving her face in the couch pillow to staring at the living room ceiling.
"I could bring dinner to the couch for you," Elsa offers, "If you're tired I'd rather you didn't move."
"That sounds fantastic," Anna says, "I don't think I could move even if I wanted to." She's so tired she can feel it weighing down her bones, like they've been laced with lead.
Elsa huffs loudly. "You know," she starts, "I could block you off if you want me to. You don't have to go around being exhausted all the time."
"It's fine," Anna says, "just getting used to it, is all. You're kind of intense."
"Only kind of?"
"You could be more intense, I suppose." Anna runs her hand through her hair. It feels like it needs a wash, but she's not moving anytime soon. "With all the build up, I thought you had a lot more in you."
Elsa laughs, then she mumbles, "Fuck," to herself, and Anna can feel she cut her finger without even seeing it. And, really, that's the last thing she needs.
Anna squeezes her eyes shut preparing for the flood of feelings that accompany Elsa getting hurt, shifting her weight to roll over on the couch again. Pain is generally the worst feeling to get coming through the bond, so she'd rather have her face in the pillow for this one. She gets more of a peculiar feeling though, a tug at the back of her mind. All the sound in the room floats away and it feels like she's weightless, like she's floating in an endless sea of water.
By the time she realizes she's fizzing out, she's already leaned over the couch heaving up everything that's in her body.
So much for making progress.
x
Anna chews on the bendy straw sticking from her gatorade and watches as Tiana switches between three different pairs of glasses. She's admiring herself in the front camera on her cell phone, but she tosses that aside after a few minutes and stares at Anna. "Orange, blue, or black?" she asks. Anna shrugs. Tiana takes off the pair she's trying on. "Okay, really, what's going on?"
Anna shrugs again. "Nothing."
"You've been drinking Gatorade like it's water, avoiding busy areas, and watching me try on glasses like you're catatonic. Something's wrong."
Anna wrinkles her nose; she never considered the idea that maybe she's catatonic — whatever that means — but she does know that she's not quite sure where most of her brain cells are hiding |
of things" that led the juvenile court to conclude that the mother had a chemical abuse problem and find that the state had jurisdiction over the children.
But in reversing the decision, the appeals court said "the record lacks evidence showing that mother's use of marijuana, her 'chemical abuse problem' as found by the trial court, is a condition or circumstance that poses any risk to her children. That evidence is necessary to establish jurisdiction over the children."
The case goes back to the juvenile court, said Holly Telerant, attorney for the mother. She declined to comment on where the children are living currently. The Department of Human Services did not immediately have comment.
-- Helen JungDestruction of Library of Alexandria and Hypatia’s Murder
One of the most emblematic moments of Christianity’s destruction of the Ancient World lies in the ruins of Alexandria.
The Library of Alexandria was a crowning jewel of knowledge in the Ancient Pagan world.
It represented a place where multiple ideologies on the Gods, Culture, Knowledge and Science could co-exist on the same shelf.
Hypathia herself is a personification of this destruction. She was a wealthy, well educated woman who was a professor in this academic city. Yet a woman who tried creating her own Astronomical instruments to study the heavens was equivalent to a “witch” to the Christians.
An angry, Christian mob dragged her out of her cart to their church. They stripped her of her clothes and flayed her to death with any object they could find. They ripped apart her body and burned the remains. This is exactly what these people tried to do to the life and blood of the Ancient Pagan World.
While many priceless texts were lost, much of the knowledge of the Ancient World was preserved by Islamic scholars in the Middle East. Eventually this knowledge came back to Europe during the Renaissance and brought Europe out of a dark age.
Now the internet is a new library, a new place where knowledge from all corners of the globe can once again come together and co-exist. The Christians tried in vain to destroy the ancient knowledge and as a result brought an age of darkness and ignorance upon themselves. Yet the Ancient Ways remain and grow stronger everyday. Our ways are thousands of years old, connected to unshakable truths about nature and reality itself. They will not be destroyed.Getty Images Remind you of anyone?
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The crisis in Crimea is a crime against humanity, but it’s also a crime against history. In their haste to explain these events, to score political points and perhaps even to shape our response, politicians and pundits have used spurious historical comparisons.
They say Vladimir Putin is like Hitler. They say Russia’s annexation of Crimea is the first shot in a new Cold War. They are wrong.
Instead of thinking about what the future might bring, the pundits and politicians are fighting the last war, and the war before that. This isn’t like the opening maneuvers of World War II, and it’s not like the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union that prevailed for nearly 50 years.
Putin is certainly no Adolf Hitler; if anything, he’s more like Benito Mussolini, who also liked to invade small, defenseless nations.
The heightened tensions between the West and Russia aren’t like the Cold War, which was an epic global battle between two roughly equal forces over which of two diametrically opposing ideologies would prevail.
In the current conflict, we have a weakened Russia that is no match politically, economically or militarily for the West. Instead of championing a worldwide Communist movement that promises to liberate billions of people from the shackles of capitalism, we have a Russia that stands mostly for Russian nationalism and imperialism. Who, besides Russians, can get behind that?
Russia may have a few allies in this world, but it has no followers.
That’s not to say that Russia isn’t dangerous. No one should underestimate the aggressive nature of a cornered bear, especially one armed with nuclear weapons. But Russia is cornered, and its ambitions have been scaled back from global domination to just being the toughest guy in the rundown backwater once known as the Soviet Union.
While Putin’s Russia is much weaker than Brezhnev’s Soviet Union was, the West has gotten stronger. Capitalism and democracy have advanced steadily eastward toward the Russian heartland. The Baltic republics, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and several Balkan states have joined NATO. No one doubts that the United States would fight to protect its NATO allies, even the ones behind the former Iron Curtain.
In the 1970s, NATO and the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact had rough parity in conventional military power. But now, NATO spends 11 times more on its military than Russia does. Russia’s aging military is only a shadow of what the Soviet Union commanded during the Cold War.
Getty Images Vladimir Putin, left, Benito Mussolini
Putin may be an opportunistic thug, but he’s no Hitler, who had the most powerful military in the world to back up his aggression in Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Putin is more like Mussolini. Hitler attacked all the great powers of his day: France, Britain, and Russia. He declared war on the United States.
And Mussolini? He attacked Albania, Libya and Ethiopia, just as Putin has attacked those major powers: Georgia, Chechnya and Crimea.
Mussolini strutted around like the heavyweight champion of the world, just like Putin. Putin is more likely to end up hanging from lamppost than down in a bunker chewing on cyanide.
The Ukraine crisis is real. It threatens the peace and stability of the region. It threatens the economy of Europe and Russia. But it is not a global conflict that will last two generations.
It’s not World War II or the Cold War. And all the nostalgia the pundits and politicians have for those days won’t make it so.
Also read these MarketWatch stories:
6 economic consequences of a new cold war
Why stocks rallied in face of new cold war
Cold War-style standoff to cause shivers this week in Europe
Want news about Europe delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Europe Daily newsletter. Sign up here.Hometown: Dublin.
The lineup: Paula Cullen (bass, vocals), Caoimhe Derwin (guitar, vocals), Lauren Kerchner (keyboards, vocals), Jessie Ward (guitar, vocals) and Sarah Grimes (drums).
The background: September Girls are named after a Big Star song, although when it appeared on the latter's 1974 album Radio City it was spelt September Gurls. Which possibly means that they aren't quite as big fans of Alex Chilton and Co as Katy Perry, or at least the latter's manager, who insisted that Perry's 2010 hit California Gurls came with a "u", as a tribute to the Memphis powerpop legends. They're from Ireland via LA – they live in Dublin but their spiritual home is the West Coast, and they often sound like a dark Bangles (who covered September Gurls and kept the "u"), a Bangles doused in some of the noise-dust sprinkled on My Bloody Valentine's early music by their mainman, Dubliner Kevin Shields. Maybe it's in that city's DNA: a compulsion to make 60s girl group pop sound echoey and strange: beauty caught through a blur, a blizzard, as though it's about to disappear at any moment through a fog of feedback and fuzz.
Reading on mobile? Click here to listen
September Girls formed in 2011 and on Spotify you can sample their numerous wares: the band have five releases so far, with a sixth out now and a debut album scheduled for release on Fortuna Pop! in January 2014. Their various EPs and limited-edition vinyl and cassette singles include one on the Haus of Pins label run by their soulmates, the Manchester band Pins, a three-track 7in for California imprint Matinée, and a self-recorded Christmas song called Hells Bells, as featured on charity record Granny It's OK to Experiment. Their debut album, Cursing the Sea, evinces a development in terms of production and songwriting for the band, even if we're not exactly talking the quantum leap from Strawberry Wine to You Made Me Realise. Suddenly, their jejune jangle becomes growlier, denser, less easy to dismiss, more sweetly sinister. The drums still echo for Ireland, reverb is never in short supply, and there's a general tendency towards the tinny, but the songs seem fuller and more, well, song-like than before, perhaps a function of the increased confidence of the band's four writers. Heartbeats reflects their increased maturity, with shades of the Smiths' Hand in Glove in terms of melody and momentum: they sound like a Dublin band aping a Manchester band copying an LA band. The subject matter has suddenly grown more ominous, too, with surging dirges about rape (Sister) and inner turmoil (the title track). It's as though they're haunted, dragged into the melancholy mire, by the lyric to the very song that gave them life. Altogether now: "I loved you – well, never mind/ I've been crying all the time."
The buzz: "Everything is looking good for September Girls so get in on the ground floor, folks."
The truth: Fine purveyors of noir jangle.
Most likely to: Get played on Radio City.
Least likely to: Have a #1 Record.
What to buy: Cursing the Sea is released by Fortuna POP! on 6 January 2014.
File next to: Pins, Bangles, Honeyblood, MBV.
Links: facebook.com/septembergirls.
Wednesday's new band: Fat White Family.Kozhikode: Intelligence agencies intensified the search for the missing Hindu girl who had converted into Islam. The girl who hails from Moovattupuzha in Ernakulam was one among few others who fell into the trap of Jihadis.
The Jihadi modus operandi to lure girls towards Islam is by [pretending to] fall in love with Hindu and Christian girls and there after convincing them about the importance of getting converted into Islam, if they want to lead a life together.
The girls in most cases bought up in a secular way of life are too naïve to understand the true nature of Islam and the motives of these Jihadi Romeos. After convincing them to convert, these girls are handed over to Mullahs in the Kozhikode conversion centre.
From there they are completely brainwashed and in most cases these girls are recruited for terrorist activities or projected as showpieces in Islamic seminars. These girls are also used to convince other girls to follow the path of Islam.
This gang of Jihadi Romeos most often target Hindu and Christian girls who are studying outside Kerala. Mangalore is one of the havens of these gangs. The aforementioned girl was studying Nursing in Mangalore when she fell into this trap. Now no one knows where she is and intelligence agencies suspect that she might be recruited for some terrorist mission.
More than 1000 teenage boys and girls were converted in Kozhikode and Ponnani Islamic conversion centres. When the girl was in this conversion entre, her Family members tried to rescue her but to the authorities haven’t allowed them to talk to her. By time Police got involved the girl was moved to some other safe hide out.
Here is another recent report following a suicide by a Hindu girl in similar circumstances:
Ongoing Sexual Jihad - One more Hindu girl ends her life
11/02/2009 14:46:09 HK
Mangalore: Sixteen year old Aswini Kulal is the recent victim of Sexual Jihad against Kafirs. Aswini Kulal who was raped by Abdul Salam ended her life on a piece of rope. Police arrested 26 year old Abdul Salam in connection with the suicide of this School girl.
Aswini was lured by Abdul Salam who raped her by taking her into his hideout in a hill top near Venoor. Three school girls consumed poison and ended their life in Alappuzha, Those responsible in that case were also Muslim youth. The surge of Jihadi Romeos in Mangalore and near by areas is not isolated incidents (As our Secular Pandits wish to believe) but bitter truth. We urge the secular parents once again to enlighten their daughters about these monsters lurking behind.
Kerala is also one of the two Indian states which is ruled by the Communists. The communists, as always the gravest danger to any nationalist idea, ensure that mainstream Kerala media outlets suppress this news. As elsewhere, the Islamists and the leftists are bedfellows. It is Hindu and Christian girls who pay the price for this alliance for the leftist media's insistence that there is nothing sinister and terrifying about Islam as an ideology.
Foreign observers of Hindu-Muslim relations in India have commented upon this aspect of the sexual Jihad. For instance, read Koenraad Elst's chapter entitled
Remember, women are always Islam's first victims.
PS: I have a follow-up post to this, please read it
Here is another recent report following a suicide by a Hindu girl in similar circumstances:Kerala is also one of the two Indian states which is ruled by the Communists. The communists, as always the gravest danger to any nationalist idea, ensure that mainstream Kerala media outlets suppress this news. As elsewhere, the Islamists and the leftists are bedfellows. It is Hindu and Christian girls who pay the price for this alliance for the leftist media's insistence that there is nothing sinister and terrifying about Islam as an ideology.Foreign observers of Hindu-Muslim relations in India have commented upon this aspect of the sexual Jihad. For instance, read Koenraad Elst's chapter entitled "Kafir women in the service of muslim demography" on Bharatvani. (I recommend Internet Explorer for Bharatvani - Firefox seems to misread some characters).Remember, women are always Islam's first victims.PS: I have a follow-up post to this, please read it here
It is by now fairly common knowledge that when the muslim population rises in an area, the Kafir women of that area suddenly find themselves targetted for rape and other sexual violence. Statistics from Britain, Sweden, The Netherlands etc. suggest a far higher rate of rapes of non-muslim women by muslim men than would be suggested by the proportion of muslims in the population. Here is an assortment of headlines on Muslim men raping British women in mid-2008 alone:Girl -14 -raped while out walking her dogMan jailed for committing more rapes while on bail for rapeSex Attack by mosque leader "Changed my girl" says MumMuslim man kidnaps 14 yr old school girl for sexMuslim Men rape four British School Girls at Amusement ParkUK Muslim preacher jailed for rapeThe Sydney gang rapes, committed by groups of muslim men upon Australian women, are still fresh in memory. The men taunted the women while raping them, saying that the women "deserved it" because they were not covered and staying at home as Islam commands women to do.Now this phenomenon, already so pronounced with small muslim populations (The 2001 census showed the UK had 1.5 million muslims), evolves into something even more sinister as the muslim population rises. Women are kidnapped (they simply vanish in the vast network of "Islamic centers"), used to commit terrorist acts, and so on. Let us look at some such incidents in India in the past few months. First, a bit of historical and theological background.The very first accounts of the muslim invasions of India, by Mohammed Bin Qasim in 712AD, talk in some detail about the women captured and sexually enslaved. Indeed, it is described as one of the major accomplishments of the subjugation of the Hindus.The collective consciousness of Hindus has since those days known that Hindu women are targets of muslim men. At a psychological level, one may explain it thus: Islam covers its women in burkhas, and keeps them at home. Therefore, the freer Kafir woman becomes an object of lust in the mind of the muslim man. This is a fair explanation. However, there is another explanation that is more rooted in Islamic theology. You see, when Muhammad formulated his doctrine of permanent Jihad upon Kafirs, the carrot he dangled to his soldiers was "war booty." This meant the wealth and women of defeated Kafirs. Muhammed himself took a fifth of this war booty (known in arabic as "Khams") and distributed the rest among muslims. Read here for a Hadith describing the fate of captured Kafir women in the presence of Muhammad.Back to today - the culture of sexual conquest of Kafir women is quite deeply ingrained in many Islamic societies that live alongside Kafir populations. In the Indian state of Kerala recently there have been a spate of suicides of Hindu girls who were trapped by Jihadi muslim romeos and then raped. Kerala has a Muslim population upwards of 25%, and large parts of the state are muslim majority. The Hindus form the majority, at about 45%, and there are about 25% Christians. Here are two recent reports from Kerala which reveal the modus operandi of what some have begun calling "The Jihadi Romeo":MOUNT CLEMENS, MI — Macomb County Sheriff Anthony Wickersham said a man shot himself in the leg while trying to enter a gun and knife show at the Gibraltar Trade Center in Mount Clemens about 12:30 p.m. Friday.
Further details about the victim were not released, but he is a registered concealed weapon license holder, the sheriff said.
"He’s going to be fine, but he was transported to the hospital," Wickersham said.
The monthly show, scheduled this Friday through Sunday, features weapons sales by certified dealers and a weekend concealed pistol license training course.
The event takes place in the 336,000-square-foot Gibraltar Trade Center at 237 N. River Road, Mount Clemens.
"There are no loaded weapons allowed in the show," the sheriff said, and the vicitm was passing through a clearance area where gun holders are required to empty their weapons.
"In the process of clearing his weapon," the gun fired, Wickersham said.
The event tightened its security and carrying restrictions after an incident in June of 2011 when a customer was inspecting a gun for sale and it accidentally fired. The seller then attempted to inspect the pistol and it fired again, injuring three people, including a child. (related story here)
Tim K. (he declined to provide his full last name), 47, of Harrison Township attended the gun show Friday a half hour after it opened and said it was "busier than ever."
He heard a gunshot but didn't see what happened. He walked by the area of the shooting later and saw "an older man with longer hair" being treated.
Inside, Tim said he spoke to a Macomb County sheriff's deputy who said the man shot himself in the thigh with a.22 caliber Magnum and the bullet entered his thigh and traveled to his shin.
Upon entry, Tim K. said attendees are asked if they are carrying a weapon, though there is no metal detector or pat-down if someone were to lie.
Carriers then reveal their weapons, remove any bullets and aim them into a barrel to ensure the chamber is cleared.
Once approved, a string is fastened to the gun to show it has been emptied of bullets.
Tim K. believes the process of people emptying their guns is "accident prone" and creates a greater danger.
This is the description of the event on the Gibraltar Trade Center website:INDIO, Calif. – A 36-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of stealing more than 100 cellphones during the Coachella Art and Music Festival, officials said Monday.
Authorities said that several concertgoers noticed their phones were missing and activated their “Find my iPhone” feature, according to the Indio Police Department.
Some victims were able to find and follow the suspect, identified as Reinaldo De Jesus Henao. He was eventually detained by security and arrested by Indio Police officials.
Henao, of New York, allegedly had more than 100 cellphones in his backpack. Several phones were returned to their owners and the remaining ones were turned into lost and found, officials said.
Henao faces grand theft and possession of stolen property charges.
Indio Police advise concertgoers to place their wallets or phones in their front pocket and to use an elastic band around their items to prevent them from sliding out.
Officials also advise those enjoying the festival to consider taking a “dummy wallet” to confuse potential thieves, and to spread valuables instead of keeping them in one place.ICOhub competition winners announced!
Gleb Kostarev Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 1, 2017
The community vote is closed. A total of 220 votes were cast on proposals from 135 different initiatives. The winners will receive all the assistance they need to get off to a flying start on the Waves platform.
Our ICOhub competition is over, and we can now announce the winners, chosen by our poll in Waves Slack. Waves will help the winner conduct its pre-ICO campaign on the Waves platform with an initial target of up to $100,000, with the second and third place entrants receiving WAVES prizes.
MyTrackNet aims in connecting people who may have lost an item as well as those who are willing to assist in locating an item. The Platform can be used stand-alone or with a collaboration of a Bluetooth tracking device. An elaborate system of rewards and payments will be implemented into the MyTrackNet app, making the cryptocurrency technology easily accessible to everyone. A blockchain project trying to resolve a mainstream everyday problem.
OceanLab applies the blockchain to a diverse range of situations, starting with a powerful search engine that will return information about assets, addresses and transactions. It will provide facilities that allow users to chat anonymously using a Waves address, or by linking an alias to an address, and will automatically generate unique chatrooms for any token based on assetID.
The project will offer a Turkish lira gateway to the Waves blockchain. It will also manage investment funds on Waves, through a company registered in the British Virgin Islands. Investments will be made in large-cap NASDAQ stocks, with dividends being distributed back to token holders.
Congratulations to all the winners, and we look forward to seeing more of your businesses on Waves!
You can view the full list of startups here. For more information, visit www.ICOhub.org.2015 is a year that will be remembered by Apple's software and security engineers. This is the most prolific year for OS X malware, in history.
The threat research team at Bit9 + Carbon Black spent over two months of 2015, 10 weeks to be precise to look into every fragment of a reported case of OS X malware. The findings were as memorable as they were damning. They discovered five times more malware in 2015 than all the malware samples discovered during the previous five years. Combined.
Perhaps more startlingly, the Bit9 + Carbon Black Threat Research Team is confident in their assessment that OS X malware attacks are bound to increase and even accelerate in their occurrences as we head into the end of the year.
The security honeymoon that Macintosh has enjoyed may be over.
[ ALSO ON CSO: Do automatic OS X security updates signal a sea change at Apple? ]
PCs are believed to the the more vulnerable operating system of the two prominent platforms when it came to cyberattacks. For the longest time, this was indeed a fact. However, with Macs taking a bigger share of the market, they seem to have attracted the nefarious malware peddlers.
As things stand, 16.4 percent of the end user market is comprised of machines running OS X. Notably, 45 percent of companies even offer Macs as an option to their employees, according to the study.
The security honeymoon that Macintosh has enjoyed may be over.
2015 will also be remembered as the year of the XcodeGhost, the first instance where a malware had a major breakout in the famously hard-to-infiltrate App Store. Going against conventional malware intrusions, the target this time was Xcode, Apple's official tool that developers obtain in order to publish and develop applications.
Even OS X El Capitan, a version of Apple's Mac operating system for desktops and laptops contained significant vulnerabilities within its Gatekeeper and Keychain features.
Altogether, the research team collected over 1,400 unique samples that were a result of the team's independent research efforts and collections from incident responses involving OS X, black lists, peer research, open sources and other sources.
The bottom line: 2015 alone had more than five times the number of OS X malware samples from 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, put together.
The numbers prove that it is already beyond time for security professionals, enterprise users and end-users to start taking the threat of malware targeting their Apple devices.
Observations of malware studied
The team had to discard tools that are routinely used for Windows malware analysis such as Process Monitor for compatibility reasons.
Instead, the research team resorted to custom built tools and several pre-built tools for dynamic analysis of malware targeting Macs. They include dtrance, opensnoop and fs_usage.
The research team quickly identified routine actions that are commonly associated with malware. Red flags were raised during auto file creations and intrusive network communications. The team then proceeded to look at command-and-control infrastructure along with any artifacts left after payload execution in the malware samples.
Interestingly, routine Unix persistence mechanisms were seldom seen in the samples of OS X malware that were analyzed. For instance, the team found that procedures such as "trojaning" startup locations such as rc.common or even adding cron jobs were seldom used. Strikingly, the malware authors specifically chose Mac OS X-specific mechanisms.
Analysis showed that most OS X malware used features of the actual OS like LaunchDaemons/LaunchAgents along with other login items and browser plugins. The malware was discovered to reside in user-land and other leveraged persistence mechanisms that offered support for this, instead of any attempts to worm into kernels by writing custom extensions to the kernel.
Even more surprisingly, there were no Unix/Linux malware traces despite OS X's roots in FreeBSD.
Also, LC_MAIN, Apple's new load command to define an entry point into the Mach-O format since the release of OS X 10.8 was not used by nearly 90 percent of OS X malware samples. Instead, the previous load commands, namely LC_THREAD and LC_UNIXTHREAD were still being used. In fact, most samples throughout 2010 to 2015 still used the previous load command, although there was a small percentage that shifted to the newer command since 2014.
This led the research team to believe that most malware authors still used the old load command instead of the newer one.
The report was simple in its summation of this particular discovery:
"Malware authors are not updating their malware to conform to the latest specifications by Apple."
More malware, less sophisticated malware
With the aggressive expansion in malware peddling to strike the OS X platform, malware authors have not particularly made their wares sophisticated.
The research team noted that malware authors are foregoing the Unix philosophy in combining "small and sharp tools" to get to their goals. In fact, the Unix-malware seems to have a monolithic tinge to it, the likes of a Windows-malware. This is in stark contrast to a composability approach, wherein the malware would look to exploit legitimate Unix-specific OS operations in their very design.
The 7 distinct persistence techniques observed With a complete lack of surprise, most OS X malware shows to leverage a persistence technique while staying on the targeted system. Altogether, 13 persistence techniques were identified. They are: LaunchAgents - An OS X-way to start programs on a system-wide or per-user basis. LaunchDaemons - An OS X-way to start programs on a system-wide or per-user basis while used interhangeably with LaunchAgents. Cron job - A time-based job scheduler in Unix-like operating systems. They're put to regular use by running scripts and programs at fixed times, dates or intervals periodically. Login items - The means used for programs to run when a user logs into an OS X account, akin to "startup items" in Windows. Browser plugins - Otherwise simply known as code that runs within the context of a Web browser. StartupItems - Programs that boot up along with the system startup. Binary infection - This occurs when one executable modifies another to ensure that control is passed onto the malicious code when the original executable is run.
Detection methods for enterprises
It is perhaps understandable that enterprises have failed when it comes to installing safeguards for OS X devices because of that 'honeymoon' period enjoyed by the platform. When they did have to look into it, there has been distinct lack of OS X support from several security vendors.
It's important to note that most infections captured by malware detectors and sensors are adware based and only lately has there been an increase in sophisticated malware.
The threat, substantial as it is, can be monitored by making use of an enterprise-class scalable endpoint threat detection and response solution.
Additionally, osquery is a comprehensive, enterprise-grade tool maintained by Facebook that will come in handy. It is also open source.
The following queries can be utilized to look into monitoring and analysis with osquery.
select name,program,path FROM launchd;
select name,program,path FROM launchd where username = ‘root’;
select name,linked_against,path from kernel_extensions;
select name,path,type,source from from startup_items;
select * from preferences where domain = ‘loginwindow’;
select * from preferences where domain = ‘loginitems’;
select * from crontab
For malware that springs along with launchd, the queries are:
select * from shell_history where command = “launchctl”;
select * from shell_history where command = “/bin/launchctl”;
Similarly, the following queries would be applicable when looking into browser extensions:
select identifier,path from safari_extensions; (mostly adware malware)
select identifier,path from chrome_extensions; (mostly adware malware)
If you suspect your organization might be compromised, make sure to contact an Incident Response company to review your concerns and if needed, to respond. This will minimize the damage caused.
Detection mechanisms for end-users and consumers
It's always recommended that consumers have an antivirus software solution with the most recent updates.
Additionally, two helpful utilities are:
Dynamic Hijack Scanner - A simple utility that scans your computer for applications that are vulnerable to hijacking or those that may have been hijacked.
KnockKnock - Looks into persistently installed software to reveal malware in them.
This article is published as part of the IDG Contributor Network. Want to Join?CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police arrested one man after a shooting in uptown Charlotte Wednesday afternoon.
Dajour Smith, 19, has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, carrying a concealed weapon, and resisting arrest.
Dajour Smith
According to Medic, one patient was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. The shooting occurred at the intersection of East Trade Street and South Brevard Street. Police say the official call for service came in just after 3:30 p.m.
When officers arrived on scene, they found a male lying in a parking lot suffering from apparent gunshot wounds.
During a press conference, CMPD announced that they had recovered a weapon at the scene.
"It's just ridiculous, they should not have shot my brother, I don't understand," said a distraught woman who didn't want to be identified.
Cheif Kerr Putney and several of the Deputy Chiefs visited the crime scene.
At last report, the victim was in critical condition, but is expected to survive. Lavar Sprinkle is a friend of the victim and saw him before he was transported.
"I saw the dude laying down on the ground, one shot in the neck and I saw the dude that was doing the shooting running down toward this way," he said.
Police caught Smith a short distance away and recovered a gun; officers have not said what sparked the shooting, but say both men know each other.
Anyone with information about this incident is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 704-334-1600.
Copyright 2016 WCNCWarner Brothers Will Make Netflix, Redbox, Blockbuster Wait Longer for New Movies
Want to watch a new movie just out on DVD from Warner Brothers? You’re going to have to buy it, or wait even longer to get it from Netflix or other disc renters.
A new deal between Time Warner’s movie studio and Netflix, Redbox and Blockbuster will double the “window” for new releases. That means the services will now have to wait 56 days after the discs first go on sale to offer them to their customers, instead of 28 days. [UPDATE: Redbox parent Coinstar now says they haven’t agreed to a new deal; see below]
The move is part of Hollywood’s ongoing campaign to bolster flagging DVD sales, and sources tell me the new deal is supposed to be announced at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Warner Brothers executives have already talked publicly about extending the current window.
This is the second time that Warner has been able to get the rental services to wait before distributing its movies.
In 2010, it struck deals with Netflix, and later Coinstar’s Redbox, to wait 28 days before renting its new discs. Coinstar and Netflix later landed similar pacts with most of the other big studios. (Coinstar did up end up in legal battles with Universal Studios and 20th Century Fox, which like this Web site is owned by News Corp.)
Two years ago, Netflix was able to argue that by delaying access to DVDs, it was able to get its hands on more streaming content, and lower prices for the discs it did buy. This time around, though, Warner won’t be granting any additional digital rights to the studios. It will simply be offering them the ability to buy discs in bulk, at a significant discount to retail pricing, like they already do.
Earlier today, news broke that HBO, another Time Warner unit, would stop selling its DVDs to Netflix altogether, but sources tell me the two moves aren’t directly related. Next week’s planned announcement is supposed to be tied to Warner Brothers’ continuing push for Ultraviolet, an industry consortium that’s supposed to allow home video buyers to watch their purchases on multiple machines, in multiple formats.
Reps for Time Warner, Coinstar, Netflix and Blockbuster parent company Dish Network declined to comment.
UPDATE: Coinstar is now commenting, via email. “The current agreement Coinstar has with Warner Bros. is to receive movie titles 28 days after their release. No revised agreements are in place.” The company’s current deal with Warner Bros. expires at the end of January; PR chief Marci Maule referred me to comments CEO Paul Davis made last fall about pursuing “workarounds” if studios try to extend their windows.The centre of London is at risk from catastrophic flooding that would make Hurricane Sandy's impact on New York pale in comparison, one of the UK's most senior businessmen has warned.
Sir Ian Cheshire, chief executive of multinational DIY company Kingfisher, which owns B&Q, has called for the creation of a national flood plan and said that responsibilities for water management are currently scattered among too many departments at national and local government level.
Cheshire, who led a government taskforce last year on the role of ecosystems, said the UK has to concentrate on adaptation and those still in denial about global warming should wake up and recognise "these events are connected to the fact that climate is fundamentally changing".
After studying the data last year, Cheshire said he was shocked that the risk to London from a storm surge or a breaching of the Thames Barrier was so little recognised and warned there was a threat of "disaster of epic proportions" in the capital. "If the Thames barrier is breached or fails for some reason, then the topography of London creates a massive problem because a lot of it is low-lying in the centre. If you combine that with the opportunity for water to get in the underground, as it did in New York, you've got a huge swath of central London being knocked out."
The worrying fact is the Thames barrier is recording increasingly higher rates of surge and has been closed more frequently, Cheshire added. While he believes it's still a "manageable risk", people need to start thinking about the problem "much more radically".
"This is sort of sci-fi disaster movie territory … It would be foolish to say there's a 50% probability this will happen in the next two years but I think when you start seeing 300-year events coming up more frequently, we start to worry about the level of adaptation that we've already got."
Cheshire believes the UK lacks a systemic understanding of how to prevent and manage flooding and pointed to three areas requiring long-term action. The first is to think about whole water catchment areas instead of worrying about where the water ends up. This involves looking upstream to get to grips with the issues such as adapting farming techniques and other soft flood defences.
This means a whole slew of initiatives "rather than just trying to build a bit of concrete at the end to stop water coming in" Cheshire said. He identified the lack of one body with the remit to tackle such initiatives as a major problem. He identified the lack of one body with the remit to tackle such initiatives as a major problem and asked whether water catchment management authorities can be set up with that explicit responsibility to also bring together all parties.
"You can't just assume this is going to go away. And I think that's the big message as a sort of wake-up call to say, this requires a national level of effort."
In a sideways swipe at the political squabbling that has come in the wake of the floods, Cheshire said the government needed to plan for the long term, rather than flood defences becoming a "political football that can be used around budget time. It needs to have a five- to 10-year view of how to manage the problem as opposed to 'we need to put some concrete in here quickly' or 'dredge this particular river'."
A second major area that needs to be addressed, according to Cheshire, is Britain's cities have become less resilient to flooding as a result of increased building density and the concreting of gardens, which means water is unable to soak away.
The third area of action is for individuals to start protecting their properties more effectively, through simple measures including the building of walls and ditches.
Kingfisher has itself been affected by the recent deluge with its Aberystwyth store put out of action twice by flooding and many more of its stores being affected in Poland. Cheshire called for businesses to wake up and respond, including understanding what their potential exposure is, given that many still don't consider flooding to be a risk. He also said there needed to be a fundamental change in the mindset of companies to recognise how they take our environment for granted.
"Most businesses don't think themselves as having any relationship with the ecosystem, that it's something very abstract, far away," he said. "They believe you get water, air and all these other things for free so it doesn't really matter. So I think making the shift in mindset |
offer such an enjoyable, unique experience that using the system itself becomes a selling point. Nintendo has moved in the other direction; the games are going to sell because of the hardware.
The Switch has changed how people play video games, and Nintendo is enjoying the rewards. All those goofy-ass commercials have come true, and I couldn’t be happier.At tonight's 13th annual Game Developers Choice Awards, held at the Game Developers Conference, PlayStation exclusive Journey swept the floor, winning all six category nominations, including Game of the Year, Innovation Award, Best Game Design and Best Visual Arts.
Far Cry 3 and The Walking Dead won Best Technology and Best Narrative, respectively.
Dishonored won the Audience Award, Subset Games won Best Debut for FTL: Faster Than Light and The Room won Best Handheld/Mobile Game.
BioWare co-founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk were awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognizes the "achievements of a developer who has made an indelible impact on the craft of game development and games as a whole."
Industry legend Steve Russell won the Pioneer Award, which is awarded to an individual who has "developed a breakthrough technology, game concept, or gameplay design at a crucial juncture video game history."
The Ambassador Award, which is given to individuals "who have helped the game industry advance to a better place" was awarded to PastPixels' founder, Chris Melissinos.
The nominees in each category are listed below. The winners are bolded.
Game of the Year
Dishonored (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
(Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks) The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)
(Telltale Games) Mass Effect 3 (BioWare/Electronic Arts)
(BioWare/Electronic Arts) XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games/2K Games)
(Firaxis Games/2K Games) Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
Innovation Award
Mark of the Ninja (Klei Entertainment/Microsoft Studios)
(Klei Entertainment/Microsoft Studios) Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games)
(Subset Games) The Unfinished Swan (Giant Sparrow/Sony Computer Entertainment)
(Giant Sparrow/Sony Computer Entertainment) ZombiU (Ubisoft Montpellier/Ubisoft)
Best Audio
Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games/Devolver Digital)
(Dennaton Games/Devolver Digital) Sound Shapes (Queasy Games/Sony Computer Entertainment)
(Queasy Games/Sony Computer Entertainment) Assassin's Creed 3 (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft)
(Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft) Halo 4 (343 Industries/Microsoft Studios)
Best Debut
Humble Hearts ( Dust: An Elysian Tail )
) Polytron Corporation ( Fez )
) Giant Sparrow ( The Unfinished Swan )
) Subset Games (FTL: Faster Than Light )
Fireproof Games (The Room )
Best Downloadable Game
The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)
(Telltale Games) Spelunky (Derek Yu/Andy Hull)
(Derek Yu/Andy Hull) Trials : Evolution (RedLynx/Microsoft Studios)
(RedLynx/Microsoft Studios) Mark Of The Ninja (Klei Entertainment/Microsoft Studios)
(Klei Entertainment/Microsoft Studios) Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
Best Game Design
Dishonored (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
(Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks) Mark Of The Ninja (Klei Entertainment/Microsoft Studios)
(Klei Entertainment/Microsoft Studios) Spelunky (Derek Yu/Andy Hull)
(Derek Yu/Andy Hull) Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
XCOM : Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games/2K Games)
Best Handheld/Mobile Game
Gravity Rush (SCE Japan Studio/Sony Computer Entertainment)
(SCE Japan Studio/Sony Computer Entertainment) Hero Academy (Robot Entertainment)
(Robot Entertainment) Sound Shapes (Queasy Games/Sony Computer Entertainment)
(Queasy Games/Sony Computer Entertainment) The Room (Fireproof Games)
Kid Icarus: Uprising (Sora/Nintendo)
Best Narrative
Spec Ops: The Line (Yager Entertainment/2K Games)
(Yager Entertainment/2K Games) Mass Effect 3 ( BioWare/Electronic Arts)
BioWare/Electronic Arts) Dishonored (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
(Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks) The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)
Virtue's Last Reward (Chunsoft/Aksys Games)
Best Technology
Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft)
PlanetSide 2 (Sony Online Entertainment)
(Sony Online Entertainment) Halo 4 (343 Industries/Microsoft Studios)
(343 Industries/Microsoft Studios) Call of Duty : Black Ops 2 (Treyarch/Activision)
(Treyarch/Activision) Assassin's Creed 3 (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft)
Best Visual ArtsSummertime, and the Rubio is easy. Fish are jumpin, and Mike is high. Oh, Jake’s our guest, and Grant is good lookin. So hush, little babies, don’t you cry.
Sierra Nevada Summerfest
Victory Summer Love
Shiner Ruby Redbird
Southern Tier Hop Sun
New Belgium Rolle Bolle
Samuel Adams Summer Ale
Rankings:
Mike
1. Sierra Nevada Summerfest
2. New Belgium Rolle Bolle
3. Victory Summer Love
4. Southern Tier Hop Sun
5. Shiner Ruby Redbird
6. Samuel Adams Summer Ale Rubio
1. New Belgium Rolle Bolle
2. Victory Summer Love
3. Sierra Nevada Summerfest
4. Southern Tier Hop Sun
5. Shiner Ruby Redbird
6. Samuel Adams Summer Ale Jake
1. New Belgium Rolle Bolle
2. Sierra Nevada Summerfest
3. Southern Tier Hop Sun
4. Victory Summer Love
5. Shiner Ruby Redbird
6. Samuel Adams Summer Ale Grant
1. Water
2. Water
3. New Belgium Rolle Bolle
4. Shiner Ruby Redbird
5. (tie) Victory Summer Love, Sierra Nevada Summerfest, Southern Tier Hop Sun
6. Mop water
7. Samuel Adams Summer Ale
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Point your podcatcher to our RSS feed: feed://feeds.feedburner.com/thebeeristsAs our AoC Clan League has successfully started just about a week ago, it's also time for her little sister to prove she's more than a valuable part of the family, too! RTS League's Age of Mythology: The Titans Clan League is here to kick up the activity in the community and bring about the best clan wars around yet again, together with tons of community content like live streams and YouTube vids, and, of course, plenty of recs and discussions on all kinds of topics - can Tsunami Clan repeat what they did several seasons ago and defend their Title? Will individual skill be enough to overcome quality teamplay? Who is going to be the dark horse of this season? So many questions to ask, yet only one way to answer them - through RTS League battles!
Follow us:
RTS League has proven time and again its irreplaceable position in the community, supplying clans of all skill levels with a place for friendly competing, looking to make sure fun is the main thing you'll experience when playing here - returning clans and new ones joining regularly confirm that if you're a part of any such organisation, you want to give us a look and convince your clanmates to join the prestigious competition running for 15 years already and definitely not stopping - RTS League
Are you ready to give it a shot then? To join in the Golden Banner race and have some top quality clan war fun, getting a chance to play also against the best skillers in the game? Then gather your clanmates and sign up for Season 27 of the traditional Age of Mythology Clan League with history as long as the game itself - live your chance for glory!
News for Season 27
We are actively looking into enhancing our pool of available maps, as not only last season has proven that they make the gameplay quite interesting and also fun, so we're interested in introducing more viable options for you clans to choose from. We have a few candidates for addition into our official mapset, both from the Tale of the Dragon expansion and other community sources, and if they should make an appearance this season already, we'll let you know the specifics as we decide on them, we're still debating certain aspects. What maps would you like to see added? Feel free to drop a message and let us know.
Otherwise as usual, we'll be using the current tested version of the Voobly Balance Patch - this means 1.05 right now.
Now back to the sign-ups!
To take part in Season 27 and have a chance at the fun (and the Banners ), your clan will need to fit a few conditions to ensure you would be a positive contribution to the League.
First you will need a Clan Operator - the guy/gal representing you in the competition, scheduling your matches with the opponents and communicating with League staffers on your behalf. This person should be reliable, responsible and available regularly, every day if at all possible. Proper and timely communication is the key here. You can, of course, have more than 1 Clan Operator to cover for each other
Then you must have at least 6 active players ready to participate - this is to ensure you are able to complete your matches regularly even if some of your heroes happen to be temporarily unavailable.
Further you need to be familiar with the League rules. Read them carefully, and pay attention to the novelties for Season 27 posted above as well.
Lastly, during seasons, we unfortunately also uncover foul play and need to take proper action, so here are the administrative decisions active for Season 27 you need to be aware of:
- Player "reDo" is banned for life for multiple serious cases of malicious smurfing. Any clan found to be actively using him in League games will be subject to severe penalties or immediate disqualification. Be sure to know who is playing for you.
And when you've checked all these points and you're ready to join, then again make sure that your clan meets the criteria listed above and within the rules and simply post the following sign-up form (if you're new and need an account first, follow the instructions up top under the menu and we'll get it done). Returning clans need just to confirm the participation (and read the novelties and active admin decisions as well, of course).
Clan Tag:
Clan Name:
Clan Website:
Number of Members:
Clan Operator Nickname and Contact:
Clan Leader Nickname and Contact:
Clan Operator has read the rules and agrees to them:The Beatles' first manager, Allan Williams, who has been credited with discovering the Fab Four, has died aged 86.
It was Williams who drove the young lads from Liverpool to Hamburg in a van in 1960, where they got their first gigs and created their own special sound.
Despite losing out on the biggest band in British music history, Williams stayed in the music scene on Merseyside later went on to found a famous club, the Jacaranda.
En route to Hamburg in 1960 the band stopped at Arnhem in Holland and John Lennon took this photograph. Allan Williams is standing on the far left, with wife Beryl, Williams' business partner, Lord Woodbine, Stuart Sutcliffe, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Best
The venue said: 'Today is one of the saddest days in our history.
'Our original owner and the man who discovered The Beatles, Allan Williams, has sadly passed away at the age of 86.
'All of our thoughts and wishes go to his family and his wife Beryl.
'His legacy has allowed to remain at the heart of the Liverpool music scene for almost 60 years and his memory will live on through every band that plays our famous stage. Allan, you will be missed.'
Allan Williams (pictured) was a big name on Merseyside but missed out on millions when he parted company with The Beatles
The Cavern Club tweeted their condolences.
They said: 'We have just heard the very sad news about the passing of Allan Williams. Sincere condolences to his family at this difficult time.'
The Beatles Story said they were'shocked' at news of his passing.
They said: 'The Beatles Story team is shocked and saddened to learn of the passing of original booking agent and first manager of The Beatles, Allan Williams.CLOSE Daniela Vargas, 22, who has been in the United States under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration policy, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents Wednesday morning, and now could be deported without a hearing in two to three weeks, her attorney said. Justin Sellers/The Clarion-Ledger
Daniela Vargas speaks about the recent immigration raid that picked up more than 50 allegedly undocumented immigrants including her father and brother during a news conference Wednesday, March 1, 2017, at the Jackson, Miss., city hall. A shot time after the news conference, Vargas was detained by ICE officials. A college student, Vargas hopes to continue her education but fears for the fate of other undocumented immigrant families. (Photo: Rogelio V. Solis, AP)
A Mississippi immigrant who made national headlines when she was detained after speaking out a news conference has been released from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.
Daniela Vargas, 22, was released Friday under an Order of Supervision from the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana, according to her attorney, Abby Peterson with Elmore & Peterson Law Firm.
"We want to see her, we want to lay eyes on her," the firm's Nathan Elmore said of Vargas.
Elmore said he received a call from an ICE agent at approximately 8:30 Friday morning saying that Vargas would be released that day.
Vargas was released around noon Friday, Peterson said.
"Daniela is really happy to be out right now, understandably," she said. "She was very surprised this morning when all of this happened and very relieved. She was told to get her things, and she was given about five minutes to get out and she took it."
Vargas, of Morton, has been in the United States under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration policy. Because of financial constraints, Vargas did not have the $495 filing fee to renew her DACA. It expired on Nov. 11. She reapplied for DACA and the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services received her paperwork Feb 10.
She was detained by ICE agents March 1 shortly after speaking at a news conference in downtown Jackson.
Vargas, who came to the United States from Argentina when she was 7 years old, was being treated as a "visa overstay" meaning she did not have the right to a bond or a hearing.
Peterson noted that Vargas has yet to appear in front of an immigration judge. Vargas' order of removal was not issued by a judge but by an immigration agent.
Peterson said she believes Vargas was released as a result of "prosecutorial discretion" and will be given "basic due process rights and put in front of an immigration judge."
After being released from custody, Vargas was driven back to Mississippi by her friend, Jordan Sanders. Sanders was with Vargas when she was originally detained.
Because she is now under an Order of Supervision, Vargas will have to check in to the local ICE in Pearl office next month, Peterson said. Her attorneys will accompany her.
It is unknown if the terms of her release will change.
If Vargas' DACA is approved, the order of removal would still be in place, Peterson said.
A tweet from the ICE-verified Twitter account said Thursday "Deferred action does not prevent DHS from executing a removal order."
"Because that removal order is still there, they could enforce it at any point," Peterson said. "That’s a real concern moving forward."
"It's something that puts her in jeopardy every day," Elmore said.
Reached Friday morning, Thomas Byrd, ICE spokesperson, would not elaborate.
"We have no further comments on the case," Byrd said.
RELATED: Who is Daniela Vargas?
Vargas' story quickly went national, and multiple groups joined together to help fight her case.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Immigration Law Center, the law firm of Elmore & Peterson and the Law Office of William Most filed a habeas petition on Monday for her release in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, Alexandria Division, according to Michelle Lapointe, senior staff attorney at SPLC.
Peterson said Vargas, whom she believes should have never been detained, was fortunate to have such a show of support.
"We are overjoyed by the news of Daniela’s release,” she said. "It is motivating that the power of so many voices in support of Daniela was finally heard. But it is important to underscore that this detention should have never transpired in the first place. Not every person will be fortunate enough to have the kind of backing that Daniela was afforded, and we need to make sure that the enforcement priorities do not allow other individuals like Daniela to be unjustly detained for deportation."
RELATED: Mississippi immigrant faces deportation without hearing
Karen Tumlin, legal director for the National Immigration Law Center, also voiced her objection over Vargas being detained.
"Dany’s case shows that when a community fights back, we win,” Tumlin said "The truth, though, is that Dany should never have been detained in the first place. President Trump’s mass deportation force is ensnaring folks like Dany, causing chaos and breaking apart communities. We will continue to fight for justice for Dany and for others like her.”
SPLC deputy legal director Naomi Tsu said their organization will continue to fight against Vargas' potential deportation. "and will not rest until she is no longer under threat of deportation."
"It is counterproductive and harmful to our communities for ICE to be targeting aspiring young people in this country, and we urge ICE to release other immigrant youth held in detention,” Tsu said.
Vargas was speaking against deportation at the March 1 news conference. Her father and brother were detained outside their home by ICE agents on Feb. 15. Vargas hid in the closet. When agents discovered her, she was temporarily handcuffed and then released.
After her father and brother were detained, Vargas went into hiding. She came out of hiding to speak at the news conference.
Peterson does not know if Vargas will speak out publicly moving forward but said, "I hope she continues to express herself however she's comfortable."
Contact Sarah Fowler at 601-961-7303 or sfowler@gannett.com. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
Read or Share this story: http://on.thec-l.com/2mtBx8E100-year-old Grace Bell Hardison had her registration challenged in North Carolina. Screenshot via WNCT
Voter suppression doesn’t only happen on Election Day. America is already in the midst of a voter suppression crisis. Voters attempting to cast an early ballot are being thwarted and lied to by Republican officials—a problem that will likely escalate into chaos on election day. This crisis is not unexpected; indeed, it’s been carefully planned by Republican politicians since the turn of this century. In recent months, federal courts have attempted to restore voting rights in states where Republicans restricted or revoked them. But early voting has already proved that these efforts cannot turn around years of careful strategizing and disenfranchisement. The only remaining question is how many qualified voters will have their ballots refused or nullified under illegal Republican regulations.
In North Carolina, Grace Bell Hardison, a 100-year-old black woman, felt the sting of voter suppression. Hardison’s voter registration was challenged in a scheme designed to disenfranchise Democrats in Beaufort County. The county was once required to submit all voting changes to the federal government due to its history of discrimination against minority voting, but the Supreme Court revoked this requirement in 2013. Since then, four individuals, led by Republican Shane Hubers, have attempted to purge 139 voters (most of them black Democrats) from the rolls in Beaufort County by challenging their registration. Voters whose registration is challenged are informed via mail and must appear at a county board of elections or return a notarized form. Otherwise their voting rights are nullified.
Following media attention to her plight, Hardison successfully restored her voting rights. Other North Carolinians were not so lucky. Any registered voter in the state can challenge another voter’s registration; in Moore County, the single person who challenged nearly 400 registered voters just happened to be the secretary of the county Republican Party. Nearly all of them were purged from the voter rolls. Other counties are engaging in the same chicanery; in Cumberland County alone, officials have purged 3,500 people from the voter rolls. They will face no resistance from a legislature and governor who, in the words of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, recently passed voting restrictions that “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The 4th Circuit blocked many of the worst restrictions from taking effect this election season—but Republican-controlled county election boards have quietly continued to implement them by limiting the number of polling places and slashing early voting.
In Wisconsin, Zack Moore, a 34-year-old black man, faced voter suppression head on. (The linked piece, like the above piece about Grace Bell Hardison, is by Ari Berman of the Nation, who’s been doing remarkable work reporting on voter suppression.) As required under Wisconsin’s stringent new voter ID law, Moore went to the Division of Motor Vehicles to obtain a photo ID to vote, presenting a photo ID from his previous state of residency, a Social Security card, and a pay stub addressed to his home in Wisconsin. It wasn’t enough: The DMV demanded his birth certificate. When he told them it was lost, DMV officials told him to drive to Illinois and obtain a new one. As an alternative, Moore entered the ID Petition Process—which would not provide him an ID before Election Day. Eventually, a federal judge had to intervene to ensure that Moore could acquire the necessary ID. At least 2,200 other Wisconsinites are still waiting on the IDPP to provide them an ID. Countless other Wisconsin voters have already been denied the requisite ID because they lack a birth certificate.
In Texas, Molly E. Neck saw voter suppression in action. When Neck went to vote in San Antonio, she saw a sign declaring that all voters must present a valid ID before casting a ballot. That was simply false: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit struck down that requirement in August, allowing voters with no ID to sign an affidavit attesting to their identity instead. Texas officials have already been caught violating this ruling by misleading voters about ID requirements in official voting materials, leading a judge to place the state under court supervision. But individual counties continue to falsely inform voters that an ID is necessary to vote. A federal judge ordered Neck’s county to comply with the order and remove the false signs. But there are 254 counties in Texas. Judges and voting rights advocates will not win this game of whack-a-mole; it is inevitable that some voters will continue to be lied to by election officials.
In Indiana, police raided a black voter registration drive on the flimsiest of pretexts and indefinitely halted its operations, blocking as many as 45,000 votes. In Georgia, Republican officials refused to process as many as 100,000 voter registration applications and moved a predominantly black county’s polling precinct from a gym to a sheriff’s office. In Ohio, a federal judge blocked the state’s efforts to purge 2 million people from the rolls—but officials are now refusing to reinstate many of the purged voters.
Of course, it’s not just states and counties unlawfully planning to disenfranchise voters. Political operatives and Donald Trump are currently colluding to intimidate minority voters; the Trump campaign has explicitly boasted of its “major voter suppression” efforts to drive minorities away from the polls. Trump has urged his supporters to become “election observers” at minority-heavy polling places, and they’ve taken the hint: In Ohio, one man explained his plans to engage in “racial profiling” and stop “people who can’t speak American” from casting a ballot.
Democrats have filed a lawsuit to stop this illegal voter intimidation. But even should the lawsuit succeed, why would we expect anyone to obey the ruling? Republican officials have already proved that officials can violate clear court orders with near-total impunity. They can ignore rulings they dislike and suppress minority votes with ease. They can mislead voters, purge them from the rolls, nullify their ballots, and deprive them of IDs. That is a crisis and an outrage. It is also the simple reality of the 2016 election.
Read more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign.Popular pizza chain Domino’s has announced exclusively to VegNews that it is partnering with four vegan meat and cheese companies to offer the industry’s first line of vegan pizzas. The “Hometown Vegan” line will be available for a limited time starting this month, and will be adorned with different plant-based meats and cheeses from Field Roast, Beyond Meat, Daiya, and Miyoko’s Creamery, including specially developed products created by each company specifically for the new line. “We listened to our customers who were clamoring for a dairy-free cheese for their pizzas,” says CEO J. Patrick Doyle, “and we decided to go 10 steps beyond that with six out-of-this world pies.” The line includes:
• The Sicilian Vegan, a rectangular pie with a thick focaccia-like crust, topped with Miyoko’s mozzarella, cipollini onions, capers, truffle oil, and specially developed Field Roast Cured Pepperoni and Chao Herbed Ricotta
, a rectangular pie with a thick focaccia-like crust, topped with Miyoko’s mozzarella, cipollini onions, capers, truffle oil, and specially developed Field Roast Cured Pepperoni and Chao Herbed Ricotta
• The Philly Vegan, boasting a thin crust, grilled peppers, onions, mozzarella, Daiya “cheese whiz,” and a specially developed Beyond Meat chopped Philly Sirloin
, boasting a thin crust, grilled peppers, onions, mozzarella, Daiya “cheese whiz,” and a specially developed Beyond Meat chopped Philly Sirloin
• The Cali Vegan, featuring chicken, avocado, mozzarella, lime-tossed microgreens, balsamic drizzle, and specially developed Daiya Bleu Cheese crumbles
, featuring chicken, avocado, mozzarella, lime-tossed microgreens, balsamic drizzle, and specially developed Daiya Bleu Cheese crumbles
• The Memphis Vegan, with barbecued chicken, onions, cheddar, provolone, Daiya mac and cheese, and a specially developed Field Roast Whiskey Bacon
, with barbecued chicken, onions, cheddar, provolone, Daiya mac and cheese, and a specially developed Field Roast Whiskey Bacon
• The Iranian Vegan, with mozzarella, walnuts, yogurt sauce, rose petals, and a specially developed Beyond Meat Braised Lamb and a Chao Feta
, with mozzarella, walnuts, yogurt sauce, rose petals, and a specially developed Beyond Meat Braised Lamb and a Chao Feta
• The San Antonio Vegan, with cheddar, BBQ pulled jackfruit, jalapeños, sour cream, sweet corn, and tortilla strips, topped with specially developed Chao Queso Fresco crumbles
“We wanted to elevate our first plant-based offerings beyond simple cheese and pepperoni,” says Ima V. Eganowicz, head of Domino’s research and development. “Developing each pizza with a locale in mind allowed us to go full-throttle with flavors and ingredients, while also helping to familiarize plant-based options to our non-vegan customers.”
Doyle tells VegNews that being the first company to bring signature plant-based pizzas to the masses represents a big investment for the brand. “Domino’s recognizes the massive potential of the vegan market and hopes to fill the niche for plant-based customers.” In the same announcement, Doyle also revealed plans for the company to phase out pineapples from all of its US chains, following a heated public debate about the tropical fruit’s validity as a pizza topping. “To be honest, it’s just gross—we all know it, and now it’s finally safe to admit it.” Doyle says. “Domino’s is committed to being on the cutting edge of food trends and customer feedback, so we’re excited to prove that by launching the ‘Hometown Vegan’ pizzas, and banning pineapple from every one of our US kitchens.” The six limited-time “Hometown Vegan” pizzas will be available April 7 through September 15, with a “strong possibility” of a permanent addition to the menu, should sales and customer reception be favorable. Domino’s has more than 5,000 locations nationwide.
Editor’s Note: #AprilFools! As more and more giant corporations wake up to the popularity of plant-based foods, a world of fantastic vegan options like this will soon be a reality. Make your voices heard, demand vegan alternatives, and keep fighting.Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh wants to be focus for Muslims across UK as one of 13 Muslim lawmakers.
LONDON – Scotland’s first female Muslim MP is hoping to be a voice for Muslims across the U.K., she told Anadolu Agency in an interview four days after her election victory.
Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh won the Ochil and South Perthshire seat for the Scottish National Party (SNP) candidate in last week’s general election, becoming the first Muslim to represent the party at Westminster.
“Just elected few days ago but I am hoping to engage with people across all Muslim communities in the country,” she told Anadolu Agency. “Hopefully they can see me as a point of contact, somebody who will stand up and always speak for equality, fairness and prosperity.
“So I am looking forward to engaging with all communities and hope they do contact me.”
Ahmed-Sheikh, a 44-year-old mother-of-four, is the only Muslim MP in Scotland and is part of a wave of SNP candidates who unseated Labour and Liberal Democrat lawmakers to take 56 of Scotland’s 59 constituencies.
“More than 50 percent of the people in Scotland voted for the SNP, this is important,” Ahmed-Sheikh said during an interview on Monday. “With 56 MPs, its historical for us in terms of our numbers. All eyes are on us to make a difference on the ground and that is the job that we are going to do.”
She is also one of six new Muslim MPs at Wesminister, taking the representation of Muslims to its highest level with 13 MPs. There are 2.8 Muslims in the U.K., according to the Muslim Council of Britain.
Ahmed-Sheikh emphasized the SNP’s opposition to the welfare cuts planned by the Conservative, or Tory, government.
“We are the anti-austerity party,” she said. “We are disappointed that we have a Tory government. So, I believe the SNP will be the voice of opposition and the voice of change and the voice of fearless.”
Ahmed-Sheikh’s constituency contains pockets of deprivation, with, according to her, one-in-four children living in poverty in Clackmannanshire borough.
“Anti-austerity is on our agenda because austerity is not working for the people of Scotland. We need to invest in our economy, boost jobs and stop the dreadful thing that people rely on food banks. These are our priorities.”
On the issue of Europe, Ahmed-Sheikh believes in Scotland’s continued membership of the EU. Prime Minister David Cameron campaigned on the promise of holding an in-out referendum on Britain remaining in the bloc.
“We will be working to ensure Scotland stays within the EU,” she said.Image caption Studies to differentiate the new species from other tailorbirds included analyses of their songs
A species of bird that is completely new to science has been discovered - hiding in plain sight in Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh.
The Cambodian tailorbird (Orthotomus chaktomuk), as it has been named, was first spotted in 2009 during routine checks for avian flu.
More specimens have since been found in regions around the city and discerned from similar tailorbird species.
The discovery is outlined in the Oriental Bird Club journal, Forktail.
Tailorbirds are in the warbler family, and get their name from the meticulous preparation of their nests, weaving leaves together.
A detailed set of tests - from the birds' plumage to their songs and their genes - has now shown that O. chaktomuk is in fact a separate, new species.
It is exceptionally uncommon for undiscovered bird species to be found in urban contexts, but Oriental Bird Club council member Richard Thomas said that earlier in the year, he "went and saw this remarkable new tailorbird myself - in the middle of a road construction site".
The authors of the paper suggest that O. chaktomuk inhabits a small area, made up largely of dense scrubland in the floodplain of the Mekong river - at the edge of which Phnom Penh lies.
Birdwatchers do not tend to target this kind of ecosystem because most of the species it supports are abundant and widespread elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
"The modern discovery of an un-described bird species within the limits of a large populous city - not to mention 30 minutes from my home - is extraordinary," said study co-author Simon Mahood of the Wildlife Conservation Society.
"The discovery indicates that new species of birds may still be found in familiar and unexpected locations."
Because of the small and shrinking nature of the birds' habitat, the team has recommended that the bird be listed as "Near Threatened" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List.[Original Story]
The first images of what purports to be an early build of a Kinect-only Gears of War RTS have emerged.
According to the accompanying report, players control a squad of four by tracing a line across the screen with their hand. The screens also show familiar characters from the Gears of War series, including Baird.
Apparently, the images come from an early video presentation of alpha footage, hence the crappy quality. Epic and Microsoft have yet to respond.
Interesting spin-off or shameless cash-in? Time will tell. Halo Wars was pretty good, mind.
[Update]
It's possible that the game, called Gears of War: Tactics according to the report, is in fact the canned Gears of War: Exile.
Back in 2010 it was rumoured that Epic Games was working on a Kinect-only Gears game, claims that were given a little more legitimacy when the studio trademarked Gears of War: Exile.
However, in April last year Cliff Bleszinski said that Exile had been cancelled. "Gears of War: Exile was an unannounced game that I can't give any details about that has since been cancelled," he told reporters.
Now all that remains to be seen is whether Tactics and Exile are the same thing, or whether what we can see in the images below are what the canned project evolved into.
[via VGleaks]Mr da Fonseca said the talks, setting procedural guidelines for a dispute that could last almost a year, were held in a “very co-operative and amicable” environment. East Timor's Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao says raiding the offices of a legal representative of Timor-Leste is "unacceptable conduct". Credit:Pamela Martin “We had a very productive proceeding today, unfortunately we had to do this against the background of the events of the past 48 hours,” he said. East Timor is seeking nullification of the 2006 treaty, known as CMATS ('certain maritime arrangements in the Timor Sea'). It was signed by then-foreign minister Alexander Downer and his East Timorese counterpart Jose Ramos-Horta, and came into force the next year. CMATS divided revenue 50:50 between the two countries from the Greater Sunrise oil and gas field, where they both claim sovereign rights, about 150km south of East Timor and 450km north-west of Darwin. It contains an estimated $40-50 billion worth of oil and gas.
However, East Timor wants the deal to be wound back, after a whistleblower revealed that Australia's spy agency ASIS planted microphones in the Timorese Cabinet room in 2004 while the deal was being negotiated. East Timor argues that Australia broke international law. On Monday ASIO raided the Canberra office of former ACT attorney-general Bernard Collaery, a lawyer acting for East Timor in The Hague, and also raided the alleged whistleblower's home. The whistleblower was detained for some hours, and his passport cancelled. Attorney-general George Brandis said he authorised the raid in response to a request from ASIO director-general David Irvine, who said the whistleblower – reportedly a former senior spy who oversaw the bugging operation - had broken the law by revealing classified information.
We have come to The Hague because we have done enough and have not been satisfied with the result On Wednesday East Timor's Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao said ''Raiding the premises of a legal representative [Mr Collaery] of Timor-Leste and taking such aggressive action against a key witness is unconscionable and unacceptable conduct. It is behaviour that is not worthy of a close friend and neighbour or of a great nation like Australia.'' Mr da Fonseca said his team advised Australia’s representatives at The Hague that the raid was a “very unfortunate event” but “we are not going to be deterred by that event.” “In spite of the events of the past 48 hours we are not deterred in proceeding in this case,” Mr da Fonseca said. He said he was “very very confident” that East Timor had a strong case, and his country would not do anything to frustrate its relationship with Australia if it did not have something “we were very sure about.” He said the spying claims were not discussed on Thursday, because they were part of the substance of the case that would be heard next year.
In 2014 the parties will exchange written pleadings, and there will be an oral hearing later in the year. “The matter to be settled by this arbitration court should not be used to generalise on the relationship that has existed and will continue to exist between the two countries,” Mr da Silva said. “We hope that will be the over-arching principle for both of us in proceeding with this arbitration.” He said East Timor had done all it could to settle the matter before taking it to The Hague. “We have come to The Hague because we have done enough and have not been satisfied with the result,” he said. On Thursday the ABC reported that the raid came after East Timor revealed the existence of three more whistleblowers, possibly connected to the bugging operation, who had also |
issue of whether Kansas’s strict citizenship laws violated the National Voter Registration Act.
The ACLU subsequently sought and was awarded a $1,000 sanction against Kobach based on his “deceptive conduct and lack of candor” before the court. Kobach’s team appealed the sanction, saying that the apparent deception was simply the result of “inarticulate phrasing.”
This week, a federal judge sharply disagreed.
U.S. District Judge Court Julie Robinson upheld the fine, noting that Kobach’s misleading statements about the photographed document are not the only “statements made or positions taken by Secretary Kobach that have called his credibility into question.” Robinson cites several other misleading statements Kobach made to the court in the ACLU case, regarding class-action certification and the court’s ruling on a prior procedural question.
She also cites Kobach’s “mischaracterization” of a summary judgment in a separate lawsuit over Kansas’s proof of citizenship requirements.
Taken together, Robinson writes, the deceptions “demonstrate a pattern, which gives further credence to Judge O’Hara’s conclusion that a sanctions award is necessary to deter defense counsel in this case from misleading the Court about the facts and record in the future.”
Since its inception, the Election Integrity Commission has faced accusations of one-sidedness and preordained conclusions. It’s filled with a number of leading voices in the movement to restrict voting based on a belief in widespread fraud, including Kobach, Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation and conservative activist J. Christian Adams. Decades of research by state officials and elections experts have consistently shown that voter fraud is exceedingly rare.
A federal ruling demonstrating Kobach’s “pattern” of deception on voter-ID cases is only likely to heighten the concerns of the commission’s critics.Special Agent Vince Cefalu has worked for the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms for more than 25 years. On top of successfully placing dozens of hard criminals behind bars throughout his career, Cefalu has received promotions and consistently positive evaluations. When he started raising his voice about ATF corruption and illegal wiretapping in 2005, things changed. Tuesday evening, Cefalu was asked to meet Special Agent in Charge of the San Francisco Field Division Joseph Riehl at a Denny's Restaurant near Lake Tahoe. When he arrived, he was served termination papers in the parking lot. Classy move. The exchange was secretly recorded by a confidential source. David Codrea has more:
The video, shaky at times from being handheld, and with color imbalance streaking happening inadvertently in the uploading to YouTube, was recorded by a confidential source and shows Cefalu approached by two ATF management representatives including Joseph M. Riehl, Special Agent in Charge of the San Francisco Field Division, which encompasses Northern California and Nevada field offices. Riehl, seen talking to Cefalu through his Jeep window and reportedly telling him he couldn’t leave because he had to sign papers, had been criticized on the CUATF forum, and Gun Rights Examiner is attempting to track down audit reports to determine what an independent assessment reveals about the allegations there. But the bottom line is, an employee with over 25 years of service who has been a leading spokesman for whistleblowers was unceremoniously canned in a public parking lot by senior division management.
Cefalu was placed on administrative leave a year and a half ago after speaking out about Operation Fast and Furious. In 2009, he launched the website CleanUpATF.org in order for agents within ATF to blow the whistle on corrupt behavior anonymously due to the agency's history of retaliation against those who "jump their chain of command." His website is where bloggers and news reporters first saw allegations of gunwalking. The site is heavily monitored by the Department of Justice.
In the February 2012 issue of Townhall Magazine, Cefalu detailed the ATF corruption leading up to Fast and Furious and his retaliation case coming from inside the bureau that led to his firing this week.
My name is Vincent A. Cefalu. I am a special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms under the U.S. Department of Justice. Welcome to our nightmare. I say “our” because dozens of us can’t write a single article, and I have been asked and am privileged to speak on behalf of my peers who have not had the opportunity to voice their concerns related to ATF mismanagement, particularly with Operation Fast and Furious. This grotesquely dangerous and reckless operation should have never been considered, much less allowed to occur. It employed the unprecedented practice of allowing fi rearms to be transferred to violent criminals without any interdiction effort at all, in hopes of somehow later identifying high-level Mexican cartel members. But it was the pattern of gross mismanagement that had been allowed to exist in ATF—and that I witnessed—which fostered an environment that unleashed this operation, violating public trust on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
At no time in my career prior to becoming a complainant against my own agency—the agency I love and have been honored to serve— could I have ever been convinced I would be the poster boy for whistleblowers and challenges to corrupt government. As a young Marine military policeman, I was thrilled, proud and honored to be in law enforcement. I never considered it work....
But I ended up the lead agent in a case with huge vendetta overtones by my state and local counterparts, where members of an ad hoc task force insisted on fast-tracking wiretap attempts against the suspects. I refused. When I reported this officially, senior management retroactively fabricated justifications for the actions they were preparing to take against me. This led to a network of frustrated agents and inspectors, which ultimately resulted in my being contacted regarding the gun-walking practices and cover-ups related to Fast and Furious. I took this information to Congress and advocated others to do the same.
In the 18 months leading up to Fast and Furious, Special Agent in Charge Bill Newell’s actions required that the agency had to pay out over a million dollars in settlements which should have led to his removal for the related conduct, had it ever been investigated and documented. Special Agent in Charge George Gillette had been disciplined multiple times, and his subordinates had logged dozens of complaints related to his incompetence and mismanagement. Had ATF dealt with them at the time, the Fast and Furious program would never have been undertaken. However, by attacking those who exposed corruption, ATF was able to keep their golden boys in place. This process was repeated all over the country (Newell has since been relocated to D.C. headquarters, but not fired). So pronounced was the mismanagement that ATF logged more complaints than either the DEA or FBI per agent. This is notable because the latter two are much larger agencies.
I write this article almost 6 years into the whistleblower process with ATF and only after millions of taxpayer dollars and countless hours of manpower have been expended by my agency to attack and discredit me and other whistleblowers. The environment at ATF today is one where honest officers cannot act without fear of reprisal from dishonest officers. Such is this agent's story, and the story of many other whistleblowers, including those involved in Fast and Furious.
Whistleblowers are often put under the supervision of corrupt ATF officials who have the intention of retaliating against them no matter what the circumstances. The Department of Justice has done little to prevent this behavior despite the act of retaliation being illegal and a violation of the Whistleblower Protection Act.
ATF's termination decision comes just weeks after Senator Chuck Grassley sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General James Cole about a rift between the Reno ATF Field Division and the U.S. Attorney's Office.
As you may be aware, I recently contacted both Nevada U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) Acting Director B. Todd Jones about allegations from whistleblowers that a breakdown in relations had occurred between ATF and the U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO) in Reno, Nevada.[1] I have not yet received a briefing from either of their offices.
The alleged breakdown is illustrated in a declination memorandum from the Reno USAO, which indicates that as of September 29, 2011, the Reno USAO categorically refused to accept any cases submitted by Reno ATF. The declination memo states, “We are willing to consider your cases again when your management addresses and resolves the issues at hand.”[2] Apparently as a consequence, ATF’s Reno Field Office has only opened one case in 2012, as the attached chart indicates.[3]
I have since obtained documents from whistleblowers which indicate that these issues were raised with ATF headquarters and the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) almost a year ago. According to one document, ATF agents in Reno notified ATF’s Internal Affairs Division of the issue on October 13, 2011.[4] According to a second document, an ATF agent in Reno notified OPR on October 25, 2011.[5] As you may know, because of ATF and the Reno USAO’s inability to resolve these issues, three ATF line agents and a supervisor were transferred out of Reno in April 2012.
In light of these facts, I am seeking to understand whether Justice Department management was also notified of the problems between ATF and the USAO in Reno, and if so, what actions were taken to rectify these issues. Your office, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General (ODAG), is responsible for overseeing both ATF and U.S. Attorneys.
Cefalu says he will challenge ATF's decision. The following was posted on CleanUpATF shortly after the termination was issued.
Well, they've finally gone ahead and done it. ATF's San Francisco hatchet men just served Special Agent Vince Cefalu with termination papers in the parking lot of a Dennys. They did this over a year and half after proposing the termination. Notwithstanding the transparently trumped-up nature of the so-called "charges" in question, proposing a termination and then excuting it over a year and a half later is prima facie evidence that the action is unsustainable and is virtually certain to be reversed on appeal.
Moreover, the allegations used as a basis for the adverse action are laughably unfounded, deliberately fabricated, and relied largely on the testimony of ATF officials who committed easily-provable felony perjury in open court and later in sworn depositions. I herein predict that a number of the people involved in this grotesque act of bald-faced unlawful retaliation and obstruction of justice will do significant jail time before this is all over.
I will also say with confidence that this was by far the stupidest, most ill-advised course of action that they (ATF management) could possibly have taken in this case. Rather than quietly settling what a mediocre first-year law student would recognize to be a Hindenburg of a losing case (for them), ATF just substantially amplified the damages award that Cefalu will, in my opinion, recover at trial. Talk about stepping in it.
It's well-known that ATF management and their viciously corrupt counsel are, for the most part, brutally self-serving and mean-spirited. But this Cefalu termination is nevertheless surprising in its utter incomprehensibility under the circumstances, from purely legal and elemental federal labor law standpoints. If they had any prayer of making the action stick, they had to do it more than a year ago, before so many additional events have transpired that will render the termination plainly unlawful and inescapably untenable. It's just plain moronic no matter how you slice it.
It seems apparent that ATF's leadership at all levels has degenerated to a pathetic state of paroxysmal, shoot-from-the-hip incompetence. They can't even do the wrong thing right.
Things are far from over.Poland: Contract for Stadion Śląski signed 16.09.2014 01:53 source: StadiumDB.com
One of Europe’s largest unfinished stadiums will finally see works restart next week. The Silesian Voivodeship contracted German company Pfeifer for the job.
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On Monday officials from the Silesian Voivodeship met with representatives of Pfeifer Seil un Hebetechnik to sign the contract for Stadion Śląski’s roof. The deal worth PLN 84 million (€20m / $26m) will see Pfeifer examine the steel cables of future roof and pick up from where construction was halted in 2011.
Photo: Krzysztof Krzemiński
German contractors, who are famous for their roof structures, are expected to enter the construction site next week. The entire process of reconfiguring, lifting and covering the cable roof should last 420 days. However, should any of the cables on site be damaged, the contractor will receive extra 120 days.
Authorities initially hoped to land a contract at around 70 million but Pfeifer, who were the only company interested, assessed the risk of this project higher than usually.
Complications with this stadium’s construction date back to July 2011, when the cable roof structure snapped during its “big lift” operation. This was the first accident of its kind, blamed at GMP Architekten, whose design proved weaker than expected.
The stadium is expected to cost nearly 600 million zloty (€140m / $180m) when done in late 2016. It was initially hoped to be ready for Euro 2012 and with 55,200 seats it will be Poland's second largest stadium.A tourist snorkels above coral in the lagoon located on Lady Elliot Island on the Great Barrier Reef, about 50 miles northeast of the town of Bundaberg in Queensland, Australia. (David Gray/Reuters)
With coral reefs all over the world suffering ongoing bleaching and death at the hands of warming ocean waters — from remote coral atolls in the Indian Ocean to Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef — the future of these beloved marine ecosystems appears increasingly grim. But while experts almost universally agree that climate change will continue to shape the future of the world’s corals, some scientists insist that there’s still hope for them.
In a paper out Wednesday in the journal Nature, more than a dozen experts from around the world say that coral reefs are likely to undergo major changes as a result of continued climate change and other human activities, like fishing. But while future coral ecosystems might look a lot different than they do today, from the species they contain to the places they live, they aren’t necessarily doomed. In fact, accepting this transition and helping them through it might be the best — and even only way — to save them.
“What that paper does, it says yes, coral reefs are in enormous trouble, they’re gravely threatened by climate change and more local forms of human disturbance — but hey folks wake up, it’s not quite as bad as we’ve been yelling and screaming about,” said Jeremy Jackson, an emeritus professor at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and one of the new paper’s authors. “And that’s important because what that means is we have more room for action and we see the possibility of a lot more benign outcome than we originally feared.”
Indeed, while coral reefs around the world are facing dire challenges, and many have experienced extensive bleaching and even death in the past few years, it’s important to avoid true alarmism, the authors suggest. Last October, for instance, Outside Magazine published a tongue-in-cheek obituary for Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, suggesting that it had been “killed off” by factors related to climate change. It was received with horror of many scientists, who quickly pointed out that while the reef has undergone dramatic changes — and large tracts of it have even been pronounced dead over the past year or so — it has certainly not yet been destroyed.
These are a few reasons not to panic, according to the experts:
The effects of climate change on coral reefs might not be as bad as we’ve predicted.
Many recent studies of climate change and coral have focused on a business-as-usual trajectory, according to Jackson — a scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated into the future. The result is extreme levels of warming and ocean acidification, both of which put stress on coral reefs.
But while the world is a long way off from being able to meet its global climate goals under the Paris agreement — namely, keeping global temperatures within 2 degrees Celsius of their preindustrial levels — recent international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions mean we’re no longer locked into a business-as-usual trajectory either. This means that the future for coral reefs might not be quite as dire as many recent studies have suggested, Jackson says.
“The trajectory is less than business as usual — it’s bad, but it’s not going to be as bad,” he told The Washington Post, adding that the progression of acidification may be less severe than previously predicted, and that there will may still be opportunity for corals to migrate to cooler parts of the ocean as well.
Coral reefs will be different in the future — and that’s okay.
While the authors advocate for minimizing the major drivers of coral stress, including climate change, unsustainable fishing and pollution, as much as possible, it’s clear that we can’t shield the world’s coral from everything forever. In particular, the progression of climate change will continue to have an impact on the oceans, even if it ends up being less dire than a business-as-usual scenario would predict.
This means that coral reefs are going to continue to react and change and adapt, and future reefs might look drastically different than they do today. But this is a survival tactic, and one that humans should embrace instead of fight, Jackson says.
Research has already shown that some types of coral are better at handling environmental stress than others. At many sites where bleaching events have occurred in the past few years, scientists have noticed that certain species tend to fare better than others, suggesting that they might have some kind of an evolutionary edge that helps them survive.
Scientists now say that, in the future, some of the species that are common today might begin to disappear and be replaced by hardier varieties. Additionally, some corals might be forced to migrate to cooler and more hospitable parts of the ocean. Instead of actively working to prevent these changes from happening, some scientists are now suggesting that allowing this transition process to happen — or even helping it along — may be for the best.
“For people that want to be nostalgic and turn time backwards and go to the way things used to be, that’s not gonna happen,” Jackson said. “There’s going to be extinctions, these newly forming reefs are going to be dominated by species that are in some way preadapted to these new conditions. So it’s going to be grim, but there will still be coral and there will still be coral reefs and we should be embracing that rather than just voicing despair.”
Actively managing reefs can make a big difference.
Because reefs will likely have to change to survive, some experts have suggested that it might even be a good idea to help this process along, perhaps by selectively breeding certain resilient species of coral and helping them to spread. The authors of the new paper note that “management and governance frameworks need to specifically embrace changes in the species composition of ecosystems or they will fail.”
In general, the authors suggest that more active strategies for management and conservation are key to the survival of coral reefs. Up to now, efforts to protect and manage reefs have been largely passive, the authors write, “relying on an implicit assumption that if reefs are protected from human impacts, they will return to their original condition following a disturbance.” But as it becomes increasingly clear that the environment will continue to change, potentially in some ways that may not be reversible, a new attitude approach may be in order.
In addition to allowing or helping reefs adapt to the changing climate, the authors recommend a more hands-on approach to the various other local disturbances that can put stress on corals — enacting more stringent fishing guidelines or pollution control efforts, for instance. While climate change is believed to be the biggest single factor in the degradation of reefs worldwide, there are numerous other issues that factor in from one location to the next. A better understanding and response to these local impacts may be critical to the survival of any individual reef.
On that note, Jackson also recommends an updated approach to the research of coral reefs — one that focuses increasingly on the cumulative impact of multiple disturbances working together (for instance, warming waters combined with pollution and overfishing) instead of focusing on one single factor at a time.
With a commitment to active management and an open mind about what the future of coral reefs might look like, scientists say we can now allow ourselves a little more optimism.
“I think the main point is that although the situation is bad, it’s really not hopeless,” Jackson said. “And we need to move away from the strict doom-and-gloom to focusing on the things that we can do to make a difference and setting realistic goals in that regard.”Located in the townhouse of the US’s first licensed pharmacist, this lively, macabre, cringe-inducing museum provides a refreshing re-contextualization of its many artifacts and an unflinching encounter with our mortality
I am immediately drawn to the leeches, their lithe bodies twisting and turning in a fishbowl filled with water. They are smaller than I expected. Several people squeal with appalled delight as they shuffle past. One woman taps on the glass and peers inside. “So disgusting,” she says. “Can you imagine?”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A leech jar. Photograph: New Orleans pharmacy museum
I try to and picture a castle on a desolate moor, probably in a thunderstorm. Inside, a lady in a long white gown is in bed, quietly suffering as the worms’ teeth tear through her flesh in a bid to relieve her symptoms. I wonder if anyone else has such fanciful visions.
Although the golden age of the leech has passed, these creatures remain one of the star attractions at the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum. In ancient Rome, the Greek physician Galen advocated the use of leeches to bleed patients, a practice that persisted for over a thousand years. In the early 19th century, 5 to 6 million of them were used annually in Paris hospitals. Leeches stayed busy.
The New Orleans Pharmacy Museum pays homage to the business of the first licensed pharmacist in the US, Louis J Dufilho Jr, who worked out of a classic Creole-American townhouse. Dufilho was educated at the College of Pharmacy in Paris and opened his own pharmacy in 1823 (Louisiana was the first state to require licensing for such establishments, in 1804).
The museum, which opened in 1950, is not so much a preserved window on the past as a restored ruin. Some of its collection was excavated from the small courtyard out back, but many of the objects were also donated by nearby Loyola University, so it is both a real and a curated space.
Marie Laveau, the Voodoo queen. Photograph: Public domain
Not all visitors, however, come to pay homage to medical advancements. They want to worship at the altar of the macabre. The American south has always had a fondness for the gothic, and New Orleans is known for its exquisite 19th-century cemeteries, concrete monuments that testify to the lengths to which we will go to guard the human body from decay. The voodoo queen Marie Laveau is supposedly buried in one such tomb, in St Louis Cemetery No 1.
In line with this lure of the ghoulish, the museum brings the repugnant aspects of medicine out into the open. The sick body, the dying body, the body undergoing treatment: all of these are conjured by the objects that helped and hurt them.
The writer Elaine Scarry argued that pain can’t be represented – prose, poetry, drama, painting, sculpture: all fail to capture it. But if pain can be represented at all, perhaps it is through this paraphernalia: hypodermic needles, probes, a tonsil guillotine, a saw. All of these offer an ample dose of what Edgar Allen Poe called “the imp of the perverse”.
On display is a box of antique tampons, soaked in opium and belladonna to relieve pain and relax the vagina. “There were a lot of tonics geared toward women’s ailments, and most were 25% or more alcohol and had some sort of opiate in them,” explains the museum’s executive director, Elizabeth Sherman. Women could indulge in the privacy of their homes.
Tampons were just one way to administer drugs: the museum’s black and rose marble soda fountain, for example, helped to hide the taste of bitter medicines.
And that’s where the Pharmacy Museum’s genius lies. Most museums tend to decontextualize objects, but this one re-contextualizes them, providing visitors with a sense of how diseases were managed in an increasingly urban and industrialized world. Owen Ever, a docent and the director of the museum’s Cachet Art and Culture Program, explains that the development of pharmacies out of the wild, unregulated world of druggists and apothecaries led to higher standard of practice and professionalism, as well as to the establishment of associations for the advancement of medical knowledge.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cocaine: a surefire way to forget a toothache. Photograph: New Orleans pharmacy museum
That’s not to say that all unsafe practices immediately disappeared, he emphasizes. In fact, danger feels very immediate at the museum. Cure-alls, miracle elixirs, gold-plated pills and mysterious packets of powders and herbs all bring to mind Dr Chillingworth’s “drugs of potency” in The Scarlet Letter, which he made from plants gathered from graves.
The labels on some containers even suggest a lost language: silver nit, cornus flor, gum shellac (a poison, a flowering tree and a resin respectively). And then there are the voodoo potions like the “love drawing powder” (these were often labeled by number rather than by name to keep their purposes secret). Pharmacists combined plants, herbs, minerals, vegetables and animal bones based on recipes from voodoo priestesses, and then sold the concoctions under the counter. Patients might have sought love, luck, money or a cure for a disease. Pharmacists treated syphilis with mercury injections; voodoo practitioners gave their patients moldy bread soaked in milk.
Next, I peer into a display cabinet that held an ether mask. It looks like something you might find in a kitchen, a miniature colander. Bert Hansen, professor of the history of science and medicine at the City University of New York and author of Picturing Medical Practice from Pasteur to Polio, dates the symbolic birth of modern medicine to the first publicly recorded use of ether for surgical anesthesia on 16 October 1846, in Boston’s Massachusetts general hospital. Over 8,000 surgeries were performed in the hospital’s famous ether dome between 1821 and 1868 (before ether, the dome was famous for the screams that emanated from it).
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Doctors at Massachusetts general hospital in Boston re-enact their first operation using ether. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
I linger over each object, as if they all have their stories to tell. In the 1970s, Philippe Aries and Ernest Becker wrote about the way we deny death, deeming any real consideration of it as morbid. In the more recent Smoke Get In Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory, mortician Caitlin Doughty takes a similar position, embracing the macabre as an honest engagement with our mortality.
Thinking about my own inevitable end, I contemplate a trephination drill, which allowed surgeons to bore a hole in the human skull. The object elicits a horrified reaction from a man next to me.
“So you would just be awake, with a hole in your head?” he asks no one in particular.
Well yes, yes you would.
The man then rests his hand on his forehead, as if contemplating what’s beneath his skin.One third of all species of sharks, rays and reef-building corals are facing extinction while governments spend $27 billion subsidizing overfishing
By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 15, 2010 (IPS)
Local fishers objected to the creation of a new no-fishing marine protected area off the coast of Belize in 1996. Today they are benefiting from the bounty of fish spilling out of the Laughing Bird Caye National Park. Tourism has also boomed, illustrating the multiple benefits and value of marine protected areas, according to a new series of reports released Wednesday by Conservation International (CI).
“The ocean is in crisis but we can’t see it with our own eyes so we’re not aware of what is happening,” said Leah Bunce Karrer, co-author and director of the Marine Management Area Science Programme at CI.
“Marine managed areas offer a solution which could significantly reduce ocean degradation while benefiting local communities,” Karrer told IPS.
One third of all species of sharks, rays and reef-building corals are facing extinction. “Most people don’t realise that,” said Gregory Stone, chief ocean scientist at CI.
“As species disappear, entire ecosystems are altered in negative ways we don’t even want to imagine,” Stone said.
Only a fraction of one percent of the world’s oceans are effectively protected even though there is growing scientific consensus of the need to protect at least 20 percent of the seas.
In an effort to show that protecting parts of the ocean makes social, economic and ecological sense, CI looked at studies from 23 countries mainly in the developing world and found that Marine Managed Areas result in more fish and improved livelihoods, said Karrer.
Marine Managed Areas (MMAs) are defined as multi-use ocean zones encompassing smaller areas, including no-take fishing zones, areas with activity restrictions or areas dedicated to specific uses like ecotourism, commercial fishing, or recreation.
MMAs for coastal reefs and mangroves provide coastal communities with protection against storms. They also play an important role in climate regulation since mangroves and sea grasses soak up large volumes of excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Karrer said.
However, any suggestion of fishery closures or restrictions is invariably met with hostility and resistance, in part due to a mistaken belief in the endless bounty of the seas and the perception that restrictions simply mean someone else will get the fish. Those attitudes have led to the current situation where overfishing is emptying the oceans and destroying marine ecosystems – killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Properly managed fisheries could have prevented malnourishment of nearly 20 million people in poorer countries and generated up to 36 billion dollars more in landed value alone, according to a new series of economic studies compiled over the last three years and published in a special issue of the Journal of Bioeconomics this week.
These estimates reflect the decades-old reality that overfishing results in a death spiral of fewer and fewer fish. To offer a new perspective, lead economist Rashid Sumaila at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Centre and colleagues decided to find out what the potential maximum sustainable yield of the oceans might be.
“We wanted to know if there was proper global fisheries management what could be caught,” Sumaila said in an interview. Researchers looked at the global fish catch for the year 2000 and calculated that without overfishing, 20 million undernourished people could have received the vital protein they needed.
They also determined that global wild-caught fisheries currently contribute 225-240 billion dollars per year to the worldwide economy. This is the first comprehensive assessment of the economic impact of ocean fisheries and represents an amount that’s about three times higher than the landed value, he said.
Recreational use of ocean ecosystems by sport divers, whale watchers and recreational fishermen contributes 47 billion dollars each year to national economies worldwide and generates nearly 1.1 million jobs. These relatively low- impact activities are the fastest growing. For example, whale watching tourism has grown 10 percent annually in recent years.
“Whether you are looking at fish as a financial resource or a source of protein, our research shows that the benefits of healthy, robust fisheries have enormous value far beyond the fishing dock,” he said.
Governments hand out some 27 billion dollars in fishing subsidies every year and the majority of these – 16 billion dollars – lead directly to overfishing, the studies found.
“These subsidies are bad for the fish stocks, bad for the economy, bad for food security and bad for the fishing business in the long run,” said Sumaila.
However, that does mean there is money in the system that could be turned around to properly manage sustainable fisheries. Maintaining healthy fisheries makes good economic sense but overfishing is “simply bad business”, he said.
Local communities are the ones who benefit most from properly managing their coastal marine resources, scientists at CI found in their studies that focused on Belize, Brazil, Fiji, Panama and Ecuador. According to one study, 90 percent of residents of 12 coastal villages in Fiji’s four Marine Managed Areas reported that the MMA also served to protect their traditional livelihood and cultural heritage.
Locally managed MMAs are the best form of management if communities are fully committed, says Karrer.
Among the other findings is that MMAs can help depleted fisheries and degraded ecosystems rebound. The Phoenix and Line Islands in the remote Pacific suffered severe coral bleaching in 1997-98. Scientists discovered that the islands that were better protected created an environment which allowed coral reefs to regenerate “with extraordinary vigour”, according to the report.
“So the message for coastal communities is this: if you want access to these resources tomorrow, you have to take care of your backyard today,” said CI’s Gregory Stone.
First published as: Locally-Run Protected Areas Could Reverse Fisheries’ Death Spiral – IPS ipsnews.net.CEDAR RAPIDS Leave it to Dylan McLaughlins teammates to keep him grounded during the biggest week of his hockey life.
Hes really not that good, one kidded as a reporter was talking to McLaughlin after practice Wednesday.
Initially lost in the hoopla surrounding the Stanley Cup being in town last Saturday and the utter craziness of an 8-7 shootout loss to Green Bay was McLaughlins creative and brilliant goal for the Cedar Rapids RoughRiders. Its one that has shown up on www.nhl.com and www.yahoosports.com and was the top play on ESPN SportsCenters Top 10 Tuesday night.
Its been pretty crazy, McLaughlin said. I never would have thought anything like this would happen.
McLaughlin took a pass from teammate Alec Marsh on right wing inside the Green Bay zone, put his stick and puck between his legs and shot from behind his leg left, roofing a perfectly placed shot into the net. Perhaps the top goal in the 14-year history of the RoughRiders.
The thing that I liked about it was that he was playing with no fear, said Riders Coach Mark Carlson. We talk about that all the time with our guys. Theres a time and a place, and that was the right time and the right place to try that. It was great.
McLaughlin said the shot came solely from spur-of-the-moment instinct.
The pass was just a little bit in front of me, he said. I just brought it between my legs and shot it. Looking back at it, I didnt start it all (intentionally). It just happened. I dont even know why I did it, really. I saw it go in, and I guess I was just shocked at first. I never thought that would go in. I didnt really get a lot of (power) on it.
The 17-year-old was acquired in an offseason trade from Sioux Falls. He had just one goal last season but has three already this season.
Including one that got him on national television.
That was really exciting, just mostly crazy, McLaughlin said. Ive watched SportsCenter my whole life. Just being on the Top 10 is an honor.Do you remember Etrian Odyssey IV, that surprisingly fun RPG that came out on the 3DS back in the spring? Well, Atlus isn’t waiting long to bring you more map-making RPG goodness. Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millenium Girl is a remake of the first game in the series, and claims itself as two games in one, with both an updated version of the entire original game and a brand-new story mode giving backstory to the world of Etria and the Yggdrasil Tree. (try saying that three times fast. Or even once, really) The classic mode gives us a complete remake of the first Etrian Odyssey, upgraded with all the features of Etrian Odyssey IV.
One of the new game’s most significant features, however, is the aforementioned story mode. A first for the Etrian series, this full-fledged adventure puts you in control of five preset characters, each with a personality and character. The tale will take them through numerous new dungeons, fighting brand new foes along the way as they learn the history of the Yggdrasil Tree, as well as the mysterious girl Frederica around whom the plot seems to be focused. The game also includes new features such as the Grimore system, allowing players to customize and combine different character classes and even obtain powers from your enemies.
On the presentation side of things, Atlus has brought in animation studio Madhouse to create the game’s into and cutscenes. Madhouse’s credentials include animation for Persona 4 Golden and Persona 4 Arena, as well as many other games and anime, most notably Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad and Card Captor Sakura, as well as the films of Mamoru Hosoda and Satoshi Kon. Voice acting and orchestrated music is also included, although the music is optional for those who enjoy a simpler sound to their punishingly-hard JRPGs.
“Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millenium Girl is so much more than a remake,” said Tim Pivnicny, vice president of sales and marketing, Index Digital Media Inc. “The ATLUS team went above and beyond to create a full-length story mode that really explores the world of Etria. The updated gameplay conveniences from Etrian Odyssey IV make the game approachable for new players, while the added voices, 3D graphics and new gameplay systems continue to push the series forward.” The game promises to be a combination of customization for the classic Etrian fan and story for those who like a little more narrative.
Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millenium Girl is heading exclusively to the 3DS this summer, and will be available in both physical and downloadable forms. Check out our screenshot gallery below, and head on over to their official website for more.Tomorrow Never Dies is a fitting title for CHIKARA Pro’s final event of 2014, as the promotion itself came back from an assumed death after a one year blackout. After a hot angle at National Pro Wrestling Day lauding the company’s return, and a successful return to iPPV with You Only Live Twice, CHIKARA settled into a relatively quiet season. Regardless, CHIKARA’s return was one of the biggest wrestling stories of the year and one that delighted the outfit’s dedicated fan base. Alright, let’s quit the exposition and get |
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For now, we're featuring 3 incredible selvedges: Cone White Oak 13.5 oz 1968 Indigo Memphis made at Cone's world famous White Oak mill in Greensboro, NC. Cone White Oak 13.2 oz W966 Black made at Cone's world famous White Oak mill in Greensboro, NC. Kuroki 12.9 oz Jetsetter Gray imported from Japan where the finest "novelty" selvedges of this nature are made.
BONUS: We've just got the very last shipment of Cone's 12.75oz Natural selvedge that will ever be produced. Once it's gone, it's gone. Because of the limited supply, only 400 pairs are being made available at this time. It's a unique product, with a red, natural and blue edge, that's going to make for a truly incredible pair of jeans you're going to love.
What is selvedge denim? High quality selvedge denim like the ones we're offering are made on narrow vintage shuttle-looms and feature continuous yarn construction. It makes for a tighter weave, finished at both edges with a contrasting stripe that jeans enthusiasts prize.
What makes it better? Raw selvedge, like we're offering, takes less maintenance (we encourage you to go months before your first washing and, even then, months or years between there-after) as the denim will stretch, mold and contort to your body more and more with every step getting better with age. Creases at the back of the knees and just below the front pockets greet you like old friends.
How will I know which fit will fit me best? Never you fear; while we're asking you to select your denim now (so we can get the mills spun-up) we'll send you all of the info, measurements, and pictures needed to find your perfect fit when it comes time to order after the funding period closes.
What sizes will be available?
For men, we're offering a huge spread, so even the hardest to fit guy will find his perfect match. Waist sizes: 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42. Inseams: 30, 32, 34. THE BOYFRIEND JEAN (a boys cut designed for a women's body) will be available in waist sizes: 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31. Inseam: 26.
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Worn Antique Brass - (this comes standard - let us do the picking and this is what you'll get, custom customers could have this, or the other options).
Silver Oxide - Same custom Flint and Tinder design as the antique brass for both the button and rivets, but with a smart distressed white-wash over top.
Rally Red Rubber Plated / Daytona Yellow Rubber Plated /F&T Blue Rubber Plated - Super modern. Super bold. Super unique. The unique hand-feel of rubber over top of metal is something you're going to love.
The Raw Split Hide -As your denim changes, so too will your untreated leather patch, picking up a patina that tells the story of where you've been. This is the standard; Let us do the picking and this is what you'll get. Customers selecting "extra custom" could have this, or the other options.
Gunmetal Gray- A modern elephant gray made of fine top-grain leather.
Burnt Orange - A bold orang-y high brown made of fine top-grain leather.
Deep Brown - The timeless standard. Back when Levis used authentic leather as their standard issue, this was one of their early favorites.
"Flint and Tinder, Crowd-Sourced Clothes You Can Be Proud Of" - This is the standard; Let us do the picking and this is what you'll get. Customers selecting "extra custom" could have this, or the other options.
Not Made In China - Designed by Brooklyn designer Daniel Blackman.
Good Guy To Know - By backing Flint and Tinder in our mission to reignite American manufacturing through better goods and service, this is exactly what you are. Why not let the world know?
First samples of SLIMs in all 4 currently available denims. More pictures, showing various hardware/denim/fit combos coming soon!
Looking for more details on fit?
The easiest way to order is simply to pick the fit that looks best to you and letting us know your preferred waist and inseam. From there, we'll take care of the rest.
Want to know how the garment itself will measure? We've come up with the handy charts below.We take a closer look at the case, and how advances in science along with your help could identify the victims more than a century later.
It's a small farming community of about 50 people on the far western edge of Grand Forks County. But a nightmare is part of this sleepy town's history.
“If someone says Niagara, you mean that's where that guy buried all those dead people,” said Niagara resident Laurel Nabben.
Eugene Butler didn't just bury seeds on his farm but also bodies.
“It’s a little piece of our history,” explained Nabben.
History describes Butler as a loner and paranoid. He was eventually committed to an insane asylum in 1906 and died several years later. A few years after his passing, while tearing down a house where a workshop stands today, a secret was unlocked. A secret Butler took to the grave.
"The fact there was that many bodies out at that scene," said Sergeant Dan Hillebrand with the Grand Forks County Sheriff’s Department.
Six nude bodies buried in a crawlspace underneath the house that could only be accessed through a hidden trapdoor in the floorboards. Some reports say it was a family of five plus one more victim. Others suggest all the bodies were males between the ages of 15 and 18. All reports indicate the victims were killed with a sharp object, sharp enough to put a hole in their skulls. Legs were broken on some of the victims so they would fit in the shallow graves.
“I'm assuming it was a rather limited force with a sheriff and possibly a few deputies,” explained Hillebrand referring to the department back in the early 1900s.
The sheriff at the time believed the serial killings took place over a period of several years. Since Butler was already dead the motive remains a mystery. As the story was passed down over the years many theories have been mentioned, the victims may have been housekeepers who were costing too much, farmhands plotting to rob Butler, or possibly a homosexual relationship that ended violently. The case file is nowhere to be found today.
"If they existed they would have been in the courthouse somewhere, in the basement area, and they could have washed away or been destroyed. I'm not even sure they existed back then - just a mystery what happened to the records," said Hillebrand.
The victims were never identified. Police believe Butler burned the clothes to hide their identities.
“How sad it would be that they were missing and nobody knew it, or a loved one was looking for them and never found them,” said Nabben.
According to newspaper clippings at the time, when townspeople got wind of the serial killings they flocked to the farmstead to collect bones belonging to the victims and took them as souvenirs. So we raised the question: if someone watching this story has one of those bones could it help identify the victims even if 100 years have gone by?
“The probability is high we would be able to extract DNA, because the techniques are dramatically improved now,” said University of North Dakota anthropology professor Doctor Phoebe Stubblefield.
She explains even the smallest piece of bone could provide some answers.
“DNA will give us the same level of specificity which population are they descendent from,” said Stubblefield.
Scientists say the bigger the bone, like a skull or femur, the more useful it would be. Dr. Stubblefield would not be surprised if skulls from this event still exist as they are often kept as trophies.
“If there is a story attached to that skull you just keep it. Especially the family members will maintain possession, just keep passing it down and pass the story down,” she explained.
But making a positive ID is impossible without a DNA match. Someone has to be looking for the victim. Lately the odds of finding a match have improved with more people researching their ancestries, and with larger DNA databanks of missing persons.
“The icing on the cake will someone come forward and say I’m missing a relative, could this be my relative from the early 1900s that we know disappeared?” commented Stubblefield.
A community hoping advances in science could unbury the identities of the six murder victims.
“Another piece of our history, closure definitely,” said Nabben.French protester Jean-Baptiste Redde calls for the release of Jacqueline Sauvage duing a rally at the Esplanade du Trocadero in Paris, on December 10, 2016 (AFP Photo/Francois Guillot)
Paris (AFP) - A woman who killed her abusive husband and became a symbol of the suffering of France's domestic violence victims walked free from prison on Wednesday after receiving a presidential pardon.
President Francois Hollande granted the pardon because he "considered that (Jacqueline) Sauvage's place was no longer in prison but with her family," the president's office said in a statement earlier.
Sauvage, 69, was serving a 10-year sentence at a jail southeast of Paris for shooting her husband Norbert Marot dead a day after their son hanged himself in 2012.
A police source said a car seen leaving the prison was carrying Sauvage and three family members. Hordes of journalists were on hand, but the car did not stop.
Sauvage's daughter Carole Marot told French radio earlier that she was on her way to the prison. "I'm crying, it's wonderful," she said. "Endless thanks to the president."
One of her lawyers, Nathalie Tomasini, said Wednesday she was "overcome by joy and emotion" over the pardon.
The case, a cause celebre in France, has seen many twists and turns since Sauvage shot her husband three times in the back.
Sauvage testified that she endured 47 years of violence including sexual assault at the hands of Marot.
Her three daughters testified against their father, saying they too were beaten and raped.
Feminist groups, celebrities and politicians rallied behind her, with a petition gathering nearly 436,000 signatures.
Hollande accorded Sauvage a partial pardon in January this year for killing Marot, a violent alcoholic who she said raped her and her daughters.
The gesture allowed Sauvage to seek provisional release through the courts, but these efforts failed, with an appeal court saying she had not shown sufficient remorse.
Sauvage was found guilty of murder in 2012, a verdict that was upheld on appeal in 2015.
The French president's power to commute or suspend prison terms was enshrined in the constitution in 1958.
Under a 2008 reform, the president may no longer decree blanket pardons, just individual ones.NEW YORK (Reuters) - American companies are now sitting on record mountains of cash in an indication of deep worries about the economy’s future.
Even though analysts forecast a return to U.S. economic growth by the third quarter, companies have yet to show any major signs of rehiring or spending.
And with consumers also hoarding cash at near record levels, a cautious stance by companies could add to worries about the sustainability of an economic recovery.
Earnings growth could be relatively flat as cash piles build, but then surge once consumers, and businesses, become more confident in the economy, analysts said.
The increased cash holdings are “negative in that they’re not going to lead a recovery, but would react to evidence that there’s an improving economy,” said Jim Awad, managing director at Zephyr Management in New York.
It provides further evidence that “businesses are just holding back,” said Fred Dickson, market strategist at D.A. Davidson & Co. in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
“There’s still a very high level of anxiety regarding the timing and speed and sustainability of an economic recovery.” he said.
Standard & Poor’s 500 companies’ cash levels, which have stood at around $600 billion to $665 billion since 2004, jumped to $700 billion in the second quarter, S&P analyst Howard Silverblatt said.
He said the amount covers the entire S&P 500 minus financials, utilities and transportation companies, which carry high cash reserves as a normal part of business.
Information technology companies held the largest amount of cash at $240 billion, accounting for 34 percent of all the cash holdings, followed by health care, with $209 billion, he said.
“SURVIVOR” STRATEGY
“Companies are being very careful about spending money,” Silverblatt said. The positive is that companies now have a “war chest for when they believe things are better,” he said.
While bottom-line earnings improved in the second quarter from the first quarter, revenue did not, he noted.
Earnings for S&P 500 companies now are estimated to decline 27.8 percent from a year ago, according to Thomson Reuters. That’s better than the decline of 35.5 percent in the first quarter of this year.
Revenue, on the other hand, went from a 10.6 percent decline in the first quarter to a drop of 14.6 percent in the second quarter, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Companies are “still cutting to the bone,” said Doug Roberts, chief investment strategist at Channel Capital Research.com in Shrewsbury, New Jersey. “The real question will be: ‘At what point do you start looking for revenue growth?’”
Reports last week showed weak consumer sentiment in August and an unexpected decline in July retail sales, adding to worries about how much the consumer will help in a recovery.
“Corporations are still in survival mode, cutting costs, preparing for the worst,” Awad said. He said they’re likely to remain in that mode until “it’s clear the hopeful consensus on Wall Street about a sharp improvement in economy in the third and fourth quarters... is accurate.”
Economists are forecasting GDP growth in the third quarter, partly because companies need to rebuild inventories to keep their businesses running and as the holidays approach.
Meanwhile, S&P 500 companies’ earnings are forecast to show a turnaround by the fourth quarter of this year.
Earnings for the third quarter are forecast to decline 20.7 percent, Thomson Reuters data showed.519 SHARES Share Tweet
It’s not easy being a feminist in 2016. Your Twitter mentions are blown up regularly with the same arguments over and over again:
“You’re whorephobic!”
“Stop erasing me!”
“Well, I’m happy in patriarchy…”
Don’t you wish there were shorthand descriptions of these logical fallacies we see everywhere in mainstream discourse and media? Well now there are, with this updated list of logical fallacies for today’s feminist. Enjoy.
Reductio ad Phobium: The logical fallacy in which a feminist critique of systems of power is reduced to fear/hatred of individuals.
For example, in response to bell hooks’ cultural critique of the commodification of sexualized female bodies in media, Janet Mock accused her of “femmephobia”:
Femmephobia, like whorephobia, must be abolished in our spaces, our theories and our critiques of one another and one another's work. — Janet Mock (@janetmock) May 10, 2016
In response to Gail Dines’ critique of the porn industry, she is routinely labeled “whorephobic,” and accused of “slut-shaming”:
@CollectiveEvol @nomadiquemc ugh, Gail Dines is a slut-shaming campaigner who actively destroys women's agency. — HAIL ANTS (@hailants) April 5, 2015
Why it’s a fallacy: First, this tactic reduces the opponent’s critique of systems of power to a nonexistent attack on an individual. Second, accusations of ____phobia do not engage with the critic’s arguments, but instead resort to pathologizing one’s opponent (not unlike when men accuse feminists of being hysterical instead of refuting the actual content of feminists’ claims).
Silentium est Liberatum: The fallacy that erasing references to “woman” and “female” from language will end sexism.
Mother's Day is highly offensive to all non-binary people on here. Sorry, but calling someone a "mother" enforces 2 genders. #MothersDay — enjoying my iPad (@seyahrelyt) May 8, 2016
Thank you for “birthing parent” as deliberately gender inclusive language @simkinchannel #birth — Sarah Whedon (@rerites) May 10, 2016
Indiana to be back in court soon, arguing for the right to prosecute pregnant people for not delivering a live baby https://t.co/CpNcewIdJo — Rewire (@Rewire_News) May 10, 2016
Someday I'm going to be rich enough to buy an abortion for any uterus-bearer that wants one. — brynkmyn (@brynkmyn) March 17, 2015
I'm all for equality of men and non-men. — austen (@ustenhenry) May 8, 2016
Maybe we could start calling feminism #nonmeninism to avoid excluding anyone? #greenpartyfeminism — ★That Big Old Moon★ (@Bigoldsupermoon) April 16, 2016
Why it’s a fallacy: Instead of arguing against the content of feminist claims, this tactic resorts to attacking the very ability of the speaker to make the argument, by erasing the political categories used to name sex-based inequality. Women are told that the act of naming the oppression they face creates that oppression by “perpetuating the gender binary.”
Pueri erunt Pueros: Boys will be boys, aka predators will be predators. This is used to argue that laws/policies should not be put in place to curtail male violence because violent males are… violent males.
@ABCPolitics No I don't think so. Sexual predators aren't like, well, it's illegal to assault someone so I won't. Law doesn't stop crime. — Jeremiah Rappel (@JeremiahRappel) April 24, 2016
@Rebeksy just like the law doesn't stop crime-criminals don't observe the law. — Broken (@fjrzram) April 25, 2015
@nranews @NRA Ppl are correct, this will not deter crime, ppl that want guns illegally will buy them that way. This hurts law abiding folks. — ♿ (@1234flyingninja) April 24, 2015
@CNNSotu Predators won't care about the law, just like criminals don't care about gun laws. Mr. Cruz, stop imposing your religious beliefs. — Publius332 (@publius332) May 1, 2016
Why it’s a fallacy: “Boys will be boys”/“predators will be predators” is a tautology, meaning that the statement is devoid of content. It’s basically the logical equivalent of shrugging one’s shoulders.
Non Sexquitor: The belief that nothing oppressive could possibly follow from something involving sex and that anything involving two consenting adults cannot be harmful:
In fact, even if the sex-thing doesn’t happen between two adults, it’s not sex acts, but just thinking about sex negatively that is harmful:
Teen Sex Isn't the Problem (But Thinking That It Is Sure Is) http://t.co/7XNTAOG9Ce — Everyday Feminism (@EvrydayFeminism) January 6, 2015
It is acknowledged that gaslighting happens in abusive relationships, which can convince women to accept abusive behaviour:
Gaslighting Is a Common Victim-Blaming Abuse Tactic – Here Are 4 Ways to Recognize It in Your Life by http://t.co/xfqgexNPhd #abuse — Everyday Feminism (@EvrydayFeminism) June 24, 2015
But, if violence happens within the context of sex, it is always acceptable because “consent,” which makes the violence totally feminist:
@EmmaCrushesPuss Also as an aside a lot of people think BDSM is unfeminist and I'm like um CONSENT IS VERY FEMINIST — Kris @ RTX HYPE! (@KrisKittie) April 3, 2016
Why it’s a fallacy: There is a disconnect between liberal feminism’s basic premises and its conclusions about sex. Sex is given special status that disappears power relations between men and women. For example, women are systemically barred from high paying, male-dominated industries, such as STEM, and compelled into lower paying, female-dominated industries, such as caretaking. This is called sexism. But when women are systemically barred from the same professional opportunities and instead compelled into the female-dominated sex trade, this is called empowerment.
Identitus ex Machina: When a person is losing an argument, so claim their identity/experience/very existence is being erased by the act of their opponent disagreeing with them, in order to end the conversation.
You can try to erase the existence of so many people, but it just proves that your views are harmful. https://t.co/YWNjQYCfqQ — Fem4SexWorkersRights (@SupportSWRights) May 10, 2016
By contrast, @glosswitch is a journalist who has a high profile in media feminism and regularly says things that erase my existence. — Dora, sekhmet (@thewildestsea) June 12, 2014
@MeghanEMurphy You said "Pornography is FOR men and happens at the expense of women." Literally erasing millions of gay men out of existence — Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) March 31, 2015
Why it’s a fallacy: This is an interesting one. Rather than addressing an opponent’s arguments, this fallacy resorts to attacking the legitimacy of argumentation itself. The very act of disagreement is said to violently erase the one whom is being disagreed with.
Et tu, Cuté?! Not technically a fallacy, but what happens when someone you just met and think is cool and/or attractive says something like:
Watching porn in queer cinema tonight so that's cool — Lil Bug (@court_ofappeals) May 4, 2016
Buzzkill.
Habeus Porpus: The idea that because a patriarchal structure works for one woman’s individual purposes, it isn’t oppressive to women as a class.
.@Mistress_Joey That's fine. But that has nothing to do with feminism. People like lots of things. That doesn't make those things feminist. — Meghan Murphy (@MeghanEMurphy) May 9, 2016
Why it’s a fallacy: This is a more specific version of Ad Verecundiam (Appeal to Authority). In this case, the appeal is to individual experience as the ultimate authority. But relying solely on individual anecdotes or experiences isn’t a reliable way to analyze systems of power.
Dicktum Factum: The argument that, because male supremacy has been around for a very long time, it is an inevitable and immutable fact.
Do they really think they can put an end to prostitution when the DEMAND for that service will always exist?? #canpoli — Ash1ey (@Totalavery) September 11, 2014
The demand for prostitution will never end as long as there is demand for sex – get used to sex workers via @nytimes https://t.co/a36U4gJmXj — Giles Duke (@GilesDuke) May 7, 2016
Why it’s a fallacy: This is a more specific version of Ad Antiquitatem (Appeal to Tradition). It argues that there is nothing that can be done about male supremacy because it exists. It is the phallus declaring: “I am who am!”
So there you have it, a definitive list of logical fallacies for today’s feminist. Perfect for saving time and space, whether you’re running low on characters in the Tweetosphere, or responding to an argument on the fly. Happy patriarchy smashing!
519 SHARES Share Tweet
Susan Cox Susan Cox is a feminist writer and academic living in the United States. She teaches in Philosophy.But on Friday, the new president did exit from the inane and pernicious W. era of cartoon villains, simplistic linear thinking, and black-and-white cowboy bluster.
“We will not let the pursuit of the perfect stand in the way of achievable goals,” Mr. Obama said, surrounded by Marines in the gym at Camp Lejeune.
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W.’s strategy was inspired by his insecurity. He has acknowledged that he went to war based on body language, without a full-throated debate or analysis; there was just a vibe coming from the general direction of the Pentagon and the vice president’s office that it was a good thing to do. His only real goal was to prove he was tough.
The confident and unsentimental Mr. Obama, by contrast, has redefined the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan around endgames.
“Until we have a clear strategy, we’re not going to have a clear exit strategy,” he told Jim Lehrer on Friday about Afghanistan, noting that he had ordered a “head-to-toe, soup-to-nuts” review of the mission there, so America could get out quickly without risking that the country once more becomes a staging area for terrorist attacks against us.
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Mr. Obama called W. on Friday to give him a heads-up about the repudiation on Iraq. Robert Gibbs said the call was not at all contentious. But in the Lehrer interview, the president compared America to a big tanker that needed to “start moving in a better trajectory so that five years, 10 years down the road you can say, you know what, because of good decisions now our kids are safer, more secure, more prosperous, more unified than they were before.” This analogy turns W. into the Exxon Valdez.
Mr. Ricks predicted that W.’s snake-bit war may yet swallow up Mr. Obama, that America will be in Iraq for many years to come, and that in the end, we will be the losers. What emerges will be an Iraq that “is not a democracy, not an American ally, and run by a strongman, probably tougher, smarter and more adept than Saddam Hussein ” and who is, ironically, “an even worse guy,” Ricks told Keith Olbermann.
The new commander in chief has the nerves of a riverboat gambler and, on the humongous budget and stimulus package, he and Rahmbo Emanuel are liberally applying the Rahm doctrine: Take advantage of a crisis to grab an opportunity.
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Even the Republican John Thune seemed impressed at the administration’s brazenness, telling The Times’s Carl Hulse, “They’re really swinging for the fences.”
It is a moment of so many giant, cascading perils, with so many mind- boggling numbers and cautionary codicils, that it makes your brain hurt. No one, including the new president himself, can possibly know if his risky bets will pay off.
“This is a human enterprise,” he told Lehrer. “It’s not going to be flawless.”
Speaking of the Enterprise, Mr. Obama has a bit of Mr. Spock in him (and not just the funny ears). He has a Vulcan-like logic and detachment. Any mere mortal who had to tell liberals that our obligations in Iraq and Afghanistan are far from over and tell Republicans that he has a $3.6 trillion budget would probably have tears running down his face.Fury FC 1, Independence 1
The last time Ottawa Fury FC faced the Charlotte Independence, the United Soccer League team scored an upset victory and then made a coaching change.
That wasn’t going to be the case this time — win, lose or draw — but Fury FC came within mere minutes of shocking the Independence again on Saturday night.
Fury FC tried to make an early goal by Jamar Dixon stand up, but Independence midfielder Lewis Hilton tied it in the 89th minute as the two teams played to a 1-1 draw in Charlotte.
Hilton’s late goal means Fury FC interim boss Julian de Guzman is still waiting his first victory as head coach and general manager, and his team remains winless since Aug. 12, when it knocked off the Independence 3-1 at TD Place stadium.
Oddly, that was followed hours later by the ouster of Paul Dalglish as Fury FC head coach and GM.
Team management quickly installed de Guzman, formerly an assistant, in the top jobs. While Fury FC has certainly played more entertaining soccer since then, a combined total of zero victories, five draws and two losses has not helped its long-shot playoff chances.
The single point from Saturday’s tie won’t help much, although Fury FC (7-9-11) still does have enough points available to get the job done before its USL schedule closes out Oct. 14 at Pittsburgh.
The next game, though, is next Sunday at home against first-place Louisville City FC.
“We fought and did everything we could,” de Guzman said. “It’s just unfortunate that they got their goal based on a mistake from us that was clearly due to the fatigue that was kicking in and that our concentration wasn’t as sharp.”
The 12th-place Fury FC was in tough against the Eastern Conference’s most prolific offence on Saturday, with the Independence holding a 50-34 advantage in goals scored heading into the contest. Charlotte’s lineup featured Enzo Martinez, who was tied for first in the USL with 16 goals, and Jorge Herrera, who was fifth with 12.
Fury FC handled those big guns well enough, but even so the Independence held a wide margin in play, particularly in the 30 minutes leading up to Hilton’s goal.
To its credit, though, Fury FC got off to just the kind of start de Guzman had been seeking. It went right to the attack, and that paid off with sustained pressure and, just 10 minutes, a goal on a header by Dixon.
Moments later, Fury FC again threatened, but one shot clattered off the post and another by Tucker Hume went wide of the goal.
Fury FC keeper Callum Irving made that lead standup into half-time, including one acrobatic save on a ball just below the crossbar. It was Irving’s 31st consecutive start.
However, Fury FC also received bad news in the final moments of the opening 45 as leading scorer Steevan Dos Santos went down in pain after taking a boot to the side of one knee from Charlotte’s Donnie Smith, who was yellow-carded by the referee.
Dos Santos was replaced by Carl Haworth for the second half.
There was no further word on the extent of the injury. It’s likely Dos Santos will be re-evaluated this coming week back in Ottawa.
Dos Santos had scored in five consecutive games, and his season total of eight amounted to almost one-quarter of Fury FC’s total offensive output.Following the addition of second baseman Neil Walker‘s qualifying offer, the salary projections for the 2017 New York Mets roster are starting to fill in.
There were many mixed reactions across the New York Mets fanbase following the news that Neil Walker accepted his one-year/$17.2 million qualifying offer. Many felt that the deal takes away much-needed money from the Mets payroll that could be used potentially elsewhere in improving the team.
With that said, allow the speculation to commence.
The following projections are provided by Adam Rubin of ESPN. If no salary is given, then it means that the player is not yet eligible for arbitration or has already agreed to the league minimum.
Rotation:
Bullpen:
Starters:
Bench:
Projection:
The Mets’ payroll currently stands at roughly $123,915,000. However, this does not include the money that could possibly be spent on a deal for Yoenis Cespedes or any other free agents.
New York certainly has some wiggle room when it comes to their salary space, but it all depends whether they want to spend like a big market team or would they rather not hand out any hefty deals and have a lower pay role.
In the end, it’ll all come down to the decision of ownership.California Governor Jerry Brown announced Tuesday evening that he had reached a deal with both chambers of the state legislature to extend the Golden State’s “cap-and-trade” program beyond its original expiration date in 2020.
Brown, Senate President pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) announced “a legislative package that will launch a landmark program to measure and combat air pollution at the neighborhood level – in communities most impacted – and extend and improve the state’s world-leading cap-and-trade program to ensure California continues to meet its ambitious climate change goals,” according to a statement released on the governor’s website.
The statement adds that the deal “includes AB 617 by Assemblymembers Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens), Eduardo Garcia (D-Coachella) and Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles) and AB 398 by Assemblymember Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles) and is the product of weeks of discussions between the administration and legislative leaders with Republican and Democratic legislators, environmental justice advocates, environmental groups, utilities, industry and labor representatives, economists, agricultural and business organizations, faith leaders and local government officials.”
The cap-and-trade system sets an upper limit for carbon dioxide emissions, and then issues emissions permits that can be bought and sold by producers. The system applies an effective tax on emissions (one that some businesses would prefer to leave the state to avoid). Companies that are more energy-efficient can sell their permits for profit — a model that Tesla, for example, has used to pad its bottom line.
The legislation will have to proceed in the absence of former Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez, who will be sworn into Congress on Tuesday — more than a month after winning a special election to replace Attorney General Xavier Becerra in the 34th congressional district. Gomez had delayed the ceremony partly to make his vote available for a cap-and-trade extension deal.
The deal, as noted by Bay Area public radio station KQED, will include provisions to allow local communities to monitor air quality and industrial air pollution, without allowing them to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Climate change activists often confuse the two phenomena, though one has little to do with the other: carbon dioxide is an odorless, colorless gas that is not harmful.
KQED adds that the deal also ends “a fire prevention fee largely paid by residents living in rural, Republican areas of the state.” That could indicate that Democrats struck an agreement with Republicans to vote for the bills.
Without Gomez, the Democrats will not have the two-thirds majority required to renew cap-and-trade without facing legal challenges. But with Republican votes, that obstacle will disappear.
Following last year’s passage of Proposition 54, which requires bills to be on public display for 72 hours before a vote, that could mean a vote on cap-and-trade could come as early as Thursday.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Correction: an earlier version of this story indicated that a two-thirds majority would have been needed to avoid a referendum.So, one of the big PC makers has come out and said it. According to Acer, Microsoft's hardware play with the Surface risks alienating the manufacturers that have been instrumental in the success of Windows.
"It will create a huge negative impact for the ecosystem and other brands may take a negative reaction," Acer's JT Wang was quoted as saying on Monday, while another top executive at the company said Acer was considering whether to find alternatives to the industry standard OS.
Fighting words, albeit words that came just after Microsoft admitted it was aware of this risk. But what is the alternative to Windows, really?
Android? With the Nexus 7, Google is doing much the same thing as Microsoft, by pushing its own brand on the hardware side. Moreover, Acer is the one major manufacturer of Android tablets that's actually seeing its shipments and market share fall.
Apple doesn't license its operating systems to other manufacturers, so that leaves non-Android Linux distributions: most likely, given its relative popularity and stated tablet plans, Ubuntu. Or maybe Open WebOS.
Time to jump?
It can be argued that two things have held Linux back until this point, certainly on the desktop. Firstly, consumers have overwhelmingly opted for Windows and, to a lesser extent, Mac OS X. Secondly (and related), for a manufacturer to seriously market machines based on desktop Linux would have meant incurring the wrath of Microsoft.
By bypassing its partners, Microsoft has effectively reneged on its side of this arrangement, so Acer must feel freer than before to do what it likes.
In the PC market, Acer has an incentive (other than revenge) to move away from, or at least downplay, Windows 8. The industry is reverberating with dark mutterings about the user experience on the desktop version. Here, we may be looking at another Vista situation, where manufacturers are forced to keep offering the last version of Windows (XP then, 7 now).
That gives users less incentive to upgrade and buy new kit, which means manufacturers need to look elsewhere if they are to avoid shrinking. So, either they push Linux desktops or they push tablets.
An Ubuntu tablet
Let's theorise that Acer or other top manufacturers start pushing Ubuntu tablets instead of Windows 8 tablets. How does that work as a pitch to the consumer?
One issue with switching to the flashy new Windows RT (the ARM-based tablet version) is that it means starting from scratch when it comes to apps. That alone makes it a good time for users to jump ship, |
when pressed
A visual loading indicator bar now displays across the top of the site when navigating between pages or performing actions
I have put in place an optimization to the initial site load that should reduce the data and load time by about 70% which should significantly help Trailposters on slower internet connections or devices
Wrapping up
These updates are just the low-hanging fruit from the beta testing feedback and a small fraction of what I have planned over the coming weeks and months.
I’ll keep everyone up to date with new features as they are added.A 27-year-old drunk man killed his mother, took her heart out and ate it with chutney and pepper in Kolhapur, Maharashtra.
The crime came to light when the accused, Sunil Kuchakurni, was seen coming out of his home with blood dripping from his hands on Monday afternoon, reported mid-day.
Sanjay More, senior inspector of Shahupuri police station, told the newspaper: "Sunil, who works as a labourer at a construction site, is married with three kids. However, his wife stays at her maternal house in Mumbai, along with the children. On the day of the incident, Sunil, who was heavily drunk, had first gone to his neighbour's house asking for food. But when he did not get anything to eat, he went to his own house."
The cop added that after returning back to his home he fought with his mother and killed her in a fit of rage. Subsequently, he took her heart out and placed it on a plate, and ate it with pepper and chutney.
Kuchakarni has been arrested by the police and an investigation is underway.
Earlier in May, in another incident in Kolhapur, a 27-year-old man had killed his father after he was questioned for coming late to the house.
Rafique Mulla, who was in an inebriated state, killed his father Pirsaheb Mohammad Mulla (55) at their house in Shahu colony area.
Pirsaheb had sought an explanation from Rafique for coming late to the house. After this, Rafique got angry and stabbed his father with a knife.
Rafique had come to the house and asked his wife to open the door, but his father turned up and opened the door following which an altercation broke out between the two, the officer said.
(With PTI inputs)The missteps of UnREAL Season 2 guaranteed that Lifetime would take a more cautious approach in Season 3, and the switch to a Bachelorette -type format is already off and running. We’ve officially found our next Everlasting star, now that Masters of Sex alum Caitlin Fitzgerald has signed on as the new leading star.
Per TVLine, the erstwhile Libby Masters will join UnREAL Season 3 as female Everlasting lead Serena, described as “a successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist who’ll win America over with her outward strength and inner vulnerability.” As-yet-uncast among the 25-something contestants are firefighter Owen, Wall Street investor Jasper, surfer August, and ballet dancer Alexi.
Elsewhere, UnREAL Season 3 has added its third showrunner in as many years, setting executive producer Stacy Rukeyser to take over from Carol Barbee, who herself assumed the position from series creator Marti Noxon. UnREAL has a few laps to run toward redeeming itself for Season 2, as our own Britt Hayes called the second run “just plain painful.”
Production will begin in February, with Shiri Appleby, Constance Zimmer, Craig Bierko, Josh Kelly, Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman and Genevieve Buchner expected to return, so stay tuned for the latest.Palmerston North Film Society president Rik Howes outside Cinema Gold, which could be closing.
Palmerston North film buffs are worried the credits may be about to roll for the city's only boutique cinema.
The Downtown Cinemas complex, which includes Cinema Gold and complexes in Havelock North and Paraparaumu, was bought by Australian company Event Hospitality and Entertainment in June.
After the sale was announced, concerns started to emerge about the possibility of the two Cinema Gold theatres being shut down.
Opened in 2003, the smaller cinemas are licensed to sell alcohol, contain larger seats, do not sell popcorn and show mainly independent, foreign and festival films.
READ MORE:
* Palmerston North chain Downtown Cinemas bought by Event Cinemas
* Downtown Cinemas to reopen after electrical fire
Palmerston North Film Society president Rik Howes said he understood the new owners were closing the Cinema Gold site, located on the ground floor of the Downtown Shopping Centre, from Wednesday.
He said it was possibly moving back into the main cinema complex.
No-one from Event Cinemas was able to confirm if it was to be closed or moved. Downtown Cinemas manager Paul Wood said he was unable to comment at this time.
Downtown Shopping Centre director Bill Wallace, the former chairman of Downtown Cinemas, said Event had given notice it would be leaving the Cinema Gold space in August.
Wallace said he was confident Cinema Gold's style of film would still be available at Downtown, even if the brand was wound up.
"My clear understanding is that those kind of films will still be shown at the main cinema complex."
There was a long tradition of showing art house and film festival fare at the complex, he said.
"The thing about Downtown is it's always had access to a broad range of film, especially because it was the first multiscreen cinema in New Zealand."
Howes said the change of ownership had yet to affect the Film Society, which met at the cinema complex each Wednesday, but things were up for negotiation in three months.
"We've got a contract that runs until the end of November, so I've been assured we're safe for the rest of the year."
This meant the 2016 International Film Festival would go ahead in a fortnight.
Howes said it would be sad to see Cinema Gold go as the majority of Society members and Cinema Gold-goers were 40 plus and preferred art house and festival films over blockbusters.
If Downtown Cinemas stopped showing that style of films regularly, the nearest alternative was Feilding's Focal Point Cinema, though older members could find it difficult to make the trip there, Howes said.
The last film currently scheduled on the Cinema Gold website is Rams, an Icelandic comedy about two brothers feuding over a sheep farm in a remote valley, which is showing at 7.20pm on Wednesday.Retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has landed his next job, signing on as a professor of aviation at the University of Waterloo.
Though his appointment as an adjunct professor has officially begun, Prof. Hadfield isn't expected to begin teaching and advising in aviation and other programs until the fall of 2014, given his busy schedule. In the meantime, he will continue participating in research into heart health in space that is already under way at Waterloo.
"This is a tremendous opportunity for our students and researchers to work with, and learn from, one of the greatest Canadians of recent times," Waterloo president Feridun Hamdullahpur said in a statement.
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Prof. Hadfield is a decorated astronaut who captured Canadians' interest and gained global prominence with a recent five-month visit to the International Space Station, when he became the first Canadian to command the laboratory. He earned praise for using Twitter to give those on Earth a glimpse inside life on the space station, and to disseminate remarkable photos of the planet from above.
The director of the university's aviation program, Ian McKenzie, first began courting Prof. Hadfield this past summer, around the time of his retirement from the Canadian Space Agency. The astronaut's ability to connect with diverse audiences from the space station gave the university confidence he would make a good teacher, and aviation is a young program that could benefit from his profile, having started in 2007 – when Mr. Hadfield was keynote speaker at its launch.
"Chris has been involved with the university for many years," Prof. McKenzie said, adding, "he's quite engaging."
Raised in Milton, Ont., Prof. Hadfield first worked at the University of Waterloo in 1982, conducting postgraduate research after earning a degree in engineering at the Royal Military College of Canada. He is a trained CF-18 fighter pilot, and first was one of four new Canadian astronauts selected from a field of 5,330 applicants in 1992, launching his career with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA.
His areas of teaching and research have yet to be defined, but he is expected to teach both undergraduate and graduate students. In the meantime, he will give a guest lecture at the university on Dec. 3, and is cross-appointed to the Faculties of Science, Environment and Applied Health Sciences.
"Chris crosses a number of faculties with his experience, and so the opportunities are there," Prof. McKenzie said. "He's very keen."What is Animation Art? What is a Simpsons Cel? Different Types of Cels Other Simpsons Artwork Authenticity & Seals Simpsons Artwork Prices Autographed Pieces Framing Animation Art FAQ Links to Purchase Cels Photos of My Cels Photos of Your Cels Contact Support the Site
Frequently Asked Questions
Below are frequently asked questions about Simpsons Cels which I often receive. If you have a question that is not listed, feel free to contact me.
How do I find a Simpsons Cel of a particular scene?
20th Century Fox distributes a very limited amount of original production cels for sale to the public each year. If you are looking for a particular scene you are most likely not going to find it since only certain episodes have had cels released. Buyers purchase choice cels and artwork very quickly when pieces are released. This makes it next to impossible to find artwork from a particular scene. It is best to purchase something you like from whatever selection is currently available.
Is it true that The Simpsons no longer use cels to create the show?
Yes. After season 13 (2002), The Simpsons have stopped creating the show with traditional hand drawn animation cels. The show has now switched over to computer animation. This makes the value of original Simpsons artwork even greater. In the coming years, as more older Simpsons cels are released it will become much harder to obtain pieces. I recommend buying cels now while you still can!
Are Simpsons cels with guest stars released?
No. Cels which feature a guest star who has appeared on the show as himself / herself are not released to the public. However, cels featuring characters with voices by guest stars are released. (Example: Sideshow Bob voiced by Kelsey Grammar)
Simpsons Cels on Ebay: Are they real?
I would say that 90% of the Simpsons cels listed for sale on eBay are FAKE! I feel bad having to tell people that what they've purchased on eBay is not real. As you can probably tell by the look of them, most were made by someone in his basement trying to make an extra buck. DON'T BE FOOLED. If you are a Simpsons fan you should be able to tell if the image was ever used in an episode. My advice: Do not buy any piece of animation artwork that does not have the official 20th Century Fox seal on in and the correct COA to go along with it. You can find some legit pieces on eBay every now and then but it is always better to purchase a cel from a true authorized gallery. All of the galleries in the links section of this site are authorized by 20th Century Fox.
Why don't some cels match up exactly with what was shown on screen?
When a show uses traditional hand animation, celluloid sheets are stacked on top of each other to form a "cel set-up". These cel set-ups contain multiple characters, body parts, or other objects each separated onto different layers in order to create separate individual motions. During this process, cels are used more than once and modified as a way of keeping production costs down. When cels are made available for sale, it is common for 20th Century Fox to put together cel set-ups using whatever is left from storing a scene. Since backgrounds and other cels are used multiple times throughout the show, cel-set ups attempt to recreate the a scene as best as possible using what is available after storage. Because of this, cel set-ups may have characters spanning across multiple frames in the show.
Aren't there thousands of cels used in The Simpsons?
This is a common mistake most people make. Yes, there were thousands of cels used in The Simpsons, BUT these ranged from individual body parts to full characters. Once the main portion of a cel-setup is released (usually a character's full body), that same scene will never again be able to have cels released because there was only one main layer that featured the primary component in the scene. There will be many other cels left over from the same scene but they are now useless. You can no longer piece together another full cel-setup using the remaining cels once the main component to the scene has already been released and sold.
Why are some Simpsons Cels wider than others?
In the animation of The Simpsons some scenes require a different ratio of a cel to be used. These cels are know as "pan" cels. The term refers to the way the camera will pan from side to side across a wider cel. This is commonly found in group shots. Visit my cels section to view examples of "pan" cels.
How do you store animation artwork?
Animation art, particularly cels or other painted pieces should be framed or contained properly using acid free materials and kept in a moderate climate away from extreme temperatures and moisture. For more information on storing artwork, I recommend contacting the galleries listed in our links section.
Why collect / purchase Simpsons Cels and Artwork?
This is the question outside people ask me often. I always tell them that there is no better way to enjoy The Simpsons than having a piece of it's history that was used in the making of the show hanging right in your own living room! Although, Simpsons artwork will without a doubt become much more valuable once the show goes off the air, in my opinion they are the GREATEST collectable that there is to own. If you are on the border about spending a lot of money on one, I suggest that you do. You will cherish it forever. Buy a piece that you can relate to and will help you remember all the laughs the show has brought to you. Your very own original production cel will be a piece of the show's history that will last a lifetime.MAUNA KEA, Hawaii -- Yes, it even snows in paradise.
The summits of famed Hawaii volcanoes Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa are getting an early coat of snow this season -- with up to eight inches in the forecast.
A winter storm warning is in effect through Tuesday night as the summits of the Big Island experience white-out conditions, CBS affiliate KGMB-TV reports. Conditions on the summits are dangerous.
The entrance to the summit of Mauna Kea has been closed at the Visitor Information Station at the 9,200-foot level due to fog and icy roadways.
In a statement Tuesday morning, the Mauna Kea Weather Center said the atmosphere near the Big Island will be "completely saturated" and "unstable" through at least Friday night and possibly even Saturday.
"Inoperable conditions will continue to be the norm as extensive fog, ice, high humidity, overcast/thick clouds and periods of rain/snow plague the summit through the next 4-5 nights," the Mauna Kea Weather Center said.
Snow accumulates at the Mauna Kea summit Tuesday afternoon. Mauna Kea Weather Center
Temperatures are expected to fluctuate near the freezing mark -- ranging from 33°F to 27°F -- throughout the day with east winds of 15 to 25 miles per hour.
A light blanket of white powder was captured on the Mauna Kea Observatory 30 webcams late Monday into Tuesday. An interactive summit map shows ice detected in the area.
Winter Storm Warning in effect until 6 PM HST Tuesday pic.twitter.com/wKy8piBWXi — NWSHonolulu (@NWSHonolulu) November 28, 2017
While it may seem unusual, it's actually not rare for snow to fall on Hawaii's mountains.
Last year, the summits of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa -- the state's two highest volcanic peaks -- saw up to two feet of snow in early December.
At the time, Ryan Lyman, forecast meteorologist with the Mauna Kea Weather Center, told CBS News there has been 30 to 36 inches in recent winters.Columbus Police say that a woman who shot and killed her boyfriend Monday afternoon might have acted in self defense and is not being charged. The woman, who has not been named, was questioned Monday following the shooting inside an apartment in the 2100 block of Winslow Drive. Malyk Shelby, 20, was found there at about 4:20 p.m. He was taken to OhioHealth Grant Medical Center where he died about an hour later.
Columbus Police say that a woman who shot and killed her boyfriend Monday afternoon might have acted in self defense and is not being charged.
The woman, who has not been named, was questioned Monday following the shooting inside an apartment in the 2100 block of Winslow Drive.
Malyk Shelby, 20, was found there at about 4:20 p.m. He was taken to OhioHealth Grant Medical Center where he died about an hour later.
According to homicide Sgt. David Sicilian, a verbal argument between the live-in couple escalated into violence, and the woman shot Shelby.
Police consulted with the Franklin County Prosecutor's office and determined that there was insufficient evidence to file charges.
The case remains open, however, Sicilian said.
dnarciso@dispatch.com
@DeanNarcisoREUTERS/Pascal Rossignol On Nov. 1, agriculture giant Monsanto bought a 7-year-old firm called Climate Corporation for about $1 billion.
Founded by two former Google employees, Climate Corporation might be described as the expression of the "big data" movement in the farming sector.
It combines decades of weather data from the USDA and National Weather Service, as well as its own proprietary live monitoring systems and radars, to better help farmers predict what yields will look like. It also sells them weather insurance.
Coincidentally, the New Yorker published Michael Specter's in-depth profile of the company a week after the purchase was announced.
The whole piece is worth reading, but one line stuck out to us. You'll recall that last year the U.S. saw one of the worst droughts on record. Although scientists have actually yet to find direct evidence that last year's epic drought resulted from climate change, the fact that in the span of two years America's breadbasket saw one of the worst-ever harvests immediately followed by one of the best-ever has hurt farmers' bottom lines. (Of course, it also likely helped boost Climate Corporation's value.)
Here is what Climate Corporation founder Dave Friedberg said about how most farmers view climate change (emphasis ours):
"You don't need to talk about climate change per se... Statistically, you are looking at a series of numbers. If it were a roulette wheel, you could say, 'It's coming up black more and more frequently.' Can I attribute that to black being overweighted by the croupier? Or to the pit boss, or the machine being broken? It doesn't matter. Some people will argue that ice ages have waxed and waned for tens of millennia and that this is part of a natural cycle. That doesn't change the fact that black is coming up more frequently and you will get less out of an acre of corn than you used to. The price for that land simply cannot be justified by the income it can generate."
In other words, it doesn't matter what's causing it, but something's definitely not right, and investing in protection from that uncertainty now seems a must.
Climate Corporation now markets itself to ag sectors around the world, and Friedberg added that his data suggests some regions' farming industry will see damage that will dwarf the losses from the U.S. housing sector crash.
Yikes.India is flexing its maritime muscles in the Indian Ocean.
Since 2011, India’s naval voyages across the world’s third-largest ocean have grown in number by 300%, according to consultancy firm IHS Markit, bolstering the country’s presence in a key region where China has been making inroads.
China has increasingly deployed nuclear and conventional submarines in the Indian Ocean as it looks to assert its dominance as a regional superpower, and counter India’s growing influence, in South Asia.
The Indian Ocean is a prominent trade route as nearly 36 million barrels of oil are transported daily through its shipping lines. This is roughly about 40% of the world’s oil supply. The ocean also accounts for 40% of the global offshore oil production. For India, as much as 95% of its trade and 80% of crude oil imports take place through the Indian Ocean.
“Dominance in the Indian Ocean translates, in a way, to dominance in Asia, because of the primary maritime trade routes and energy trade,” Caron Natasha Tauro, south Asia analyst for security research firm IHS Jane, said in a statement. “This boosted competition between India, which sees the ocean as its backyard, and China, which has the potential to enlarge its influence with the One Belt, One Road project and the Maritime Silk Road initiative.”
The One Belt, One Road project involves setting up of road and rail routes, oil and natural gas pipelines, and other infrastructure projects—running through central Asia to as far as Venice—and the setting up of ports and sea infrastructure between south Asia and the northern Mediterranean Sea.
Since coming to power in 2014, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has spent considerable time engaging with the Indian Ocean Littoral nations. Last year, for instance, he visited Seychelles, Sri Lanka, and Mauritius, with an eye on countering China’s growing influence in the region.
India and Japan have also been considering building a sea wall of “hydrophones”—microphones with sensors placed on the seabed—between southern India and the northern tip of Indonesia. The move was aimed at keeping a check on Chinese submarine movement.
The navies of India, Japan, and the US also held a joint drill in the Philippine sea in June this year, irking Beijing.
While China had cut back on the number of visits to the Indian Ocean last year, perhaps to focus on the muddled South China Sea waters, it firmed up patrolling this year. The Chinese navy’s redeployment reflects the country’s “commercial interests and possibly to build relations with states like Pakistan and Bangladesh,” IHS Markit reckoned.
In all, between 2011 and 2016, the various navies of the Indian Ocean region have also stepped up their procurement budgets from around $8.5 billion to $12 billion. During these years, the navies of India, China, Bangladesh, and Pakistan have also been investing in attack submarines, destroyers, frigates, and mine warfare vessels.
The Indian Navy currently has a fleet of 137 ships while the Chinese Navy boasts a fleet of 300 ships. But, India plans to add some 100 new warships, including two aircraft carriers and three nuclear-powered submarines, over the next 12 years, spending $61 billion.
The prize is obvious. “The Indian Ocean is re-emerging in strategic significance, not just due to the previous risk of piracy,” said Lee Willett, head of IHS Jane’s naval desk, “but also due to the world’s naval superpowers seeing the chance to fill a strategic void at sea in the region.” Add to this the “elegant decline” of the US, including from the Indian Ocean region, and the field is open for others to step in.A man charged in connection with the collision that left teen twins in serious condition on Halloween night in Toronto has been identified. Yung Cheung Chow, 44, has been charged with criminal negligence causing bodily harm and dangerous driving causing bodily harm.
A Honda CRV on Lawrence Ave. E. hit three trick-or-treaters before crashing into a pole. A man charged in connection with the collision has been identified as Yung Cheung Chow. ( Dan Pearce/Metroland / Dan Pearce/Metroland ) Halloween candy and a piece of an auto part on the front lawn of an apartment complex on Lawrence Ave. E., Nov. 1, 2016. ( Andrew Francis Wallace / Toronto Star )
Police say a Honda CRV travelling west on Lawrence Ave. E. at approximately 100 km/h rear-ended a Hyundai vehicle, veered off the road onto a grassy area and hit three children before it crashed into a pole. The Hyundai hit a Volkswagen also travelling west on Lawrence Ave. E., say police. The 13-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, remain in serious condition, and a third child, 14, suffered minor injuries, according to police. Ryan Peden, who lives in a building at Don Mills Rd. and Lawrence Ave. E., heard the crash from his apartment.
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He said car crashes occur “pretty often” at the intersection, but that this one, instead of just a simple “crunch,” was “a crunch, a screech, and a bump, and then a big smash, and then silence.” By the time he ran over the window, people were already converging on the scene, and Peden called 911. “Everyone seemed pretty conscious of not wanting to move (the victims),” he said, even though several people were crouched “in the cold” next to the victims. Within a minute or two, people were bringing the bystanders blankets. Two of the teens attend Don Mills Middle School, just half a kilometre from where the crash happened, Toronto District School Board spokesperson Ryan Bird confirmed Tuesday. Counsellors were at the school to offer support for any students or staff, he added. Chow is scheduled to appear in court on Dec. 15 at 1000 Finch Ave. W. With staff files and files from CPRecession's over, economists say to a skeptical public
A declaration that the turning point came in June 2009 gets an indignant reaction, showing that many Americans see little difference between the recession and current conditions.
"Hallucinatory news," one blogger snapped in response to the report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private nonprofit research group that is considered the official arbiter of economic contractions and expansions.
Even so, minutes after the experts announced Monday that the worst recession in more than half a century had officially ended 15 months ago, its members felt the sting of indignant reaction from a public for whom economic pain continues to be an everyday reality.
That may seem perplexing, given the sour state of the economy, but the panel of experts designating when serious economic downturns begin and end typically takes a year or so to make the calls.
Reporting From Washington — This just in: The recession ended more than a year ago — in June 2009.
"I'll start believing the recession is over when I stop seeing endless numbers of people sleeping on the streets," said another.
And the public reaction was only the latest evidence that, with unemployment high, job creation low, the housing market on life support and other day-to-day economic realities still bad, most Americans see little difference between the recession and current conditions.
President Obama acknowledged the widespread dissatisfaction with the economy during a town-hall-style meeting broadcast on the business news channel CNBC. Alluding to the announcement that the recession had officially ended, he remarked on the public's "understandable" frustration.
"The hole was so deep that a lot of people out there are still hurting, and probably some folks here in the audience are still having a tough time," he said. "So the question then becomes, what can we now put in place to make sure that the trend lines continue in a positive direction, as opposed to going back in the negative direction?"
During the hourlong event, Obama pressed for extending tax relief for the middle class and insisted that he has "absolutely not" vilified or enacted policies harmful to the business community — criticisms that Republican leaders have made in blaming the administration for the nation's tepid recovery and job growth.
The NBER committee made its determination after considering numerous economic data and concluding that several key measures of economic activity — including total output and industrial production — pointed to June 2009 as the trough of that business cycle.
The 18-month recession that started in December 2007 was the longest since the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, said it was noteworthy that the panel settled on June, as it was during that month that the spending from the Recovery Act stimulus was at its maximum.
"One conclusion is that the stimulus played an important role in bringing the recession to an end," said Zandi, who has been an economic advisor to officials and lawmakers in both parties.
The NBER panel, in a lengthy statement that seemed to anticipate the public reaction to its decision, noted that employment was typically a lagging indicator and that unlike other broad measures of the economy, employment didn't hit bottom until December 2009.
What's more, the panel took pains to note that a determination of the end of the recession doesn't mean the economy has returned to vigorous growth.Yet from this immense talent pool, the American political system has managed to narrow the race down to two supremely flawed human beings, neither of whom remotely deserves to be in the White House.
On the one hand we have Hillary Clinton, a scandal-ridden, uninspiring candidate whose Left-wing policies would destroy what is left of US exceptionalism; on the other is Donald Trump, a demagogue who specialises in whipping up hate and threatening cataclysmic trade wars.
This depressing choice comes at the worst possible time for the US: the country is bitterly divided, faith in the American Dream and US constitution is receding and many would like nothing better than to shut themselves off from the world. Meanwhile, the threat of terrorism remains as high as ever.
For the prosperous parts of the East and West coasts, all is great, at least for the middle-aged and for those with Ivy League degrees; but the rest of the population is in its worst funk since the Seventies, in desperate need of a strong, competent, reformist leader who will begin to fix its economy and restore its mojo. There were problems when I first visited the US in the early Nineties, but nothing like today. It is no exaggeration to say that the very fabric of US democracy is being tested.Conspiracy theories are mounting after the Rose of Tralee's name and family crest appeared on the prize of silverware cutlery two days before the winner was announced.
Conspiracy theories are mounting after the Rose of Tralee's name and family crest appeared on the prize of silverware cutlery two days before the winner was announced.
Thorny issue as Rose of Tralee's name appears on prize two days before final
Several eagle-eyed viewers noticed that the family crest of eventual winner, the Texas rose Haley O'Sullivan, had already been emblazoned on to the winner's Newbridge Silverware cutlery on Monday night.
Haley won the coveted crown last night, beating out 31 other contestants from around the world.
As tradition dictates, the winner receives a Newbridge Silverware cutlery set with her family crest as part of her prize.
Viewers noticed that the O'Sullivan family crest had already been engraved into the set on Monday night, when the cameras flashed to the prize.
After Ms O'Sullivan appeared on The Ray D'Arcy Show on Today FM earlier today, several listeners contacted the station in order to query whether or not the winner had been chosen prior to the live broadcast.
“Last night’s winner Hayley O’Sullivan’s crest was already engraved on the cutlery on Monday night," one listener said. "It was shown by the camera man before the best escort was announced. Coincidence?!! Not likely!”
Another listener wrote: “I could be wrong but I’m nearly sure on the first night, when showing the silver cutlery during the escort award, O’Sullivan was engraved on the knife...If so this would mean the winner was picked before the live show.”
John Drummey from the festival office told The Ray D’Arcy Show on Today FM: “Yes apparently that was an O’Sullivan family crest on the cutlery on Monday night. That’s just a coincidence. Newbridge just wanted to show that they can provide cutlery with the family crest. The escort will have his own family crest engraved on it.”
The show also contacted Newbridge Silverware, who responded: “That was purely coincidental. RTE filmed promotional stock and the O’Sullivan crest was picked because it’s a good Kerry name. That is not the actual cutlery that the winning Rose or escort receives. They will have their own family crest engraved on it.”
Judges for the competition included Mary Kennedy and several previous Roses.
Caitlin McBride
Online EditorsThe government will boost spending on building infrastructure next year even as it continues to strengthen state-run banks, widen the tax base and rationalize taxes, said finance minister Arun Jaitley.
It will also continue to push through structural reforms, Jaitley said on Thursday at the annual meeting of lobby group Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry.
The finance minister’s comments come weeks before the Union budget will be presented on 1 February, the last full budget by the National Democratic Alliance government before general elections in 2019. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also reiterated the government’s commitment to pushing through more reforms.
“In 2017, India has seen more structural changes taking place than any time in the recent past. The changes in 1991 were more out of compulsion while the changes in 2017 more out of conviction," Jaitley said, adding that there may be some short-term adverse consequences of the structural reforms undertaken by the government.
India rolled out the goods and services tax (GST), brought in changes to the insolvency and bankruptcy code to make it more effective and initiated the process of capitalizing state-run banks over the past few months.
Highlighting the steps taken to resolve the issues in the banking sector, including the Rs2.11 trillion capitalization plan for state-run banks, Jaitley said it remains an important unfinished item on the government’s agenda.
“Completing the unfinished task of strengthening state-run banks and resolving the bad debt problem is unquestionably one of the most important agendas on the table today. Lending capacity of banks is depleted because of NPAs (non-performing assets). Banks have a lot of liquidity on account of low-cost deposits but they are not able to lend because of capital adequacy issues," said Jaitley. Bad loans of state-run banks were more than Rs7 trillion at the end of the September quarter, as per government estimates.
Jaitley also hinted that the upcoming budget could see the government increase spending on infrastructure.
“We have to keep the momentum going on infrastructure creation, including rural infrastructure. Therein lies the core of India’s future growth story," he said, flagging areas such as railways infrastructure including trains and stations, urban infrastructure, water, housing and sanitation.
Jaitley added that the government will strive for greater formalization of the economy, further rationalization of GST and expansion of the tax base to enable reduction in both direct and indirect tax rates.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption I denied I was ill for ages - Andy Cole
Former Manchester United footballer Andrew Cole has undergone a kidney transplant operation.
The 45-year-old, who also played for Newcastle United and Blackburn Rovers, suffered kidney failure after contracting an airborne virus in 2015.
The operation at Manchester Royal Infirmary was part of his treatment for focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, a spokesman for Manchester United said.
He added that Cole would be "taking a break" from his club ambassador role.
The illness is a leading cause of kidney failure in adults and causes scarring in the organ.
Requesting the former England striker be given "privacy" during his recuperation, the spokesman added: "Andrew and his family would like to thank the club and fans for their support."
Image copyright PA Image caption Cole made 15 appearances for England and played for 12 clubs
Speaking in 2016, Cole said kidney failure had been "tough to accept".
"Putting on all the weight has been the toughest part," he said.
"When I retired, I promised my kids I will never put on weight because when [footballers] retire they eat and drink.
"Seeing the change in my body, that has been tough, it wreaks havoc with yourself. You get comments like, 'Andy Cole's let himself go, who ate all the pies?'"
The forward, who scored 121 goals in 275 appearances for the Old Trafford club, played for 12 clubs in his career and made 15 appearances for England.
He remains the third highest scorer in Premier League history with 187 goals.How long did I wait for this good news, sync browsing sessions! I was thinking about this feature while I was writing about chrome://sync-internals/ as well, just this Monday.  On behalf of everyone who impatiently waited for this feature, hurray!!!
But wait, this is not fully functional yet. By using –enable-sync-typed-urls and –enable-sync-sessions command line switches in Chromium right now, you can these options. It may take some more time for it to land on Development and then beta, stable builds.
With Sync-Browser-Session, you will have your open tabs synced across computers and platforms. Suppose you are reading this article on your computer and then close Chrome window and login to your new Chromebook, you will get the same tabs you had open on the other computer.
Stay tuned for more updates on this!! thanks François Beaufort for this awesome news and the screenshot!!SOMETHING ABOUT WU: At last year’s Met Gala, Mario Testino introduced Christopher Bailey to the Canadian-Chinese actor and musician Kris Wu, the most talked about person at the event on social media after Justin Bieber, Rihanna and Beyoncé.
Testino had shot Wu for the cover of Vogue China in July, alongside Kendall Jenner. The introduction to Bailey got Wu another job, closing the Burberry men’s show in London on Monday.
Hundreds of Wu’s mega-fans had been waiting since dawn to catch a glimpse of the star — China’s answer to Bieber — who had no idea he’d be the last model out on the runway.
“It was very exciting, but I was nervous at the same time. My heart was pounding, but then I tried to look like I was not nervous,” Wu told WWD, demonstrating a facial transition from animated to the picture of catwalk model blankness.
Wu was sporting a shaved head, his regular lustrous coif long since shaved in sacrifice of his role as a monk in “Journey to the West: Demon Chapter,” which is set to be released next year.
“I had a shaved head for, like |
we are talking about geometry, not engineering, and technology never changes geometry. You must solve a problem spatially before you have really solved it.The mouth of the Miami River runs out to Biscayne Bay as it exits downtown Miami. Southeastern Florida is especially vulnerable to sea-level rise. (Photo: Allison Diaz, for USA TODAY)
If Florida Gov. Rick Scott didn't want the terms "climate change" or "global warming" officially associated with his state, he won't be happy with the media attention his decision has sparked.
Scott, a Republican, banned the use of those terms in state communications and publications shortly after he took office in 2011, according to a Miami Herald story Sunday by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.
Though it was not a written rule, "we were told not to use the terms 'climate change,' 'global warming' or'sustainability,' " Christopher Byrd, a former attorney with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's (DEP) Office of General Counsel told the investigative reporting center. "That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors," said Boyd, who held that post from 2008 to 2013.
When reached for comment about the supposed ban on the terms, Gov. Scott's spokesperson John Tupps said "it's not true." Tupps said that neither the governor's office nor the DEP had a policy on the use of the terms.
In Florida, about 300,000 houses worth about a total of $145 billion are vulnerable to a rise in the sea level caused by climate change, according to Climate Central. a nonprofit news organization that analyzes and reports on climate science.
Sea-level rise was another term that Scott prohibited, saying it should be called "nuisance flooding," the newspaper said.
This has happened before: In North Carolina in 2012, the legislature said it would ignore studies that mentioned sea-level rise.
Last year, the federal National Climate Assessment said Florida is vulnerable. "There is an imminent threat of increased inland flooding during heavy rain events in low-lying coastal areas such as southeast Florida, where just inches of sea-level rise will impair the capacity of stormwater drainage systems to empty into the ocean," the study said.
The Washington Post, CNN and other media have picked up on the story about the Florida ban, spreading the word about how climate change is likely to impact Scott's state.
In this Feb. 5, 2015, file photo, Florida Gov. Rick Scott gestures during a cabinet meeting at the Florida State Fair, in Tampa, Fla. (Photo: Chris O'Meara, AP)
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1BZw23tbluh tired of looking at this
Teaser for this not-so-secret supah long comic that I've been scripting for over a yearWorking title right now is "Upheaval"; the first working title was "Worlds Will Fall", and anything related to the project will probably be preceded by WWF, because an acronym is easier to type than a wordThis little plot point is set between the season 3 finale and the season 4 opener, after which the story goes off into an alternate universe wherein Anarchy more or less fucks everything up (spoilers!). Violence and madness, and a fair bit of sadistic/dark humor therein, so fair warning for anyone who's here just for my light-hearted funny thingsderpFluttershy and the draconequus race, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic © Hasbro/Anarchy ©(Sarah H.)Updated Curriculum, New Report Cards Coming to Ontario Schools
Province Modernizing School System to Unleash Full Potential of Every Student
September 6, 2017 10:15 A.M. Office of the Premier
Our schools are at the foundation of a fair and competitive Ontario. Today, our province's publicly funded education system ranks among the best in the world, preparing our students for academic and future success. To build on this progress and make our schools even better at unleashing every student's full potential, Ontario is taking immediate steps to give students and parents better information about a child's progress and launching an ambitious multi-year initiative to modernize curriculums and assessment tools from Kindergarten to Grade 12.
Premier Kathleen Wynne and Mitzie Hunter, Minister of Education, were at Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute to announce the opening of public consultations for this new initiative and detail the new report cards, which will be introduced in schools for the 2018-19 academic year.
Ontario's updated school curriculum will be developed through the public consultations with the goal of improving student achievement in core skills such as math and increasing emphasis on transferable life skills that can help students of all ages meet the changing demands of today and tomorrow. Communication, problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity and global citizenship are skills that will help Ontario students thrive as they grow up in a changing, interconnected world. Beginning next school year, new report cards will better track a young person's development of these essential and transferable life skills.
By consulting with students, parents, teachers and other partners, the province also aims to:
Help students take full advantage of their education experience with a new curriculum that better engages every aspect of a young person's interests and potential
Place an increased emphasis on equity and well-being, including the effects that physical activity, bullying and mental health can have on student success in and out of the classroom
Update provincial assessment and reporting practices, including EQAO, to make sure they are culturally relevant, measure a wider range of learning, and better reflect student well-being and equity
Enhance parents' access to information about how their children are doing in school.
A comprehensive overhaul of school curriculum and student assessment tools, aimed at making our schools better at unleashing the full potential of every child, is essential to building a fairer, better Ontario.
Quick Facts Ontario will invest $49 million over three years to integrate student well-being into all provincial education practices and policies.
The province’s renewed vision for education will help ensure that all students develop the knowledge, skills and characteristics to become personally successful, economically productive and actively engaged citizens.
Over 86 per cent of Ontario students are graduating from high school — more than ever before.
In 2016, 68 per cent of adults (ages 25-64) in Ontario had a postsecondary credential, up from 56 per cent in 2002 — higher than the rate for any country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Since 2013, the government has invested $9.3 billion in capital funding for school boards to support more than 120 new schools and more than 140 additions and renovations.
This public consultation on student assessment will be conducted by the Premier and Minister of Education’s six education advisors led by Dr. Carol Campbell.I was a big fan of deadlines. Chasing them. Crossing them off of my todo list. Striving to meet them. Spending countless hours just to prepare myself for this date with my deadline. Oh, the feeling of pride when I was there in time to make it. The inner power and fulfillment… Yes, that was a very interesting experience.
I’m not into deadlines anymore but I do remember the feeling of satisfaction I got from crossing my deadlines off. I still enjoy doing things, I’m just not into deadlines anymore. As simple as it seems, this is a fundamental difference.
The Word “Deadline”
Have you ever really thought what is the meaning of the word “deadline”? It has the word “death” in it. Never wondered why? Because a deadline is a line of death. Once you meet that line, you kill the task. You take its life away. You conquered it. You extended your presence onto its territory, occupied it and now you have the right to eliminate it from your system. That’s a highly motivating psychology. Also, it’s a very disempowering one.
Thinking in terms of “death” lines will make you assimilate the end of a task with its death. Doing things will mean kill one task after another. Slashing tasks over a to do list has this feeling of power: I killed 32 enemies today, I feel good. Tasks are not your enemy. Nobody is, in fact. You just pretend that they are, so you can use the “warrior” resources you already have deep down in your ancestral behavior. The pressure of doing more and more exalted our warrior style way over the safety level.
We position ourselves as conquerors of our own task land. What lies in front of our work day is a field filled with enemies that have to be eliminated. Every day is a battle. Many productivity techniques are using this subliminal approach. What you have to do is a burden. You have to take it away, to overcome it, to eliminate it. The more you eliminate, the better you’ll feel. Train yourself to become better at killing tasks.
At a certain level, this psychology is, as I already said, very motivating. Fighting for our survival is deeply wired in our unconscious memory. This is why we find it easy to understand this approach. Fear of our own death will push us to kill the “other”. And the “other” in this case, is clearly written on our daily to do list. If we don’t kill “them”, they will kill us, so we’d better jump off of our beds, rush into the subway and take position in our daily trenches, suitably camouflaged as desks.
But the downside of this approach, its disempowering part is that, by transforming your tasks into your personal enemies, you’ll eventually become so good at deadlines that life itself will look as a deadline. You’ll rush towards the biggest deadlines of all: your own death. Deadline by deadline, task killed by task killed, you’re going to eventually cross the final episode off of your to do list with great satisfaction. The ultimate project management victory: I crossed off my own death today.
For A Liveline Philosophy
Forget deadlines. Instead let’s have livelines. A liveline is different from a deadline in that it creates a new starting point. The point where you start something on the foundation you just finished, something alive. You restart the movement.
In Assess – Decide – Do, your tasks will always generate a new cycle. You’re not spending time only in Do. You’re also spending time in Assess or in Decide. Each time you finish a task in Do, you will have to feed your Assess realm with the results. You will evaluate feed-back. In this respect, a project is never “finished” in ADD. The graphical representation of a project in Assess – Decide – Do will look more like a spiral than like a Gantt diagram. I agree it’s a little difficult to understand this concept, especially if you’re coming from a long traditional task management experience.
A liveline will never ask you to cross a task over. You always have the possibility to re-start the liveline by sending it back to Decide, and, from there, back to Assess. A liveline will be met only if all its initial stages (Assess and Decide, namely) are completed and fulfilled. And every liveline will generate in turn several ideas, lessons or potential tasks.
A liveline means we’re taking the “death” out of the deadline. We’re taking the pressure out, we’re taking the urge of finishing it so we can get back to our regular life. Because there will be no dichotomy between what you “have” to do and your regular life. It will all take place in the same time/space continuum.
I hear you loud and clear: what about commitments? What about promises? What about our corporate life where we have to finish tasks before competition, otherwise we’re out of business? Well, if you set a certain end date to a task, keep it. It means you Assessed it right and you also took the right Decision about it. If you spent enough time in those two realms, nothing can go wrong.
Every Do imbalance is in fact a liability you carry on from the previous realms. If you can’t finish a task in the specified time and space constraints, it means something went wrong on the Assess and Decide realms. Completing a task is not a function of the Do, is also a function of Assess and Decide. Until you won’t realize that, it will be really difficult to understand the benefits of the Assess – Decide – Do framework.
How about “unexpected” events? Let’s say you did your best in Assess to anticipate every possible outcome and you properly allocated time and space resources in Decide.And still, some catastrophe happened. A power outage 2 hours before the client presentation or a traffic jam which delayed your presence at that important meeting. Well, things are happening. It doesn’t mean you’re off track. Back to Assess.
In a traditional approach, you would consider the undone task a liability. In the best case, you would have tried to reschedule or postpone. Meaning you would still keep yourself in the Do realm. Stuck on the deadline. And for as long as you’re stuck in the same mindset, the problem will never disappear.
Take a leap of faith. Go out. Make a lateral step. Transform that deadline into a liveline. A liveline will give you flexibility not only at the action level, but also at the perception level. Start assessing what went “wrong” and see what could you’ve done better. There are many reasons for what you can’t really Do a thing. Keeping yourself only in Do will hide those details, will lock you in the Do box. You can’t see the real picture if you’re not taking time to assess.
Perhaps the presentation wasn’t ready. Perhaps the client wasn’t ready to receive your message. Perhaps the meeting wasn’t very good for your career. There are so many things you should ponder about what’s happening around you and still, because you’re pressuring on Do, you skip them. Or you avoid them consciously because they won’t “help” you in any way.
Inject Some Life Into That Deadline
And make it a liveline. By now, you should have understand that there is a little bit of a word game here: dead versus alive. I deliberately pushed the comparison a little bit. Of course you will commit to doing things in Assess – Decide – Do too. Of course you will do the best to meet your own expectations, at least. What’s different, though, from the traditional productivity approach, is an unprecedented degree of flexibility.
In a traditional approach, if something went wrong, you would at best re-schedule and try to refill the Do realm with that task. Or lose it all together. In Assess- Decide – Do, you will reintroduce the task into your Assess realm. Of course you can just Re-Decide it, and in many day by day circumstances, that would be the expected reaction, but you also have another realm to work with, Assess.
I will avoid using a term like “planning” when it comes to Assess. You do much more than planning. You evaluate, you imagine, you wait, you dream about it, you play with the task as in a dream world. The degree of flexibility offered by the mere idea that you can be productive while Assessing is incredible.
And finally, one of the most important benefits of this bouncing back and forth is the organic rearrangement of your activity. Projects, tasks and events will start to fall into their places. The initial feeling will be one of melting, of losing control. But after this rather scary period, another feeling will come into place: the feeling of flow. There is an inner capacity of natural order, of simple flow from one project to another.
The deadline carries with it a threat. If you won’t do it, something or somebody must die. In 99,99% of the cases, the task will die, and you will actually kill it. But a liveline will not have any threat associated. It’s like “doing nothing” and yet “doing it”. A good deal of resistance to implementing Assess – Decide – Do will come, ironically, from the fact that you associate “doing” things with pressure. And when you’re not feeling pressure you’re going to feel like you’re doing nothing. If there’s no deadline it means there’s nothing to do, right? Wrong. you can do things in the absence of a deadline, just by knowing that the results of your work will not get lost in a to do planner, but they’ll be part of a bigger, flexible system that you can work with. I know, you associated doing with pressure. But no, with a liveline there is no pressure. And you can still do things.
Now, I hear you for the final question: are one going to do more using Assess – Decide – Do than using any other productivity framework? My answer to this question will always be: “more” is not automatically “better”. The consumerist obsession put a lot of weight on “more”. If you live in the deprivation of only one realm, spending your entire life in the Do realm, “more” becomes important. “More” is a way of measuring what you’re Doing. But once you get out of the prison of Doing, spending time in Assess and Decide, “more” will lose its meaning as a measurement tool. It will be only a choice, an assessment. I can Do more today, or I can spend more time Deciding or Assessing.
***
Ok, this was a teaser. What you just read is just a chapter from my upcoming ebook: “Assess – Decide – Do: Natural Productivity“. The ebook will be launched this Friday, on September 17th, but you will be able to pre-order it at a significant discount starting this Wednesday. Many concepts you read in this article and seemed a little foggy will come to life by reading the entire ebook. It’s a 150 pages text, grouped in 3 main parts. The last one is a very thorough guide of iAdd for iPhone, the app which puts the power of this framework literally in your hand.
If you’re a blogger, your audience is revolving around productivity or lifestyle design and you feel like reviewing the ebook, you can have a chance to get a copy of it for free, as long as you commit to review it on your blog. It doesn’t have to be a positive review, just an honest one. I’ve done this before with other ebooks I wrote and I was positively surprised by the results. After the ebook launch, next week, I will also do a round up of the reviews and post links to the blogs who published them. So, you’re not only getting the ebook for free, you also get a link back to your blog from quite a popular site. So, if you’re into it, just hit me up with an email in which you’re telling me your blog address, a few words about yourself and why would you like to review it. You should also tell me if you want to become an affiliate (you may include affiliate links in your review, if you want).
Other than that, I’m really looking forward to this Friday, September 17th, this is one of the most interesting livelines I’ve set up lately ;-).Below is a short email interview I conducted with Noam Chomsky regarding the coup in Egypt.
[START]
Q. Are you pleased or upset by the events in Egypt over the last month or so?
A. Upset
How have these events changed the outlook for Egyptian democracy and the Arab Spring generally?
A setback, in my opinion, though many of the gains remain.
How would you characterise the relationship between the US, Israeli and Egyptian military/intelligence communities?
As far as I know, nothing significant has changed. The US provides Egypt with substantial military aid, in the hope and expectation of having influence over its actions. We have no detailed information about intelligence relations but they are doubtless close. The Israel-Egypt security arrangements seem not to have changed materially.
How would you compare this to the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and any allies they have in Washington?
The Obama administration was mildly supportive of the MB government, which maintained the neoliberal programs that the US favors and the existing security arrangements, but the MB does not have close allies in Washington.
Do you see the events as a coup?
Yes
What actions specifically, if any, do you think Mohammad Morsi or the brotherhood took which justify the intervention by the military?
There have been “bills of particulars” offered by June 30th supporters, of varying credibility in my opinion. But I’ve seen nothing to justify calling in the military to overthrow the elected government, however flawed the elections or objectionable the post-election policies, and I expect that the faith now often expressed in the benign intentions of the military will prove severely misplaced.
[END]
AdvertisementsIn defining atheism as a lack of theistic belief (i.e., the claim that some sort of god or gods exist), it may seem that one has little in which to take pride. However, I think that one's ability to either escape from religion should be a source of pride in itself. Those of you living in America know full well how pervasive a force Christianity can be, and to have de-converted or never to have accepted it in the first place is notable. We face tremendous pressure to go along with the Christian majority and are regularly demonized for our refusal to do so.Even in realizing that atheism is the lack of theistic belief, most of us construct atheistic worldviews which end up being much broader. We talk about valuing reason, science, secular humanism, and the like. In fact, this is exactly what I have been trying to do in my periodically updated index of what I believe. Beginning with the recognition that "I am an atheist" provides no information about what I do believe, I started to articulate what I believe. I recognize that I have a ways to go with this project and look forward to continuing it in 2008, but I am fairly happy with what I have so far. Such atheistic worldviews give us plenty to berather than just against and provide ample opportunities for pride in who we are and what we do.I feel good about how I escaped the clutches of religious delusion. I am living a more authentic life, free to experience the world for what it is and not simply how I want it to be. I take pride in how I manage to function in accordance with reality even while the majority of my neighbors are plagued with self-deception. To be sure, I experience compassion for them because I know that their path takes them away from truth and makes them dangerous. I seek to improve the present world for the benefit of all and do not concern myself with fantasies of afterlife because to do so would only detract from what I need to do now.As we begin 2008, I hope you will join me in feeling good about who you are and what you do - for reason, for truth, to make the world a better place. Experience some atheist prideMichael founded GeeklyInc with Tim Lanning way back in 2013 when they realized they had two podcasts and needed a place to stick them. Since then, Geekly has grown and taken off in ways Michael could have never imagined.
Would you like to take the lead on making something cool happen at GeeklyCon 2017? Whether it is a panel on your favorite subject, a performance of your non-geekly podcast, or a trip to a fun and/or interesting spot in St. Louis: we want to help you make it happen. Panel space is limited, so we can’t accept every submission, but we would love to hear about your idea. We will take submissions until 3/1/17, or until space is full.
Please fill out the following form to submit a Panel, Event, or Outing proposal:
https://goo.gl/forms/eESnJAMmzLaYxBX63
If you have questions email geeklyinc@gmail.com.So, it’s been a long time, again. Why? I don’t have to explain myself to you. Your job in this relationship is to read the shit I post here and not complain. And judging by the statistics I can see, you haven’t been holding up your end of the bargain, either. How about you explain that first?
This blog post is about rejection. It will be short, neat and to the point. The way any good rejection should be.
A few months ago I e-mailed a few of my short stories for publication. I received my first response a couple of days ago. A short, simple rejection. To be honest, I had completely forgotten that I had even sent anything to anyone and my reaction to this completely surprised me. Reading it made me extremely happy.
An acceptance would have been lovely, obviously. But, the first thing that came to my mind after reading the e-mail wasn’t ‘Well, what was wrong with it? You pieces of shit haven’t got a clue about writing!’ It was, ‘Woah, I’ve made a start.’ Someone, somewhere, that I don’t even know has read something that I have written. Regardless of their response, that’s a really exciting step. I’m not going to be crushed by this and I’m certainly going to continue writing.
By all of this, of course I mean that I’m currently tracking down the whereabouts of my rejector so that I can mail them a bag of shit and toenails. Because fuck you, that’s why.
It’s strange how similar a rejection letter from a publication is to a break-up. This was the explanation I was offered:
‘I’ve now had a chance to read it and I’m afraid it’s not quite right for us.’
Translation: ‘Your story was shit, how dare you waste my time.’
To be fair, I’m really not sure if my story will be “quite right” for anyone. It is about a strange man wandering about a vacant Ireland with a deckchair, claiming that he’s the king. So maybe that wasn’t just a line.
But whatever, the most important thing about rejection is learning to accept it. So right now, I need someone to help tape me into a large cardboard box and post me to these bastards.
I demand a real explanation.
Gavin
AdvertisementsI'm currently offering a free e-book, "57 Marketing Tips for Financial Advisors". All you have to do is go to TheAdvisorCoach.com and enter your email at the top of the page. The book will be sent directly to your inbox.
I love helping people in the financial services industry get more clients. When I first get introduced to people, I try to ask them, “What’s the biggest thing you’re struggling with right now?”
9 times out of 10, people will tell me that they are having difficulty prospecting. This is a shame, because prospecting bottlenecks the rest of the sales process. Without successful prospecting, there’s no qualifying, appointment-setting, and no client conversions. Failure to prospect stops everything dead in its tracks.
Fortunately, one of the best ways to get moving in the right direction is to become conscious of the prospecting mistakes that you might be making. Here are some of the most common prospecting mistakes I’ve seen, in no particular order:
1. Thinking quantity over quality.
I’ve noticed that there are some people who have an anemic pipeline (that’s a problem, too) and there are others who have tons of “prospects”, but upon closer examination, they’re poor quality. You should strive for both quality and quantity, but I would much rather see you with a few quality prospects over dozens (or hundreds) of poor quality ones.
Your whole sales funnel should look like this:
Leads -> Prospects -> Qualified Prospects -> Clients
Here’s how I define these terms:
Lead – these are just names on a list. It could be a list you bought or a list of people who downloaded your whitepaper. They aren’t a prospect because you don’t have enough information to tell if they’re prospects yet.
Prospect – these are people who fit the criteria you are looking for. If you have a $250,000 account minimum, a lead would only become a prospect once you find out that he/she has at least that amount in investable assets.
Qualified prospect – these are the people that you want to convert to clients. For generalists (people who work with anyone who can fog a mirror), it’s possible that 100% of prospects are also qualified. Another good sign of a qualified prospect is two-way communication. A qualified prospect is someone who meets your criteria and is talking to you/having appointments.
Client – this is pretty self-explanatory.
Getting leads is not the same as filling your pipeline.
Your pipeline should contain nothing but prospects, and preferably qualified prospects. One of the best ways to “pre-qualify” is to have a niche and make sure your prospects are in that niche. I understand that it takes a long time to put together a pipeline of nothing but qualified prospects, but that’s what you should be doing. The way to win in business isn’t to collect the most names and phone numbers. It’s to make the most money. Never forget that.
ALSO READ: 7 Reasons Why Advisors Need a Niche
2. Believing that social media alone will make the phone ring.
Social media is awesome, and it has completely transformed the way we do business. Heck, I get so much business from LinkedIn that it’s not even funny. But it is a mistake to think to rely on any type of prospecting tool completely. You should have a variety of techniques – phone, mail, social media, networking, referrals, etc.
I see so many financial advisors get sold this dream that all they have to do is write blogs and, like magic, they’ll have an influx of inbound leads. While this does work, there are two caveats:
Most people will give up long before their inbound marketing strategies pay off. Social media growth tends to be exponential and/or in bursts. As you get more connections/followers, you stuff gets shared more and more. When your stuff gets shared more and more, you get more connections and followers. However, in most cases, it takes a lot of time to get past the “slow phase”. Advisors will write three or four posts, not get any leads, and then give up.
Again, it can’t be your only prospecting strategy. What if your social media accounts get shut down for some strange reason? All your eggs would be in one basket and get smashed to pieces.
ALSO READ: 5 Things to Do Instead of Cold Calling
3. Constantly babysitting your current clients.
Customer service is a great thing. I definitely don’t want you to not serve your current clients, but don’t do so at the expense of prospecting. It might feel more important to work on the deals you have in progress and/or your current accounts, but remember how you got those clients in the first place – by prospecting. Spending time with current clients (past a certain point, of course) comes with a huge opportunity cost.
ALSO READ: How Financial Advisors Can Become Better Prospectors
4. Not leaving voicemails.
Always leave a voicemail! Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t tested leaving a voicemail versus not leaving a voicemail. If you saw an unknown number on your phone, would you call it back without a voicemail? Nope! You’d figure if it’s important enough, the person will leave a message.
According to InsideSales.com, the average voicemail response rate is 4.8%. So for every 20 voicemails you leave, one person will call you back. Is this worth your time and effort? I certainly think so. Especially when you know this sweet voicemail hack…
The voicemail hack: people who hate leaving voicemails typically point out that they waste time. After all, that voicemail prompt is pretty long. Go ahead and skip it by pressing the star button (*). It will take you straight to the “beep”. This works on most phones, so it’s a great way to save thirty seconds on most dials. If that doesn’t work, try the pound sign (#) or “7”.
When you leave a voicemail:
The prospect can hear your voice and feel your confidence.
You continue to build awareness with the prospect. Your messages help the prospect to become more familiar with you.
The prospect can listen to your message when it’s convenient for him/her.
ALSO READ: 7 Reasons You'll Fail as a Financial Advisor
5. Trying to sell.
Repeat after me: Thou shall not sell whilst prospecting.
I know that you’re excited to let the whole world know about you, your company, and what you have to offer, but prospecting isn’t the time for it. When you are prospecting, all you should be doing is asking simple, targeted questions that address your prospect’s issues to determine if you are a good fit.
When you get asked, “What do you want to see me about?” or “Why do you want to set an appointment?” let them know that you want to have a discussion about their financial situation to see if you can help in any way.
The truth is that the person might not need your services, but that’s to be figured out later. When you’re on the phone setting appointments, concentrate on that one thing… setting appointments. Nothing else.
I guess you could say that you’re “selling” the appointment, but you know what I mean. The common mistake when financial advisors try to set appointments (especially when cold calling) is to sell everything BUT the appointment. It goes something like this:
They try to sell themselves – their trustworthiness, credibility, etc.
They try to sell their company – they talk about how long they’ve been in business, how great they are, etc.
They try to sell their product/services – their unique value proposition, advantages, etc.
Don’t promote the benefits of you, your company, or your services (too much, at least). Promote the benefits of the appointment instead. Let the prospect know that there’s no risk and that there is something he/she will gain for the time investment. As a financial advisor, your prospects should gain some tangible benefits just by spending time with you, whether they move forward or not. These tangible benefits could be:
Important information/news.
Tax-saving ideas.
Ways to save money for retirement, children’s education, etc.
ALSO READ: How Advisors Can Sell Without Being "Salesy"
6. Not following up.
Deals aren’t typically closed on the first call. Even if you do everything else right, you can still fail if you don’t follow up. Following up is the biggest thing, besides relentless prospecting, that can skyrocket your income.
Only 2% of sales are made on the first contact. This necessitates some form of follow-up, but nearly half of all sales professionals never follow up. Do you see the opportunity here? This is the point at which a lot of my clients get excited about following up and start to commit themselves to following up with all of their leads. That is, until they learn that 80% of all sales are made between the fifth and twelfth contact.
“You mean I have to follow up with someone twelve times? That’s too pushy. I’m not that aggressive.”
You need to realize that most of your qualified leads aren’t ready to do business with you. In order to catch them when they are ready, you must continuously follow up to remain top-of-mind. Over 90% of salespeople stop following up after the fourth contact. You have to stay in the game.
ALSO READ: One Tip That Doubled An Advisor's Income
7. Failing to prospect in the first place.
The deadliest mistake of all is unfortunately all-too-common. I’ve yet to meet many people who default to prospecting mode. That is, when they have a free 20 minutes, they think, “Let me hit the phone and call some leads.” If that’s you, congratulations! You’re one of the rare ones.
Prospect is easy not to do because it doesn’t pay off right away. You must block out time in your calendar for prospecting. There are so many productivity apps, softwares, and browser extensions in the marketplace today but not many people actually use them. It’s easy to get distracted and do anything except pursue new prospects. Make an appointment with yourself that can’t be broken, and make sure that you do it.
If you’re a financial advisor who wants to get more clients, make sure you get “The Ultimate Financial Advisor’s Guide to Getting More Clients”, available at TheAdvisorCoach.com. It contains extremely valuable information on cold calling, productivity, referrals, social media, goal setting, dealing with rejection, seminar marketing, and much more. It also contains the EXACT questions I've used in private coaching to help advisors succeed. Plus, it comes with a money-back guarantee. Once you make your payment through PayPal, the download link will be sent directly to your inbox. Make the investment today.FILE -- As Oregon State Trooper Michael Kendoll conducts a traffic stop, most cars that passed by didn't move over to the next lane. Starting Jan. 1, drivers will be required to move over a lane for any vehicle pulled over to the side of the road, not just emergency vehicles. (KATU FILE Photo)
A new year means new laws, and in 2018, there are some important ones that will affect Oregonians starting Jan. 1.
TRANSPORTATION TAX
This new year more of your money will fund transportation. The Legislature's $5.3 billion plan to modernize Oregon's transportation and public transit systems will pay for projects that will expand freeways like I-205 and I-5, along with improving congestion and road maintenance.
But that also means a hike in gas taxes, car registration fees, and a new bike tax. The gas tax will increase by 4 cents and then 2-cent increases every two years. Car title and registration fees will go up by $13 next year, and a $15 tax on bicycle sales that cost $200 or more will help fund bike and pedestrian paths.
"I think sometimes it's good to have those taxes, at least if they're going to the right places," said Rachael Meador, who lives in Portland.
MOVE OVER LAW
Once you get on the road, pay attention to anyone pulled over on the shoulder. By law, you'll need to change lanes. The Move Over Law doesn't just apply to emergency vehicles anymore, but to all vehicles.
"I didn't know about it. I just always did it as a courtesy," said Bijan Tavazoie, from Portland.
"Probably be a good thing, but it will probably slow down traffic more than it needs to," said Meador.
EXPANDED BOTTLE BILL
Not all new laws require you to pay up; You could earn money based on what you drink.
The Expanded Bottle Bill will let you deposit almost any beverage container that isn't milk, wine or liquor to redeem for money.
TOBACCO AGE INCREASE
Young tobacco users will have to cool it. Following California and Hawaii, Oregonians will have to be at least 21 years old in order to buy smokes, vapes, or any product with nicotine or tobacco under Senate Bill 754.
"I started when I was 18, so maybe it would've been better if the law was 21 at that time; I may have never started," said Tavazoie.
LOWER SPEED LIMITS IN RESIDENTIAL STRE |
South for seven or eight hours, go ahead, pass the McDonald’s and go to the side of the roadside barbecue stand. If it looks like it didn’t pass its last health inspection, it’s probably very good barbecue.”
Yes, that’s true, but the authentic stuff defeats the purpose of the embrace of the quasi-synthetic. We want a McRib.
Turns out, if we want a permanent McRib fix, we might be better off traveling overseas. In Germany, it is a standard part of the menu. And in October, McDonald’s introduced the McRib to Japan, and not just the McRib, but the boneless Double McRib (twice the boneless goodness). However, the Japanese McRib may be an acquired taste for Americans.
Like many foods in Japan, it is topped with mayonnaise.
Now, would that offend the barbecue diehards?Sun Microsystems' chief Scott McNealy will tell you at the drop of a hat that "Java is probably a bigger brand name than Sun itself." And, of course, he is right. When Time magazine called Java one of the Ten Best Products of 1995 (the only computer-related entry on the list), a new American marketing legend was born. Who's to say whether Sun's prized technology would have fared so well if its name had remained "Oak" or "Greentalk"?
We all know the story: Give away an elegant, open programming environment and the world will beat a path to your door. No sweat, no matter what you decide to call it. The people charged with establishing a brand identity for Sun's lingua franca for next-generation application developers, though, decided upon a coffee metaphor for their trademark. Oak, the previous name, was taken. Why they did so, by their own accounts, is still something of a mystery.
To find out the true story behind the Java name, JavaWorld interviewed several of the key people at Sun involved in the naming process. Their accounts appear below. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.
Brainstorming a trademark -- seven perspectives
"The lawyers had told us that we couldn't use the name 'OAK' because [it was already trademarked by] Oak Technologies," said Frank Yellin, a senior engineer at Sun. "So a brainstorming session was held to come up with ideas for a new name. The session was attended by all members of what was then called the Live Oak group, those of us actively working on the new language. The end result was that about ten possible names were chosen. They were then submitted to the legal department. Three of them came back clean: Java, DNA, and Silk. No one remembers who first came up with the name 'Java.' Only one person, to the best of my knowledge, has ever suggested in public to being the creator of the name."
Frank Yellin's complete remarks
"I named Java," said Kim Polese, then the Oak product manager and now CEO of Marimba Inc. "I spent a lot of time and energy on naming Java because I wanted to get precisely the right name. I wanted something that reflected the essence of the technology: dynamic, revolutionary, lively, fun. Because this programming language was so unique, I was determined to avoid nerdy names. I also didn't want anything with 'Net' or 'Web' in it, because I find those names very forgettable. I wanted something that was cool, unique, and easy to spell and fun to say.
"I gathered the team together in a room, wrote up on the whiteboard words like 'dynamic,' 'alive,' 'jolt,' 'impact,''revolutionary,' et cetera, and led the group in brainstorming," Polese said. "The name [Java] emerged during that session. Other names included DNA, Silk, Ruby, and WRL, for WebRunner Language -- yuck!"
Kim Polese's complete remarks.
"I believe the [brainstorming] meeting was held around January of 1995," said Sami Shaio, a Sun engineer at the time, who has since become a founding partner of Marimba. "It's actually hard to say where 'Java' first came from, but it ended up on the list of candidates we chose... along with Silk, Lyric, Pepper, NetProse, Neon, and a host of others too embarrassing to mention."
Sami Shaio's complete remarks.
"Some other candidates were WebDancer and WebSpinner," said Chris Warth, an engineer on the project from its inception and currently a consultant at JavaSoft. "Although marketing wanted a name that implied an association with the Web or the Net, I think we did very well to pick a name that wasn't associated with either one. Java is likely to find a true home in applications far from the Internet, so it's best that it wasn't pigeonholed early."
Chris Warth's complete remarks.
"The name 'Java' originated in a meeting where about a dozen people got together to brainstorm," said James Gosling, a vice president and fellow of Sun, and the author of Oak. "The meeting, arranged by Kim Polese, was fundamentally continuous wild craziness. Lots of people just yelled out words. Who yelled out what first is unknowable and unimportant. It felt like half of the words in the dictionary were yelled out at one time or another. There was a lot of: 'I like this because...' and 'I don't like that because...' And in the end we whittled it down to a list of about a dozen names and handed it off to the lawyers."
James Gosling's complete remarks.
"We were really disgusted and tired from all the marathon hacking we'd been doing at the time, and we still hadn't found a name that we could use," said Sun engineer Timothy Lindholm. "We were pressed for time, as adopting a new name meant a lot of work, and we had releases coming up. So we set up a meeting to thrash out a list of names.... The meeting went on for quite a while, and I remember there wasn't anything that jumped out as obviously the right thing to do. We were talking in despair about dumb names like Rover. We ended up with a final list, and Java was one of the top choices along with Silk, as in what you spin webs with. I do not remember there being a particular champion of Java.... Among the people of the original group that I've talked to about this, most deny any memory of Java being anything but something that bubbled out of the group dynamic."
Timothy Lindholm's complete remarks.
"I believe the name was first suggested by Chris Warth," said Arthur van Hoff, a senior engineer on the project and now CTO of Marimba Inc. "We had been in the meeting for hours and, while he was drinking a cup of Peet's Java, he picked 'Java' as an example of yet another name that would never work. The initial reaction was mixed. I believe the final candidates were Silk, DNA, and Java, however. I suggested Lingua Java, but that didn't make it.... We could not trademark the other names, so Java ended up being the name of choice. In the end, our marketing person, Kim Polese, finally decided to go ahead with it."
Arthur van Hoff's complete remarks.
Deciding to go for coffee
"I test-marketed the names at parties, and on my friends and family members," Polese recalled. "And Java got the most positive reactions of all the candidates. Because it wasn't certain that we would get any of the names cleared through trademark, I selected about three or four and worked with the lawyers on clearing them. Java passed, and it was my favorite, so I named the language Java and subsequently named the browser HotJava, a much better name than WebRunner. The engineers had a hard time parting with Oak, but they finally got used to it.... I felt that branding was very important, because I wanted Java to be a standard. So I focused on building a very strong brand for Java."
"We held a final meeting to vote on the name," said Yellin. "Every person got to rank Java, DNA, and Silk in order of their preference. The same name that got the most'most-favorite votes' also got the most 'least-favorite' votes. So it was dropped. And of the remaining two, Java got the most votes. So it became the preferred name."
"It came down to Silk or Java, and Java won out," Shaio remembered. "James Gosling seemed to favor Java over Silk. Kim Polese had the final say over the name, since she was the product manager. But most decisions back then were done by everyone kind of agreeing, and then someone would just say, 'OK, this is what we're doing.'"
"I can tell you precisely about the decision to choose the name," said Eric Schmidt, Sun's chief technology officer. "We met in early 1995 at 100 Hamilton in one of our standard operating reviews for little businesses like Oak. Bert Sutherland was the senior manager at the time -- he worked for me -- and he and Kim and a few others including James were there. Kim presented that: one, we had to choose a new name now, and two, Oak -- which we were all used to -- was taken. As I recall, she proposed two names, Java and Silk. Of the two, she strongly preferred Java and represented that the [Live Oak] team was in agreement. Bert and I decided to approve her recommendation, and the decision was made. For those reasons I believe it is correct to give Kim the credit for the name. She presented it and sold it, and then made it happen in marketing."
Eric Schmidt's complete remarks.
"I do seem to recall that Kim [Polese] was initially lukewarm on the name 'Java,'" recalled Warth. "At the time we were also trying to rename our browser from WebRunner -- which had been already taken by Taligent -- to something that wasn't already trademarked. Kim wanted things like WebSpinner or even WebDancer, something that would make it clear that this was a World Wide Web product. The trademark search was done, and after several weeks a short list of cleared names came back.... There seemed to be an endless series of meetings and approvals that were necessary -- as if the name were actually meaningful.
"At the time Kim wanted us to hold up the release so we could find a better name than Java, but she was overruled by the engineers, especially James and Arthur [van Hoff] and myself," Warth said. "At one point James said we were going to go with Java and HotJava, and Kim sent some e-mail asking us to wait for other names that might clear. James wrote back and said 'no,' we were going with what we had. And we just did a very quick set of renames in the source code and put the release out.... In the end, I think the marketeers and vice presidents had far less to say about the name than the engineers who were dying to get something out the door."
"I think Kim is rewriting history a bit when she suggests that she picked this name for some savvy marketing reason," Warth said. "We ended up with this name because we ran out of options and we wanted to get our product out. The marketing justifications came later."
"If Arthur's recollections are accurate (and I have no reason to doubt them) then Chris named the language Java," said Bob Weisblatt, the Java group's self-described "technical writer and margarita master" who now works at Active Software. "I don't remember who first yelled out the name Java -- Chris always had a cup of coffee handy so it makes sense that he'd be the one. Of one thing I am certain: Kim did not name the language Java."
Incidentally, Warth noted that Java was actually the third name for the language. "When we were working on the Green project, James first called it "Greentalk" and the file extension was ".gt"," Warth said. "Then it became "Oak" for several years and only relatively recently was it called "Java."
Sleepless in Palo Alto
"I don't claim to be the one who first suggested the name," said Warth when questioned about van Hoff's statement. "It definitely was Peet's Java [we were drinking], but it might have been me or James [Gosling] or someone else. I just don't recall exactly who said it.
"The feeling amongst myself and James and the other engineers was that we could call it 'xyzzy' and it would still be popular," Warth added. "In the end it doesn't matter who originally suggested the name, because it ultimately was a group decision -- perhaps helped along by a handful of caffeinated people."
"I think that the extent to which the people involved have considered the history of Java's name without arriving at any generally agreed-upon resolution shows that the naming of Java was not done by some heroic individual, but was a by-product of a creative and driven group trying very hard to achieve their goals, of which this name was a part," concluded Lindholm. "I would encourage you not to strive beyond what is reasonable in ascribing the naming of Java to an individual. That is simply not the way things worked in those days. Don't be fooled by how individuals and the media have subsequently filtered many elements of Java's creation to fit their own ends."
Kieron Murphy is a freelance technology writer living in New York City.A joint report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Sunday Times has revealed that Lord Tim Bell's PR firm Bell Pottinger was hired by the US military to run a "covert" propaganda operation in Iraq.
At the peak of the Iraq war, the London based consultancy was hired by the US department of defense to orchestrate a mammoth $540m campaign, in what is believed to be one of the most-costly PR contracts in history.
Operating under the agency's now dissolved 'conflict resolution' arm between 2007 and 2011, the bulk of the operation included "scripting soap operas, providing footage for local Arabic news networks and allegedly distributing insurgent videos used to track the individuals who watched them," according to the Times and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Bell confirmed some elements of the news to the Sunday Times, noting he was "proud," of the programme for preventing further bloodshed and saying that his PR firm had reported on its work to the CIA, the National Security Council and the Pentagon.
"It was a covert military operation. It was covered by various secrecy documents. We were very proud of it. We did a lot to help resolve the situation. Not enough. We did not stop the mess which emerged, but it was part of the American propaganda machinery," he added.
Details of the contract first surfaced in US defense and procurement documents, which showed that the former Thatcher PR guru's company was paid close to half a billion dollars for five contracts with the US military between summer 2007 and December 2011.
In order to help America win over civilians and combat militants Bell Pottinger produced reams of material for the Pentagon, a lot of which went far beyond the standard communications remit.
Speaking in the first media interview any Bell Pottinger employee has given about the project, one of the agency's former video editors Martin Wells described how a few days after being given the job he was sent to Baghdad to conduct a "psychological operations" campaign.
The initiative was operated in secrecy and distinct from the PR agency's main offering and included short TV slots created in the style of Arabic news networks and, according to Wells, fake insurgent videos which could be used to track those who watched them.
The Sunday Times has noted that those previously involved in the conflict-resolution division at the firm have denied any involvement in video-tracking software.
However, telling the Bureau how the videos were seemingly made, Wells claims he was given precise instructions that the films had to be shot in the style of al Qaeda and 10-minutes long. The films were then allegedly burned into CDs and contained codes which linked to a Google analytics account, giving a list of IP addresses where the CDs had been played.
This data was then apparently shared with a restricted circulation list, the former employee said, while the tracking account had a very restricted circulation list, according to Wells, who claimed the data went to him, a senior member of the Bell Pottinger management team, and one of the US military commanders.
"If one is looked at in the middle of Baghdad…you know there’s a hit there,” he noted, explaining the videos' value to US forces. "If one, 48 hours or a week later shows up in another part of the world, then that’s the more interesting one, and that’s what they’re looking for more, because that gives you a trail."
Watch Wells' interview in full here.
Bell Pottinger has a history of defense-related dealings, having represented a number of controversial clients including the government of Sri Lanka, ousted Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra, and Asma al-Assad, the wife of the president of Syria. Earlier this year, the agency announced Lord Bell's intentions to step down from his namesake agency to work on his new PR shop, Sans Frontières.
Updated
The Pentagon has since admitted to funding the PR project to combat the Islamic State’s propaganda online.In 2006 when James Howard Kunstler published his breakthrough book The Long Emergency, the next two years seemed to vindicate his warning that the oil age was coming to an end with perilous consequences. Oil soared to $147 a barrel in mid-2008. A few analysts suggested that it was headed for $200; but that was not to be. By autumn the stock market had collapsed and with it the world economy. Oil, too, then collapsed, trading in the mid-$30 range by December as demand for oil fell off a cliff with the economy. It seemed for months that the world was headed for an economic depression.
But extraordinary stimulative spending by governments around the world and emergency measures by central banks reversed the trend and led to a weak, but extended recovery of sorts that lasts to this day (though not for everyone--just ask the Greeks).
Oil prices have rebounded and have remained at or near record levels for more than three years when measured by the average daily price of the world benchmark Brent Crude. That high price (higher on average than the year of the spike) is holding back economic growth. It is creating a seeming puzzle for economic policymakers who don't understand why their extraordinary measures have not led to extraordinary growth. They are blind to the central role of energy and particularly oil in the economy.
Despite the so-called recovery, much of Europe remains mired in low or no growth, lingering on the edge of a deflationary spiral. Germany is the one bright spot; prospects for France continue to darken. In the United States jobs are only now starting to return to previous levels almost five years after a slow and laborious climb off the bottom of the so-called Great Recession.
Today, governments of some of the world's largest nations are still running extraordinarily high deficits, though these have come down as the world has inched its way out of the recession.
What appears to be masking the ongoing emergency is the rise in stock and bond markets (which has disproportionately benefited the rich who hold the most stocks and bonds). The disconnect between the still sluggish economy and the stock market which keeps hitting new highs is one indication that dangers lurk in the world economy.
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Retirees and others who are risk-averse have been getting virtually no interest on their money in the bank, interest that many rely on to live. For five years the world's central banks have maintained ultra-low interest rates designed to goose the economy. This policy has forced these risk-averse investors out of their comfort zone and into the stock and bond markets to obtain income and a chance at growth. Such markets, of course, carry far more risk than bank CDs.
The people at the top and those with substantial retirement investments are doing okay again, but do not understand the precariousness of markets which are now totally driven by government and central bank policy--policy that will inevitably shift or, if unchanged, will stoke the world's speculative fever to such a degree that no intervention will be able to prevent a financial crash.
Perhaps another reason that the long emergency we have entered does not seem like one is that some emergency measures have morphed into permanent fixtures of society. The Bank of England has held its key lending rate at 0.5 percent since 2009, the lowest since the opening of the bank in 1694. The projected US federal deficit of $492 billion for 2014--which previously would have provoked sharp public debate about the ruin of government finances--today seems unnoteworthy when compared to the four straight $1 trillion plus deficits from 2009 to 2012. The abnormal is becoming normal.
Analyst Doug Noland at first didn't believe that governments around the world would mortgage the future of their peoples to such an extent to protect and enrich the financial class in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Eventually, he dubbed the phenomenon the "government finance bubble." He expects it to be the largest and final bubble of a series occurring in the last 30 years. At the end there will be no Bank of Mars to bail us out when the government finance bubble collapses.
On the energy front, new hydraulic fracturing technology combined with horizontal drilling is being touted as the answer to high oil prices. But oil prices remain stubbornly elevated. And, the technology itself is designed to harvest oil from shale layers thousands of feet below conventional reservoirs, layers which are far more difficult and expensive to exploit. In a way, our extraction of shale-based oil should be considered an emergency measure, one designed to forestall a decline in world oil production and one that would never have been taken if the easy-to-get oil hadn't already been gotten.
Likewise, attempts to exploit oil under the Arctic Ocean (so far unsuccessful) are opening a new front in the era of "extreme oil" and should also be classified as emergency measures.
But the public and policymakers generally do not view these developments in oil exploration with concern. On the contrary such efforts are touted as evidence of humankind's inevitable advance through clever manipulation of the environment using technology. It is just this idea of inevitability which holds the public mind in thrall regarding the economy with a promise that conditions will return to normal sometime soon--normal being defined down to include all sorts of emergency measures.
Meanwhile, the rampage of an itinerant army of vengeful youths in Syria and Iraq intent on building a new caliphate and the suddenly shifting borders of The Ukraine and Russia (accompanied by the downing of a civilian airliner by belligerents) seems to trouble the public elsewhere very little. Regarding the Middle East few are saying out loud that oil and water are among the driving forces of intensified conflict that threatens to make current borders obsolete.
Joining in the mess are Palestinians and Israelis who are once again in a hot war that seems to draw yawns from the rest of the world populace.
As long as we ignore the role of climate change and resource and energy depletion, we can delude ourselves that somehow things will return to the way they used to be--before the long emergency began--that political or ethnic factors are the main problems and that it has ever been thus! So, we tell ourselves not to worry too much since these problems are really local or regional; as long as we can stay out of the way, we think we can safely ignore them.
But, of course, we can't because the world is now one global system dependent on critical resources coming from the very areas affected by conflict--oil, of course, in the Middle East and natural gas from Russia upon which Europe depends.
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Is all of this happening too slowly to be considered an emergency? Emergencies generally make obvious the need for immediate and decisive action. Some people do indeed perceive that swift action is needed to address urgent energy and sustainability issues. But, it is also true that we will need decades-long engagement with such issues if we as a species are to navigate the path to a successful transition to a renewable energy economy that also conserves the soil, the water, the climate and ultimately us. Hence, the long emergency.
But in order to embrace such a worldview, most people would have to give up the supposed comfort offered by the financial bubble of the last generation, a bubble made possible by cheap fossil fuels, especially oil. It seemed as if the public might let go of this fossil-fueled fantasy after 2008. But because of the extraordinary financial measures deployed in an attempt to return us to business-as-usual, the global economic and financial system has been revived just enough to allow us to engage in a few more years of fantasizing--until our cumulative debts to nature and to one another catch up with us.If you look under the Self-Help heading on Amazon, you’ll find roughly 5,000 books listed under the subhead Self-Esteem. The vast majority of these books aim to not only tell you why your self-esteem might be low, but to show you how to get your hands on some more of it. It’s a thriving business because self-esteem is, at least in Western cultures, considered the bedrock of individual success. You can’t possibly get ahead in life, the logic goes, unless you believe you are perfectly awesome.
And of course you must be perfectly awesome in order to keep believing that you are — so you live in quiet terror of making mistakes, and feel devastated when you do. Your only defense is to refocus your attention on all the things you do well, mentally stroking your own ego until it has forgotten this horrible episode of unawesomeness and moved on to something more satisfying.
When you think about it, this doesn’t exactly sound like a recipe for success, does it? Indeed, recent reviews of the research on high self-esteem have come to the troubling conclusion that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. High self-esteem does not predict better performance or greater success. And though people with high self-esteem do think they’re more successful, objectively, they are not. High self-esteem does not make you a more effective leader, a more appealing lover, more likely to lead a healthy lifestyle, or more attractive and compelling in an interview. But if Stuart Smalley is wrong, and high self-esteem (along with daily affirmations of your own terrificness) is not the answer to all your problems, then what is?
A growing body of research, including new studies by Berkeley’s Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, suggest that self-compassion, rather than self-esteem, may be the key to unlocking your true potential for greatness.
Now, I know that some of you are already skeptical about a term like “self-compassion.” But this is a scientific, data-driven argument — not feel-good pop psychology. So hang in there and keep an open mind.
Self-compassion is a willingness to look at your own mistakes and shortcomings with kindness and understanding — it’s embracing the fact that to err is indeed human. When you are self-compassionate in the face of difficulty, you neither judge yourself harshly, nor feel the need to defensively focus on all your awesome qualities to protect your ego. It’s not surprising that self-compassion leads, as many studies show, to higher levels of personal well-being, optimism and happiness, and to less anxiety and depression.
But what about performance? Self-compassion may feel good, but aren’t the people who are harder on themselves, who are driven to always be the best, the ones who are ultimately more likely to succeed?
To answer that, it’s important to understand what self-compassion is not. While the spirit of self-compassion is to some degree captured in expressions like give yourself a break and cut yourself some slack, it is decidedly not the same thing as taking yourself off the hook or lowering the bar. You can be self-compassionate while still accepting responsibility for your performance. And you can be self-compassionate while striving for the most challenging goals — the difference lies not in where you want to end up, but in how you think about the ups and downs of your journey. As a matter of fact, if you are self-compassionate, new research suggests you are more likely to actually arrive at your destination.
In their studies, Brienes and Chen asked participants to take either a self-compassionate or self-esteem enhancing view of a setback or failure. For example, when asked to reflect on a personal weakness, some were asked to “imagine that you are talking to yourself about this weakness from a compassionate and understanding perspective. What would you say?”
Others were asked to instead focus on boosting their self-esteem: “Imagine that you are talking to yourself about this weakness from a perspective of validating your positive qualities. What would you say?”
People who experienced self-compassion were more likely to see their weaknesses as changeable. Self-compassion — far from taking them off the hook — actually increased their motivation to improve and avoid the same mistake again in the future.
This increased motivation lead to demonstrably superior performance. For instance, in one study, participants who failed an initial test were given a second chance to improve their scores. Those who took a self-compassionate view of their earlier failure studied 25 percent longer, and scored higher on a second test, than participants who focused on bolstering their self-esteem.
Why is self-compassion so powerful? In large part, because it is non-evaluative — in other words, your ego is effectively out of the picture — you can confront your flaws and foibles head on. You can get a realistic sense of your abilities and your actions, and figure out what needs to be done differently next time.
When your focus is instead on protecting your self-esteem, you can’t afford to really look at yourself honestly. You can’t acknowledge the need for improvement, because it means acknowledging weaknesses and shortcomings — threats to self-esteem that create feelings of anxiety and depression. How can you learn how to do things right when it’s killing you to admit — even to yourself — that you’ve done them wrong?
Here’s an unavoidable truth: You are going to screw up. Everyone — including very successful people — makes boatloads of mistakes. The key to success is, as everyone knows, to learn from those mistakes and keep moving forward. But not everyone knows how. Self-compassion is the how you’ve been looking for. So please, give yourself a break.Stash Launches ‘Bank In A Box’ Bitcoin Full Node
The Austin, Texas-based software startup Stash Inc., has just announced the release of its first product — the “Stash Node Pro.” The device is a Bitcoin full node with various features that protect privacy and cryptographic financial security.
Also read: $35k For Cotton Marks World First Interbank Blockchain Trade
Stash Reveals Its Bitcoin Full Node With Strong & Privacy-Centric Cryptography
Stash is a privacy-focused Bitcoin company founded by Cliff Baltzley and Chris Odom. The company’s first product, the Stash Node Pro, will be the world’s first Open-Transactions hardware device. The plug-and-play device is a Bitcoin full node roughly five-by-five inches in size.
With the typical capabilities of a full node, the products’ privacy-centric features are unique. Stash Node Pro will include Open-Transactions — which has untraceable cash, digital checks, recurring payments, basket currencies, bid/ask market exchange, and a secure end-to-end encrypted messaging system. All the features included give Stash Node owners a complete cryptographic resource library.
“We’re reducing the need for reliance on trusted third parties,” says Chris Odom, Stash CTO and co-founder. “All money services existing today can be replaced by consumer devices. Through strong cryptography, parties can transact directly and privately with one another.”
‘A Powerful Turnkey Transaction Server’
Stash said members of its staff have been coding rigorously for over six years to provide this software to the public. Stash Node Pro is a “powerful turnkey transaction server and mobile financial platform, built on Open-Transactions and the blockchain,” says CEO Cliff Baltzley. The startup believes consumers have been looking for a turnkey device that is accessible from their mobile wallets. With the Stash Node Pro, the developers say “among other things, it’s a bank in a box; your own, personal bank.”
The Bitcoin full node contains a self-hosted copy of the blockchain and can support any block size in the future. The startup has also designed a stand-alone mobile app which can pair with the Stash Node Pro. This gives the user access to their own blockchain copy at all times. In essence, the entire platform gives financial control to the owner by enabling a trustless device with censorship resistant capability.
Currently, there isn’t a node on the market that has Open-Transaction software integration. The team believes these features add significant value to the Stash node, alongside a pairable mobile wallet interface. The Stash mobile wallet also utilizes BIP47 payment codes and enables “two-way Bitcoin addresses with fungibility and full on-chain privacy.” The founders of Stash believe that the public has desired a platform with a broad range of cryptographic procedures for quite some time. Stash CEO Cliff Baltzley explained:
Bitcoin professionals and enthusiasts have been seeking a way to gain access to a complete financial and cryptography software suite, and Stash has responded to this demand by creating a self-contained hardware device that addresses a multitude of needs.
‘Revolutionary Features Coming Soon’
Stash details that they are developing “revolutionary features” with an architecture based on freedom and prosperity. In the future, the team plans on implementing more protocols to the Stash financial infrastructure. Innovations coming soon include trustless coin mixing, multi-signature technology, cold storage applications, SMS integrations, multi-currency support, payments through SMS texting, and much more.
The startup Stash hopes this product and its upcoming innovations will help spread “true financial autonomy.” The company will be accepting a limited number of pre-orders for the founder’s edition of the Stash Node Pro. Pre-orders are currently available for purchase with Bitcoin only, and free FedEx shipping is included. The startup says it has quite a lot of devices in stock and will begin shipping orders on November 18. Stash looks forward to providing a node with the foundations of privacy in mind and believes consumers will as well.
Would you buy and run a Stash Node Pro? Let us know in the comments below.
Images via Stash Inc., and The Crypto Show
Did you know Bitcoin.com is holding a blockchain conference in London this year? Our premiere event, Blockchain: Money, features the biggest innovators and executives in the industry. The event also takes place in the beautiful surroundings of 155 Bishopsgate, London on November 6-7, 2016. Reserve your tickets today!Americans and Canadians don't often see their federal politicians engage in extended conversations about cannabis. Most of them shy away from the controversial issue altogether, or give short, scripted answers and try to avoid follow-up questions.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is not like that at all, which is what makes him so impressive whenever he talks about why he believes legalization is important.
He makes familiar arguments about protecting kids and killing the black market, but he speaks with such ease and a sense of conviction that he inspires both confidence and a sense of connection with ordinary people - necessary ingredients for making the broader Canadian public embrace legalization. It's why he should remain Canada's front man on the issue, even if he has appointed MP (and former Toronto police chief) Bill Blair to be his point man.
Trudeau knows how to talk to people on the street
Check out this conversation from 2013 that has recirculated on social media since Trudeau's election win last fall. Trudeau fully - and fearlessly - engages a voter on an issue where there's sharp disagreement. He's pro-legalization, and she's an opponent with concerns about youth and people with addictions. Even though they have opposing viewpoints, they treat each other with respect and really talk it out - very impressive in an age where most politicians seem to have pre-screened and controlled conversations with voters and constituents.
He knows how to talk to reporters
Trudeau is very much at ease with reporters, gives extended answers to questions about his views on legalization. Sure, he has standard "talking points" like all politicians. Whether he's engaged in an impromptu chat with someone in a grocery store or talking to journalists, he repeats his practiced message about protecting youth and shutting down criminal organizations. This is precisely what he did during last year's VICE's election town hall, in response to a question from Damian Abraham:
Every year, millions upon millions of dollars are funnelled into criminal organizations, street gangs, gun runners, for the sale of marijuana. Indeed, for most law-abiding citizens, one of the only times they come into regular contact with a criminal is when they're actually trying to buy weed...We have a gray area and lack of federal leadership...that is putting our kids at risk.
But he's direct and elaborates on his points, and willing to participate in both back-and-forth informal conversations, or more formal question-and-answer sessions with journalists.
He's knowledgable and has a sense of humour
Trudeau has a complex, ever-evolving attitude toward legalization and cannabis itself.
He freely admits he's smoked pot a handful of times in his life - once since he become an MP. "We had a few good friends over for a dinner party, our kids were at their grandmother's for the night, and one of our friends lit a joint and passed it around. I had a puff," he told The Huffington Post in 2013.
Up until a few years ago, though, he actually opposed decriminalization. By 2013, he'd come around to supporting legalization, while not being a huge fan of cannabis himself. "I'm not someone who is particularly interested in altered states, but I certainly won't judge someone else for it," he said.
Nonetheless, he became an eloquent advocate for the cause, and confident enough to display a sense of humour in this 2013 video, where Mark Critch - a star of CBC's comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes - pulls out a joint in Trudeau's parliamentary office.
22 Minutes Star Asks To Smoke Pot With Justin Trudeau
Posted by Mike Anthony on Monday, October 26, 2015
How many prominent world leaders are familiar enough with the term hotboxing to make a joke about it?
For reasons like this, Trudeau is the perfect face for legalization, even if others lead the process that begin to unfold over the next few weeks.
He's a father and husband who says all the right things about protecting the country's young people; he's understanding and reassuring enough to connect with people who still have doubts (after all, he once had them himself).
And yet he's self-assured and knowledgeable about why legalization is important, which should make advocates feel confident he'll ultimately deliver on that commitment.
Mark Leger is the editor of Civilized. E-mail: [email protected]
banner image: Flickr / Prime Minister of Canada.
WHY THEY CREATED TEEBOTS
TEEBOTS.COM
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’s ban causes a stir at Mavericks 1 / 38 Back to Gallery
Baker won the first Mavericks contest he entered, in February 2006. He finished second in January ’08, reached the semifinals in February 2010 and won for a second time in January ’14, the last time the event was held.
Bruce Jenkins is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: bjenkins@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Bruce_Jenkins1In this photo taken on Tuesday, July 25, 2017, Mohammed Naseer, with black turban, holds his sons' hand when they enter a Pizza Restaurant in Kabul, Afghanistan. Mohammed Naseer spent several weeks arranging for his son, a nephew and several other children from his district of Ander in Ghazni province to go to Quetta to study the Quran. (AP Photos/Massoud Hossaini)
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — It was a routine check. Two vans, both without license plates, were stopped earlier this month by police in Afghanistan’s eastern Ghazni province, where Taliban hold sway in large swaths of the countryside.
Inside, police found 27 boys between the ages of 4 and 15, all being taken illegally to Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province to study in seminaries called madrassas, according to a police report acquired by The Associated Press.
The authorities told the AP that the children were being taken to Pakistani madrassas to educate a new generation in the ways of the Taliban, with the intention of returning them to Afghanistan to enforce the same rigid interpretation of Islam practiced by the radical religious movement until its ouster by U.S.-led coalition forces in 2001.
The police called it child trafficking and threw the drivers and the only other adults, two men who organized the convoy, into jail.
But the parents said they wanted their children to study in Pakistan and had willingly sent them to Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s sparsely populated Baluchistan province on the border with Afghanistan.
Quetta is significant to Afghanistan’s Taliban, many of whom graduated from madrassas there. It is also considered the headquarters of the Taliban leadership council, which is widely referred to as the “Quetta shura.”
An Afghan counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because revealing his identity could endanger him, said Afghan intelligence has identified 26 madrassas in Pakistan where it suspects future generations of Taliban are being trained and in some cases instructed in carrying out suicide bombings.
Several of the 26 madrassas he identified were in Quetta.
Sheikh Abdul Hakim madrassa was among the Quetta schools the Afghan official identified as a Taliban recruitment center. The AP went to the madrassa and was told the director, after whom the madrassa is named, was on a missionary sabbatical to preach Islam, but a teacher, Azizullah Mainkhail, said some students at the madrassa were from Afghanistan.
The majority, however, he said are Pakistanis from villages throughout Baluchistan. He denied affiliation with the Taliban or Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency known by the acronym ISI and accused by Afghanistan of supporting the Taliban.
The madrassa is massive, surrounded by high walls that shelter several buildings of mud and cement. Mainkhail said 350 students live and study there.
A separate attempt in Ghazni province to move children across the border, also for religious education, was foiled by police about two weeks ago, the Afghan official said. The 13 children, from neighboring Paktika province, were also destined for religious studies, this time in seminaries in Pakistan’s sprawling Arabian Sea port city of Karachi.
Traffickers “wanted to take our innocent children to the terrorist centers on the other side of the border under the pretense of Islamic studies,” Ghazni Police Chief Mohammad Mustafa Mayar said.
War, poverty, insecurity and a lack of understanding by families of the dangers awaiting their children all combine to drive the child trafficking trade in Afghanistan, said Mohammed Musa Mahmoodi of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.
Each year there are at least three or four cases of children being smuggled from province to province or across the international borders, sometimes to be used as cheap labor, other times to be recruited by the Taliban under the guise of religious education and other times for sexual abuse, says Mahmoodi.
Still, he said the problem is much greater than the few busloads of children intercepted would indicate, but corruption and a lack of training in the ways of child traffickers makes it a lucrative and fairly safe trade in Afghanistan.
Several years ago a child trafficking ring that had taken children to Saudi Arabia to be used as cheap labor was busted, he recalled.
“Parents often agree to send their children but they don’t know what is awaiting the child. Sometimes they are told they will be educated or will get a good job and be looked after,” said Mahmoodi. “But when they get there they are beaten, forced to work as cheap labor, taken by Taliban as new recruits.”
Mohammed Naseer spent several weeks arranging for his son, a nephew and several other children from his district of Ander in Ghazni province to go to Quetta to study the Quran. His son Mohammed Yaseen is just 9 years old but he said he was excited to be going to Quetta. His dream: “I want to be a mullah (cleric).”
Naseer, who wore a black turban and a long black unkempt beard, said his son had studied three years in a village school but he still could neither read nor write, not even at a rudimentary level, in his native Pashto language. He said the village school even offers English lessons but the teacher doesn’t speak English.
But even more worrying for Naseer is the lack of a quality Islamic seminary to school his son in Islam’s holy book. Several children from nearby villages were home on vacation from a madrassa in Pakistan and Naseer said he heard them recite the Quran and “their words were so sweet.” He decided then to send his son to Pakistan. Naseer said he wanted a madrassa with a dormitory that would house and feed his child. They don’t exist in his area, he said.
He loaded his son along with 26 other children into the two vans, gave his son a change of clothes and gave some money to the men taking his child to Pakistan “but only for transportation.”
But senior police official Fazlur Rahman Bustani in Kabul said the movement of children is a business and a dangerous one, regardless of whether parents willingly send their children.
“Those involved in the transport of children are part of a dangerous network and it is a criminal act,” said Bustani. “It doesn’t matter if the parents approve.”
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Associated Press writers Abdul Sattar in Quetta, Pakistan, and Amir Shah in Kabul, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.A lift hill, or chain hill, is an upward-sloping section of track on a roller coaster on which the roller coaster train is mechanically lifted to an elevated point or peak in the track. Upon reaching the peak, the train is then propelled from the peak by gravity and is usually allowed to coast throughout the rest of the roller coaster ride's circuit on its own momentum, including most or all of the remaining uphill sections. The initial upward-sloping section of a roller coaster track is usually a lift hill, as the train typically begins a ride with little speed, though some coasters have raised stations that permit an initial drop without a lift hill. Although uncommon, some tracks also contain multiple lift hills.
Lift hills usually propel the train to the top of the ride via one of two methods: a chain lift involving a long, continuous chain which trains hook on to and are carried to the top; or a drive tire system in which multiple motorized tires (known as friction wheels) push the train upwards. A typical chain lift consists of a heavy piece of metal called a chain dog, which is mounted onto the underside of one of the cars which make up the train. This is in place to line up with the chain on the lift hill.
The chain travels through a steel trough, and is normally powered by one or more motors which are positioned under the lift hill. Chain dogs underneath each train are engaged by the chain and the train is pulled up the lift. Anti-rollback dogs engage a rack (ratcheted track) alongside the chain to prevent the train from descending the lift hill. At the crest of the lift, the chain wraps around a gear wheel where it begins its return to the bottom of the lift; the train is continually pulled along until gravity takes over and it accelerates downhill. The spring-loaded chain and anti-rollback dogs will disengage themselves as this occurs.
Cable lift [ edit ]
The cable lift is a type of lift mechanism that was first used on Millennium Force at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio.[1] This type of lift has also been used for Kings Dominion's Intimidator 305, Holiday Park's Expedition GeForce, Walibi Holland's Goliath, Djurs Sommerland's Piraten (Europe's only "Mega-Lite"-model coaster by Intamin), Tokyo Dome City's Thunder Dolphin, Hersheypark's Skyrush, Flying Aces at Ferrari World and Altair at Cinecittà World. Currently, there are only two wooden roller coasters that utilize a cable lift hill: El Toro at Six Flags Great Adventure and T Express at Everland.
The cable lift utilizes a cable loop in place of the traditional chain, which is attached to a short section of chain that engages the trains chain dog. Because a cable is much lighter than a chain, cable lifts are much faster than chain lifts and can be used on much steeper hills - even vertical. A cable also requires far less maintenance than a chain. Another advantage to park guests is that a cable lift is very quiet, partly because the main drive winch is located directly beneath the top of the lift, a location which will normally be relatively far from guest-accessible areas.
Despite having several advantages over a chain lift, it has a significant disadvantage, which is that it must return to the bottom of the lift hill after lifting each train (in contrast to a continuously moving chain lift which does not need any kind of resetting). This limits the usefulness of the cable lift in applications where the cable must travel a long distance and the interval between train departures is short.
Ferris wheel lift [ edit ]
The Ferris wheel lift is a type of lift based on the rotating circular design of a ferris wheel. Created by Premier Rides, it exists on 'Round About' (formerly Maximum RPM) which operated at Freestyle Music Park in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina prior to being dismantled and moved to a park in Vietnam.[2][citation needed] It uses a Ferris Wheel like motion to lift the cars to the top, as on a Ferris Wheel. The cars are then released onto the track.
Elevator lift [ edit ]
The elevator lift is a new technology used to make the ascension of the roller coaster faster and more comfortable due to the fact all riders are doing is moving vertically up. It is used mostly in indoor rollercoasters like Scooby-Doo Spooky Coaster. The most notable coaster to use this lift system (and the second purposely-built roller coaster in the United States to be built with it) is Cobra's Curse at Busch Gardens Tampa Bay.
Tilt lift/thrill lift section [ edit ]
A tilt lift is a new way to elevate coasters. The tilt lift is essentially an elevator lift, but the elevator lift rotates 90 degrees so that the train is now vertical, with the nose of the train facing the ground. This design has not been made yet; the only places where this occurs are in the video games RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and Coaster Crazy. However, there are coaster designs that use the tilting aspect of this lift already. The first operating tilt coaster in the world is Gravity Max at Lihpao Land in Taiwan. The coaster was built by Vekoma. In this coaster, after going up a chain hill, the train is held on a horizontal section of track, which then tilts forwards, to become a vertical section, which then leads into a vertical drop accelerated by gravity. The second and at the moment last tilt coaster is Battle of Jungle King at Hefei Wanda Theme Park.[3]
Anti-rollback device [ edit ]
Diagram depicting the anti-rollback safety feature
The familiar "click-clack" sound that occurs as roller coaster train ascends the lift hill is not caused by the chain itself. The cause for this noise is actually a safety device used on lift hills—the anti-rollback device. The anti-rollback device is a standard safety feature, typically consisting of a continuous, saw-toothed, section of metal, forming a linear ratchet.
Roller coaster trains are fitted with anti-rollback "dogs" which are essentially heavy-duty pieces of metal which fall and rest in each groove of the anti-rollback device on the track as the trains ascend the lift-hill. This makes the "clicking" sound and allows the train to go upwards only, effectively preventing the train from rolling back down the hill should it ever encounter a power failure or broken chain.
This feature was derived from the similar feature originally used on the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway in Pennsylvania, starting in 1846. The two uphill planes that cars were drawn up under the power of a stationary steam engine had two slightly different early forms of this anti-rollback device. The entire concept of the modern roller coaster was also initially inspired by this railroad.Joel Embiid has yet to make his NBA debut, but after two years of watching him rehab from foot injuries and develop on the court, Brett Brown has a clear picture of the big man’s role on the Sixers.
“He needs to be the crown jewel, the centerpiece to our defense,” Brown said Thursday at his annual preseason luncheon with the media.
Over the course of his rehab, Embiid has been wowing with videos of himself knocking down three-point shots and dunking. Brown, though, envisions him making an impact on the other end. He believes Embiid’s 7-foot-2, 276-pound presence is best utilized at the basket. Last season, the Sixers ranked last in the league in rebounds (41.2), opponents’ rebounds (47.6) and rebound differential (minus-6.4) per game.
“I think he's a rim protector,” Brown said.
Brown expects Embiid to be ready for the start of training camp on Sept. 27 and the preseason opener on Oct. 4 against the Celtics. Embiid and the Sixers have been waiting since draft night 2014 for Embiid to play his first game. Given the long recovery process, which took Embiid as far as Qatar, the Sixers are continuing to follow their carefully mapped out schedule. There will be restrictions for Embiid’s playing time, which are to be determined.
“I think we all know that there are parameters coming,” Brown said. “We all know that less is more. We want to walk him down in a very responsible, thoughtful way, where we continue to deliver him to the court in a calculated way that doesn’t jeopardize anything with what we just spoke about — the investment that he has made, and we have made, in the past few years.”
Brown knows firsthand the value of healthy bigs. Brown, who spent over 10 years in the Spurs' system, has shared stories of his championship-winning days with David Robinson and Tim Duncan (see story). He has told Embiid about the widespread effects of a defensively-savvy presence in the paint.
“I learned in my first year going to a team that had Duncan and Robinson behind your defense,” Brown said, “it allowed the perimeter defenders — Mario Elie and Steve Kerr and Avery Johnson-type guys, Sean Elliott — that... you could be a little more physical. Sometimes if they beat you, you had the luxury of that behind them. So there was a bravado, there was a toughness, there was an aggressive philosophy we could put on the ball.”
From draft night to training camp, Embiid has been transforming his body to become NBA-ready. Brown also has seen changes in the 22-year-old’s personality. Two rehab processes later, Embiid has taken on a new outlook.
“Joel’s frustration has been documented his first year with us when he was out,” Brown said. “He is a 7-foot-2, young kid, all balled up, can’t play, trying to figure it out, what does this mean, trying to be professional with rehabilitation and recovery, and sometimes frustrations got the better of him.
“The growth of Joel Embiid as a person, then as a player, is important to me. I think that the path that has unfolded sort of organically, with the injury, the setback, and now here he is, I think we could look back and say in an inverted, twisted type way, it has provided him a layer of growth. I think he sees the world a little bit differently in relation to taking things far more seriously, professionally, etcetera. I see a more mature Joel Embiid today.”
Embiid was one of many players at the Sixers' practice facility on Thursday putting in work before training camp. Among those was fellow big Jahlil Okafor, who rolled an ankle last week. Brown expects Okafor, who has recovered from right knee surgery, to be ready for the start of camp.Vancouver’s Morgan Hibbert Leaves Furious George, Joins GOAT
Morgan Hibbert is off to Toronto.
Morgan Hibbert, the face of Vancouver ultimate for nearly a decade, is leaving the Vancouver club team Furious George and will join Toronto’s GOAT for the remainder of the 2014 season.
The massive mid-season transaction further cements GOAT as the top Canadian club, and could mark the end of an era for Furious, a team that has seen its strength wane over the past few years.
Hibbert just concluded captaining Furious George at WUCC in Lecco, Italy, where they finished sixth, losing to Seattle Sockeye and London Clapham in the Championship bracket. Hibbert was a captain of Furious since 2007.
GOAT is now looking stronger than ever, adding another big cutter to their already deep roster. Hibbert’s biggest contribution may come on the defensive side, an area where GOAT struggled at times last season. Hibbert won the 2014 Western Conference defensive player of the year award in Major League Ultimate while playing for the Vancouver Nighthawks.
“GOAT is pleased to welcome Morgan Hibbert to the team starting at the Pro Flight Finale,” said GOAT coach Scott “Shooter” Hastie. “Morgan’s wealth of talent, knowledge, and experience make this a fantastic addition to the team. We look forward to his immediate contributions.”
Furious George takes the field without Hibbert for the first time this weekend at the West Coast Round Robin. GOAT will play with Hibbert next weekend at the Pro Flight Finale.President Obama says he’s “concerned” that some Republicans appear to be siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin amid a fierce debate over allegations of Moscow’s interference in the U.S. presidential election.
“I think that what is true is that the Russians intended to meddle and they meddled," Obama told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in an interview that aired Friday.
Obama voiced worry about “Republicans or pundits or cable commentators who seem to have more confidence in Vladimir Putin than fellow Americans because those fellow Americans are Democrats.”
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"That cannot be,” he said.
“I said that after the election — we have to remind ourselves that we're on the same team," Obama said. "Vladimir Putin is not on our team."
Obama’s comments came after the Intelligence Community published a declassified report blaming Putin for orchestrating hacks on Democratic groups and an online influence campaign in an attempt to boost Trump's White House chances.
Both the president and president-elect were presented with a classified version of the report this week.
Trump has repeatedly voiced skepticism toward the notion the Russians attempted to aid his candidacy, and on Friday, he did not say whether he accepted the intelligence agencies’ conclusions.
He would only say that “Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat National Committee.”
Trump also stressed that “there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”"Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site's homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.
Wikileaks reports that the Web site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program was defaced last week with a message claiming that the database of prescriptions had been bundled into an encrypted, password-protected file.
Wikileaks has published a copy of the ransom note left in place of the PMP home page, a message that claims the state of Virginia would need to pay the demand in order to gain access to a password needed to unlock those records:
"I have your [expletive] In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh :(For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password.""
Read more: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/05/hackers_break_into_virginia_he.htmlMeet the America-Hating, Assad-Loving Journalist Who Just Came Back From the Islamic State
When Jurgen Todenhofer crossed out of Islamic State-controlled territory on Dec. 16, he accomplished something that no Western journalist had done before him – he had visited the self-declared caliphate, and survived. The jihadist group, he warned upon his return, is “much stronger and much more dangerous” than the West realizes.
But this wasn’t Todenhofer’s first journalistic coup in Syria. In July 2012, he secured an interview with the ruler that the Islamic State is trying to topple – Bashar al-Assad. At the time, he was seen as sympathetic to the regime: He had recently published an article suggesting that Syrian rebels had been responsible for the mass killing of civilians in the village of Houla, and referred derisively to the rebels’ claims that Assad’s men perpetrated the attack as “massacre marketing.”
Todenhofer, a former judge and German parliamentarian, has seen his share of war zones. He traveled to Algiers during the Algerian civil war, to Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, to Iraq during the U.S. occupation, and to Libya during the revolt that toppled Muammar al-Qaddafi. He does not pretend to be a neutral observer of events: The New York Times referred to him as an “outspoken antiwar advocate” and a critic of Western coverage of Syria, which he viewed as unfairly hostile to Assad.
Todenhofer’s critics charge that he is little more than an apologist for dictators. He “is a strange political bird, but his business model is quite successful,” wrote Die Zeit editor-at-large Josef Joffe in an email. His recent books have sold well, and he is a regular on German television shows, “where he is cast as a pacifist bien pensant who likes to cavort with the world’s worst despots, notably Saddam [Hussein] and Assad, while flacking for the Iranian regime.”
Joffe also accuses him of “reliable anti-Americanism and anti-Israelism.” There’s no doubt that the perfidy of U.S. policy in the Middle East is a recurring theme in Todenhofer’s work: He penned an open letter to President Barack Obama in 2012, listing 10 points that he argued should cause the United States to reassess its relationship with the Muslim world. “The West is a lot more violent than the Muslim world,” he wrote, saying that millions of Arabs had been killed since the start of the colonial era. The problem, he said, was the West’s anti-terror programs, which “are a terror-breeding program.”
In 2007, Todenhofer crossed the Syrian border to interview anti-government fighters in Iraq’s restive Anbar province. He detailed his trip in a book titled “Why Do You Kill, Zaid?” – a harrowing account of his journey, and a profile of a young man whose two brothers were killed in the war, and who later joined the anti-American insurgency and set off an improvised explosive device that destroyed two U.S. Humvees. The book even includes an interview with an al Qaeda fighter. “[George W.] Bush is responsible for the deaths of many more people than all the dictators and terrorists in the world put together,” Todenhofer writes, to preempt criticism of him speaking with al Qaeda. “Nonetheless, every Western politician is proud to have a meeting with Bush.”
Statements like this, which seem to equate Western politicians with jihadist leaders, have at times provoked a backlash against Todenhofer in Germany. This summer, he photoshopped the face of German President Joachim Gauck onto the body of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, to protest what he viewed as Gauck’s enthusiasm for war. “Dear friends, what have we done to get such a jihadist as president?” he wrote.
His views aside, there’s no doubting Todenhofer’s grim portrayal of Islamic State-controlled Syria and Iraq. In his latest trip, he does not appear to have avoided asking the jihadists tough questions: He engaged in a tense discussion with one fighter about the Islamic State’s enslavement of Yazidis, and wrote on Facebook that the group was planning a massive “religious cleansing” of non-believers.
He also came away from the trip impressed by the Islamic State’s military and strategic abilities, and sure that in the long run they planned to attack Europe and the United States. “You can say, these are fantasies, this is ridiculous,” he told CNN. “But if someone had said that at the end of this year, 2014, IS would run a country bigger than Great Britain, everybody would’ve said, ‘you’re crazy.’”
Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty ImagesAfter defying a court order to release Attorney General Jeff Session’s security clearance form relating to his contact with the Russian government, the Justice Department has released a heavily redacted version.
The document was released early Thursday morning to American Oversight after the group sued the Justice Department and the FBI in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
The Justice Department initially withheld the document, but then produced the single page of the Standard Form 86 (SF-86), one day after the deadline passed, reported the Washington Examiner.
Justice Dept. misses court deadline to to release info on Sessions's contacts with Russians: report https://t.co/y6UqDGsfSApic.twitter.com/7e6RrIDnSk — The Hill (@thehill) July 13, 2017
On the released document, Sessions checked a box stating he did not have any contact with a foreign government in the past seven years. Further details are redacted under a privacy exemption.
American Oversight filed the FOIA request in March, requesting sections of Sessions’ federal security clearance form. When the Justice Department and the FBI failed to release the records, American Oversight filed a lawsuit in April.
“Jeff Sessions is our nation’s top law enforcement officer, and it is shocking one of his first acts after being named Attorney General was to mislead his own agency about a matter of national security,” the group’s executive director, Austin Evers, said in a statement to NPR.
Last month, a US district court judge in Washington, DC gave the Justice Department one month to make public the page of Sessions’ security clearance application on which he was supposed to list contacts he had with foreign officials.
Read more
That deadline was Wednesday, June 12.
“The court gave DOJ thirty days to produce Attorney General Session’s security clearance form, DOJ has already confirmed its contents to the press and Sessions has testified about it to Congress, so there is no good reason to withhold this document from the public,” Evers said.
During his confirmation, Sessions failed to disclose meetings he attended with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak and omitted contacts from his security clearance application.
A representative from the FBI told Sessions not to include meetings he had with Russian officials if they happened in his capacity as a senator, the Justice Department said.
The attorney general later admitted to speaking with Kislyak at least twice last year, but dismissed allegations he was working with the Russian government.
“The suggestion that I participated in any collusion, that I was aware of any collusion with the Russian government, or hurt this country which I have served with honor for 35 years, or to undermine the integrity of our democratic process, is an appalling and detestable lie,” Sessions said during a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 16.
The group is also seeking any Department of Justice records relating to any contacts between then-Senator Sessions and Russian officials during the 2016 presidential election campaign.
American Oversight says it is nonpartisan, but its staff has connections to the Democratic Party, according to USA Today.But it was Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, seen by many as ascendant in the presidential race, who perhaps went furthest in punching up his campaign rhetoric. When asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos how he felt about Hillary Clinton saying “radical jihadists” but not wanting to use the term “radical Islam,” Rubio said, “I don’t understand it. That would be like saying we weren’t at war with Nazis, because we were afraid to offend some Germans who may have been members of the Nazi Party but weren’t violent themselves.”
“We are at war with radical Islam,” Rubio continued, “with an interpretation of Islam by a significant number of people around the world, who they believe now justifies them in killing those who don’t agree with their ideology. This is a clash of civilizations.”
“Clash of civilizations” — though the term’s origins date back many decades — was likely a reference to an American Enterprise Institute lecture given by Samuel P. Huntington in 1992. That paper, which predicted cultural conflicts would replace ideological and economic ones, was a kind of viral hit in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The theory has been much debated and much criticized since.
But Rubio’s simultaneously bellicose and esoteric call might get pushed out of the media spotlight by multiple GOP calls to halt all immigration from Syria and Iraq.
“To bring them over here is … a suspension of intellect,” Carson said on Fox. Rand Paul called for more scrutiny of “refugees, visitors and students” to determine who will “do us harm.” Rubio said it would be impossible to do the background checks and the United States should take none of them. Bush suggested the country only take in Christians because, he says, they are the ones ISIL is executing.
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum drew an absolute line. “Under no circumstances” should the country let in more refugees, he said in a statement. "By taking in persecuted Christians, Jews, and moderate Muslims,” the statement reads, “we are complicit in helping ISIS accomplish their goal of establishing an Islamic caliphate. Without Christians, Jews, or moderate Muslims in the region, radical Islam will be allowed to run rampant."
And, not to be outdone, Donald Trump told MSNBC Monday that the U.S. should consider closing mosques with leadership the candidate called radical.
“I would hate to do it, but it's something that you're going to have to strongly consider,” he said. Trump called for increased surveillance in and around mosques, and a reevaluation of some civil liberties.
“We have to be much tougher,” Trump said. “We are going to have to give up certain privileges that we've always had.”
The GOP reaction stands in notable contrast to the way Friday’s tragic events have influenced the Democratic candidates’ talking points. Though all condemned the Paris attacks and the people reportedly behind them, all attempted to differentiate a fight against terrorists from any change in immigration policy. No one seemed to advocate sending regular U.S. ground troops to Syria. And none, publicly, at least, have called for the kind of surveillance ramp-up suggested by the likes of Paul and Trump.
Clinton did stumble rhetorically in Saturday’s debate, condemning “radical jihadists,” but she seemed intent on staying clear of the “clash of civilizations” frame, then and in media appearances the next day.
Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley distinguished himself from his two opponents, Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, on the refugee issue Saturday night, going further during the debate to assert that the U.S. should still commit to taking in 65,000 people by the end of 2016 — or approximately one-half the resettlement goal of 130,000 set out by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees.
And in what seemed an almost radical step for a candidate inside the sound bite-driven, reductivist logic of a political campaign, Sanders went so far as to connect terrorism to what he says is the foremost national security threat, climate change.
“Climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism,” Sanders said during Saturday’s debate. “And if we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say, you're going to see countries all over the world … struggling over limited amounts of water, limited amounts of land to grow their crops and you're going to see all kinds of international conflict.”
Sanders went further on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday, explaining how Syria’s severe, multi-year drought — likely exacerbated by global warning — drove migration to the cities, which led to more unemployment, poverty, instability and unrest. That provided a fertile environment for the seeds of what would become the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL.
Those comments drew instant rebuke from some GOP candidates, much of the conservative press, and even some campaign-watchers in the traditional media, but the science supports Sanders. Whether voters will, however, is usually — fairly or not — the final arbiter of ideas inside the bubble of election-cycle coverage.
Can the short attention span often associated with campaign season stay focused enough on these issues to change policy now or have an effect next fall? That is, as they say, open to debate.NEWLY crowned Spelling Bee champion Ananya Vinay was the target of a rude and shocking statement by TV host on morning television in the United States.
In a statement many have labelled “racist” and “offensive” CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota has been widely criticised for suggesting Vinay, 12, is more familiar with using Sanskrit, an ancient language connected with Hinduism, than English.
Vinay, a sixth-grader from California, has an Indian ancestral background, but has grown up as an American citizen in Fresno, between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The polite champion appeared via a live video link on CNN’s New Day and was quickly thrown off by Camerota’s request for her to attempt to spell “covfefe” — the nonsense word made famous when US President Donald Trump muddled up a sentence.
Vinay was obviously confused by the strange request, but kept her cool by asking for the origin of the word as she had trained herself to do when preparing for last week’s spelling competition.
She was mid-way through spelling the word when Camerota cut her off.
“It’s a nonsense word,” the CNN host said.
“So, we’re not sure that its root is actually in Sanskrit, which is what you’re probably, uh, used to using, so, I don’t know. Anyway,” Camerota said.
Vinay did not appear to take offence to the comment, but Camerota was widely criticised on social media.
CNN has announced in a statement it will be standing by Camerota, Yahoo 7 reported.
“Alisyn made the same joking reference to the root of ‘covfefe’ in an earlier panel discussion that aired Wednesday,” the CNN statement said.
“If she’s guilty of anything it’s recycling a joke. To assign a bias to what was a fun and innocent segment celebrating Ananya Vinay’s incredible accomplishment is frankly extremely cynical.”
Commentators on social media were less forgiving of the TV host.
Christ! CNN host tells 12-year-old spelling bee champion Ananya Vinay that she's probably "used to using Sanskrit." pic.twitter.com/XZUJrDWEnF — Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) June 4, 2017
.@AlisynCamerota owes Ananya Vinay, her family, and every Desi person in the US an apology for this crap. It's 2017. She's from Fresno. https://t.co/Uz06hbdgsf — Mythili Sampathkumar (@MythiliSk) June 4, 2017
.@AlisynCamerota Seriously? An English speaking girl who grew up in Fresno is "used to" Sanskrit?You owe her an apology for your rude remark — Roop Raj (@rooprajfox2) June 5, 2017
I was not on Twitter much on Friday so I missed this bizarre and totally gratuitous bit of ignorant racism pic.twitter.com/BtRjpXa3HM — Ishaan Tharoor (@ishaantharoor) June 4, 2017
She knows the diverse root origins of the English language way better than Poppy, yet is told she probably only knows Sanskrit... just what? — Ishaan Tharoor (@ishaantharoor) June 4, 2017
.@AlisynCamerota owes Ananya Vinay, her family, and every Desi person in the US an apology for this crap. It's 2017. She's from Fresno. https://t.co/Uz06hbdgsf — Mythili Sampathkumar (@MythiliSk) June 4, 2017
The purpose of this tweet is to help the people at @CNN see what they are putting on @CNN https://t.co/kPYB74Vot6 — Baratunde (@baratunde) June 4, 2017
Christ! CNN host tells 12-year-old spelling bee champion Ananya Vinay that she's probably "used to using Sanskrit." pic.twitter.com/XZUJrDWEnF — Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) June 4, 2017
Every goddamn year the media disrespects our kids for winning the spelling bee. Every time. https://t.co/I7sQ6buAHu — Anil Dash (@anildash) June 4, 2017
Ananya became 13th consecutive Indian-American to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee and the 18th of the past 22 winners with Indian heritage — a run that began in 1999 with Nup |
. It has a really foul smell, but you get used to it. It's also almost as alcoholic as beer.
I've also had dog soup, in Uzbekistan. I lived there for a while in my early twenties. Stalin moved a lot of Koreans there after World War II, so there's a huge Korean population in Taskent. I had a lot of Korean friends, and one night they made soup with dog meat.
I've always wondered about that. Which are the delicious dogs, and which are the dogs you should steer clear of?
I don't know. I'm sure I was eating low-grade dog. But I do know there are natural steroids in dog meat. So if you eat dog you'll bulk up like you're taking steroids.
So it's possible Mark McGwire has never taken steroids, but just eats a lot of dog.
I think Korean athletes actually have been bounced from the Olympics for that.
So after Mongolia you went back to Russia. How did you start the Exile? Were you ever scared of having people blow up the office? Were you scared of your advertisers being threatened?
Originally I was supposed to do this paper called Living Here, which was a competitor to the Exile. Basically I showed up in Moscow and found out it was a mess and bolted to the Exile instead. Ames was there already, he was there from day one.
I wouldn't say it was enormously scary. There was a situation once where I was working in a partnership with this Russian paper called Stringer. And the Stringer editor and I arranged to wiretap the phone of the Kremlin Chief of Staff. We bought off this ex-KGB operative to do that. And then we published transcripts of his telephone calls. That was a pretty dangerous thing to do. I was pretty nervous about that. I was actually out of the country when we first ran that. When I flew back into the country, I was detained on the way in, and I didn't know what for, and nearly shit my pants. It turned out the lamination on my passport was messed up.
There were some tight moments, though. The thing about Russia is you really never know. You never know when you're safe, and you never know when you're in danger either. Anything can happen.
Early on I had this situation with this pimp named Michael Bass, who made a fairly serious threat to my life. So I had to split town and negotiate safe passage back with some other gangsters.
My life has never been threatened. How is a death threat carried out?
In Russia they have this thing called a krysha, which means "roof." It's your mafia protection. I published this thing on this pimp, and he called me up on the phone and he said, "Matt, I don't know what to do. My roof wants to have you wacked, but I don't feel good about that. You know what I'm saying?" He didn't say "I'm going to kill you." He just let me know there was this discussion going on. And he's not sure how he's going to come down on the issue.
I went to the FBI after that happened, because this guy happened to be an American citizen. And I complained to them, saying that these guys were threatening me. Their advice was, "Observe normal safety precautions." I was like, thanks a lot! I remember the FBI guy like it was yesterday. I was telling him this story in the basement of the embassy, and he wasn't listening to me because he was enjoying a cold Diet Coke so much. It was like he'd never had a Diet Coke before.
What made you decide it was serious enough you wanted to leave town?
This guy Bass was in a lot of trouble generally. He was constantly borrowing money from people and getting in scrapes. He was always on the verge of getting killed himself—he was actually kidnapped a couple of times. He was a real doubledealing swindler-scumbag. And when he was in trouble he would often get so desperate... not having much experience with this sort of thing, I thought maybe that if he needed to prove himself to some other underworld figure, I could easily see how someone like me could become expendable.
So I left town and ended up talking to the people who were the real gangsters in the situation, and worked it out.
What was the case that you made to them?
To be honest, I don't even remember. It was something along the lines of, Michael's making threats and invoking your name. Again, that was a dangerous thing for Michael to be doing if that wasn't true. But they pretty much let me know that they didn't have any problem with me. Within a year I was having dinner with Bass. Hilariously, he stuck me with the bill.
Violence often has a self-limiting aspect to it. Your smarter gangster will only resort to violence when absolutely necessary. It's the real morons for whom violence is a first resort. For instance: the Bush administration.
Yes, well, that is why America is a doomed empire. You can see it so clearly in the Putin-Bush relationship. On the one side you have Putin, a self-made criminal genius, a guy who's had to learn to see every angle before they even happen in order to keep from getting shot on his way to the top. On the other side you have Bush, a total zero who fucked up everything he ever tried and ended up in the White House anyway. These other foreign leaders in the third world, the Putins and Musharrafs and the like, they're playing every hand with their own money. They understand the immediate physical consequences of failure. It has been a long time -- not since World War II, anyway -- since America has needed to be smart enough to protect itself from real harm. It has forgotten how to save its bullets for the real fights. And so it stumbles into this place and that, shooting out windows and randomly wrecking shit like teenagers playing mailbox baseball. Sooner or later that is going to come back and really bite us.Get the latest news and videos for this game daily, no spam, no fuss.
The next update for EA's new Need for Speed is coming soon--and it's a big one. The March 3 update introduces hot rods, manual transmission, and drag racing, among other things.
There will be two new hot rods when the update arrives this week, the first of which is a 1932 car that comes with four bodykits. These bodykits are soft top, coupe, sedan, and pickup. The other hot rod is the Aaron Beck "BeckKustons F132." It sounds like a beast.
"When you take the shell from a Ford 1932, gently massage it into a fierce Formula One style chassis and strap in a high performance NASCAR engine, this is what you get," developer Ghost Games said.
The studio also mentioned that both hot rods can be fully customized like the game's other cars, with players able to tweak the hood, lights, grille, exhausts, and bumpers.
As for manual transmission, this feature is already available for the PC version of Need for Speed and now finally comes to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. However, players will need to wait a little, as it's apparently not in this update, but is instead coming "as early as next week."
Below is more of what's coming to Need for Speed in the free update and further into the future (descriptions written by Ghost):
Drag Racing events: There will be five new Drag events for you to take part in; Neck to Neck, The Perfect Shifts, Drag the Town, Pedal to the Metal and Speed Tunnel.
The Warehouse (coming next week): Your garage will receive an upgrade that will allow you to store an additional five cars, perfect for those eyeing up a new ride and no excuse now not to take a Hot Rod for a fun-filled spin around Ventura bay.
Wrap Editor Improvements: One of the most common bits of feedback we’ve received about the Wrap Editor is that you would like a coordinates system allowing you to position decals with a lot more accuracy. This information will now be shown in a panel below the selected decal in the edit decal menu and will update in real time when the decal is transformed.
Writing on your car also becomes even easier as we introduce Text Decals 2.0 and selectable fonts. Simply select your desired font and a popup will appear where you’ll be prompted to input your desired text.
Additionally, Ghost said that animations inside the Editor are being improved with the following updates:
Animation indicating when a decal has been added to a vehicle
Improved animation to indicate more clearly the selected decal on a vehicle
Speed up info text animation when showing an action happening
The March 3 Need for Speed update also includes three new Trophies/Achievements. Head to the Need for Speed website to see a full rundown of the patch.
This update, like those before it and the ones to follow, is free.
"All of the content that we're going to give you--a pretty substantial amount in the future--is going to be free. That's what players deserve," creative director Craig Sullivan said.We have to be clear about this. We cannot have God without religion. They go together as far as we are concerned. Religion is precisely our relationship with God. It's an unavoidable thing, whether we like it or not. It has its laws and requirements that flow from God himself and that ought to be followed. Without religion, what would God be to us?
There are some people who profess that they believe in God but not in religion. Perhaps what they mean is that they indeed believe in God but do not want to be hampered by certain "requirements" that religion demands from them. Or they do not want what they call as "organized religion" with its doctrine and practices.
It's like saying that they want a God that is according to their own liking, their own designs, their own terms. They do not want to be told what to do in their own so-called relation with God.
Of course, they are quick to say that these "requirements" are simply man-made, or are mere legalisms that really have nothing to do with the essence of our relation with God. They seem to be the only ones capable of knowing how their relation with God should be. No one should intervene.
Worse, they are quick to point out the many inconsistencies that people who occupy positions in the Church and those who call themselves as pious, holy and religious make, to justify their rejection of their own idea of religion. They are deflecting the issue, as if the mistakes and sins of these men and women detract from the objective need for religion.
This is unfortunate because such understanding of God and religion is fatally flawed. While religion is personal in the sense that it is unique to each individual, it is also personal in the sense that it is by definition relational and subject to the laws of God and the laws that the divinely founded Church stipulates.
To be personal is not only to be a unique individual but also to be related to God and to everybody else. A person is always a religious and social being. That is how a person is wired, and in these relations, there are universal God-given laws that need to be followed.
Of course, these laws are articulated in human terms and therefore cannot fully capture the mysterious laws of God. That is why they need to be updated, improved, polished, enriched, etc. as time goes on. But they have to be followed just the same, unless it's clear that a particular law does not apply to a concrete situation of the person.
Some people say that they believe in God but they do not want to do anything with the Church. But God without the Church is not God. He would be a man-made god. The bishop-martyr St. Cyprian expresses this truth well: "You cannot have God as your Father if you do not have the Church as your mother."
roycimagala@gmail.com.Stressed mice grew larger tumours Social isolation may make cancer more deadly, US research on mice suggests. Researchers found the social environment can modify the biology of the disease - and lead to significant differences in outcome. Female mice stressed because they were separated from their mothers developed more and larger mammary gland tumours than more contented animals. The University of Chicago study appears in the journal Cancer Prevention Research. It is now widely recognised that stress plays a part in illness, but no-one really knows how much
Oliver Childs
Cancer Research UK Previous research has suggested that social support can improve health outcomes for patients with breast cancer, while social isolation has been linked to an increased risk of death from several chronic diseases. The Chicago team worked with mice genetically predisposed to mammary gland cancer. They found changes in the activity of genes that play a role in tumour growth in the stressed animals, suggesting that they may have been directly influenced by surging levels of stress hormones. The researchers said more work was needed to pin down exactly which cell types are affected. New treatments But researcher Dr Suzanne Conzen said the study raised hopes of new ways to block cancer growth. She said: "Given the increased knowledge of the human genome we can begin to objectively identify and dissect the specific alterations that take place in cancer-prone tissues of individuals in at-risk environments and that will help us to better understand and implement cancer prevention strategies." Dr Caryn Lerman, editor of the journal, said: "This study uses an elegant preclinical model and shows that social isolation alters expression of genes important in mammary gland tumour growth." Professor Thea Tlsty, of University of California San Francisco, said it had long been known that psychological factors could influence disease, but not how. She said the study added to growing evidence that chemicals circulating in the blood - such as stress hormones - could influence the development of cancer by turning genes on and off within cells with the potential to turn malignant. Previous work has also suggested that depression can have a negative effect on cancer prognosis. Oliver Childs, of the charity Cancer Research UK, warned against drawing any firm conclusions. He said: "These experiments were carried out in mice, so certainly do not prove that the stress caused by social isolation causes cancer to get worse in humans. "It is now widely recognised that stress plays a part in illness, but no-one really knows how much and there is no good evidence from controlled studies that stress contributes to cancer progression."
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionARLINGTON, Texas -- Rangers second baseman Ian Kinsler and his teammates just rattled off seven straight games to make it to the American League wild-card tiebreak game.
And, on a Sunday when the players could hear fans chanting "baseball town" at Angels outfielder Josh Hamilton -- mocking his comments from before the season -- Kinsler wondered aloud how a must-win game in Arlington wasn't a sellout.
Where was everybody?
"We've been to the postseason three years in a row," Kinsler said. "We're fighting for our playoff lives. I'm just a little disappointed this place wasn't sold out and rocking.
"You can't say it's the Cowboys because they were on the road. The fans were chanting 'baseball town' and stuff like that, and we can't sell out."
The Rangers had an announced crowd of 40,057, meaning there were close to 9,000 empty seats. The Rangers finished with 3,1135,477 fans, second in the American League to the New York Yankees and second only to last season in team history.
"The fans that were here were amazing," he said. "They were allowed to chant 'baseball town' because they were here supporting us. It was a little disappointing to see the place wasn't sold out today."
The Rangers will play again Monday night against the Tampa Bay Rays, giving fans another chance to fill up the ballpark.
When its team is playing for the postseason, a "baseball town" shows up.Mike Colter Describes ‘The Defenders’ As Most Fun Marvel-Netflix Show
The Defenders star Mike Colter (who plays Luke Cage in the ensemble street-level superhero team-up) has just stated that the miniseries will have “a sort of lightness” to it, indicating that it will be the most accessible of Netflix’s Marvel shows.
Talking to LRM Online at the Denver Comic Con, Colter stated that The Defenders would have a relatively lighter tone compared to the other four works in the Netflix-Marvel mythos – Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist – and that it would feel like a “Summer popcorn thing”. This approach isn’t all that surprising given that the Netflix series will have a shorter first season than the other shows – consisting of eight episodes instead of the usual thirteen – and it will have to focus on integrating the ensembles of all four series into a single, concise narrative.
The Defenders join forces on August 18, 2017. The show features an ensemble cast that includes Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock (Daredevil), Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones, Mike Colter as Luke Cage, Finn Jones as Danny Rand (Iron Fist), Élodie Yung as Elektra Natchios, Eka Darville as Malcolm Ducasse, Simone Missick as Misty Knight, Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page, Elden Henson as “Foggy” Nelson, Carrie-Ann Moss as Jeri Hogarth, Scott Glenn as Stick, Rachael Taylor as Pasty Walker, Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple, Jessica Henwick as Colleen Wing, Wai Ching Ho as Madame Gao, and Sigourney Weaver as Alexandra Reid.
Source: LRM OnlineThis has come up before, so I'm rephrasing another poster's solid response to the question:
Sinjin is actually an attempt to represent phonetically the now rare name "St. John." As a given-name, "St. John" is sometimes pronounced as [SIN-jin] or [SIN-jun] in the UK. I presume this to be a relic of Norman-French origin (see also Sinclair for St. Claire).
Its spelling is not set in stone, I believe the forms Sinjin, Sinjun and Sinjon have been found.
The name has no'meaning' in and of itself, but its usage is typically in honor of St. John the Baptist or St. John the Evangelist.
Now I mention just for hilarity's sake, if you've ever seen "A View To A Kill," one of James Bond's aliases is 'St. John Smith.' When someone calls him [SAYNT-jon SMITH] he corrects with the riotously English pronunciation [Sin-jin SMYTHE].A 27-year-old medical student may have the prescription for instant Internet notoriety by auctioning her virginity.
The woman is using the name "Elizabeth Raine," and claims to be a student at one of America's top medical schools.
Raine hopes to net at least $400,000 from the bidding and is using an Australian agent to avoid breaking U.S. prostitution laws.
On her website,Raine also says she's 5 feet 10 inches, 130 pounds, with measurements of 34A-26-36. Her photo shows a head of blond hair, but with a gold banner covering part of her face, it's impossible to verify that her eyes are green as she claims.
The auction commences, dubiously enough, on April Fools' Day. Siobhanne Sweeney, Raine's Australian-based publicist, insists that is an unintended coincidence.
"The date was picked based on the fact it is the first day of the month and we didn't even think about April Fools' as it is not something big here in Australia," she told HuffPost by email. "It was also based around Liz's med school exams and to make sure we had gained enough interest for it to be a successful auction."
Financial gain tops Raine's list of eclectic reasons for selling her alleged purity.
“Money is my motivation, but by no means do I need the money. I’m pretty safe and secure financially,” she told EliteDaily.com.
Adventure, eroticism, scandal and challenging norms about virginity also rank on her list.
“Many women are raised believing that they should hold on to their virginity and that it’s something that’s important for their marriage, for their relationship. It is a measure of how good they are as a person," she told the website. "I never believed that and I never even intentionally tried to stay a virgin. It just really happened this way.”
There's no word on the date the auction will end, but Raine promises the winning bidder a "sensual 12-hour date" that will transform her "from virgin to literal whore."
Love is not part of the deal, the New York Daily News reports.
She plans to donate 35 percent of her virginity earnings to a charity that brings education to women in developing countries, according to the Metro.
Raine is the latest woman to allegedly attempt to auction off her virginity online. If history repeats itself, the odds are against any deal actually happening.
In 2008, 22-year-old college student Natalie Dylan supposedly attempted to sell her first sex experience with the help of a brothel owner in Nevada, where prostitution is legal.
The deal went south when the auction winner said his wife wouldn't let him reap the prize.
In 2012, Catarina Migliorini of Brazil participated in a virgin auction as part of a proposed documentary series called Virgins Wanted.
Though she reportedly received a $780,000 bid from a Japanese millionaire, she rejected it because she had misgivings about his true identity.
In 2013, Migliorini staged an auction herself, but decided to find love through a proposed reality series, "There's Something About Catarina."
Also in 2013, Brazilian teenager Rebecca Bernardo put her virginity on the online auction block to help pay her mom's medical expenses. It is unknown whether any deal was actually consummated.Equifax Breach
Recently there’s been a buzz over the Equifax breach — rightly so. It’s a transformative event and its effects will reverberate for years if not decades.
What’ll Happen Next
Nobody knows for sure, but we can guess. First, the leadership at Equifax will be replaced, and we’re seeing that happen now. Next, there’ll likely be new standards governing security in the workplace, specifically around punitive damages when service providers commit gross negligence, as was the case here. Finally, the usage of the Social Security Number itself as a credential in account origination will fall out of practice. Why? Because there’s no expectation that data is private now that 143 million records have leaked.
How To Prevent This From Happening
There’s no foolproof way to secure computing systems. But there are ways to mitigate the risk of exposure once the inevitable breach occurs.
Practice The Principle of Least Privilege
If Equifax had run their software inside a sandbox, like SELinux or the Java Security Manager, it would not have been possible for a remote code exploit to invoke system commands, a precursor to leaking the data. The following code sample shows how to run Java code inside of a security sandbox that enforces mandatory access controls:
https://github.com/shawnmckinney/serial-exploit-sample
Nothing can be done before first being added to the policy file. Follow the instructions inside the README to understand how the Java Security Manager works and how it can be used to prevent untrusted code from executing system commands.
More Reading
The Exploit CVE-2017-5638
How Does It WorkThe ‘Ferguson Effect’ is part of an ugly history of using crime to delegitimize civil rights movements. That’s why we must be especially vigilant against it
Pulling a page out of the conservative playbook from the 1960’s, some are arguing that America is seeing a “dramatic crime wave” as a result of the protests against police shootings in cities like Baltimore and Ferguson. But the so-called “Ferguson effect” is just the latest example of conservative crime fiction being used to undermine the recent gains of the country’s newest civil rights movement.
The causal link underlying the “Ferguson effect” is unfounded, as any honest social scientist will tell you. Given the complexity of identifying short-term crime trends and of determining reliable causal antecedents – even with decades of hindsight and troves of big data, which is certainly not the case here – the idea that we could observe a “Ferguson effect” on crime today is preposterous. One need only glance at the voluminous scientific controversy surrounding the massive crime drop since the early 1990s in the United States and Canada to understand this perfectly.
The point of the “Ferguson effect,” though, is not to be accurate. It is instead to distract us from the growing evidence about the magnitude and extent of police use of lethal violence in the United States – as powerfully documented just this week by The Guardian and the Washington Post – and to besmirch the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
It’s a strategy that Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater inaugurated in his campaign in 1964, almost single-handedly turning crime into a political weapon against the civil rights movement. As Katherine Beckett shows in Making Crime Pay, the strategy coincided with a southern conservative focus on crime as a way to discredit the gains of the civil rights struggle and attract voters to the GOP.
Richard Nixon perfected this tactic during his presidency, repeatedly emphasizing, as he would in his 1968 acceptance speech, that all “we have reaped” from social programs for the urban poor is “an ugly harvest of frustrations, violence and failure.” As his chief of staff, HR Haldeman, would document in his diaries, referring to President Nixon as “P”: “P emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”
Linking crime to race as a way to undermine a civil rights movement is an approach that was woven into the fabric of the law-and-order movement from that period til now. Consider arguments about the threat of juvenile “super-predators”, which William Bennett, John DiIulio and John Walters invented and defined in their 1996 book Body Count as: “the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known”. They wrote:
Based on all that we have witnessed, researched and heard from people who are close to the action, here is what we believe: America is now home to thickening ranks of juvenile ‘super-predators’ – radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more preteenage boys, who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs and create serious communal disorders.
DiIulio would add, in another article in 1996: “as many as half of these juvenile super-predators could be young black males”.
Still today, those attempting to undo civil rights gains try to link crime to race. J Phillip Thompson shows well that the roots of “broken windows” policing – often touted as the solution to the so-called “Ferguson effect” – was precisely the “conservatives’ response to the civil rights movement demand for full employment in the mid-1960s.”
Back in the 60s, the language and references were more explicit. In his 1968 book Varieties of Police Behavior, James Q Wilson could, for instance, describe disorder as, among other things: “a Negro wearing a ‘conk rag’ (a piece of cloth tied around the head to hold flat hair being ‘processed’ – that is, straightened).”
Today, people don’t use that kind of language in mainstream publications, but it is there in code – those none-too-subtle references to race, crime and civil rights equality.
In a recent WSJ op-ed that warns of the “Ferguson effect”, we are told: “Almost any police shooting of a black person, no matter how threatening the behavior that provoked the shooting, now provokes angry protests”. The op-ed decries “the belief that any criminal-justice action that has a disparate impact on blacks is racially motivated.” The author suggests that recent attempts to reduce the population of black men in Wisconsin prisons may account for increased crime in Milwaukee. The op-ed quotes a police chief as saying that all this leaves “the criminal element... feeling empowered”.
With no reliable evidence to go on other than an assortment of anecdotes and hunches, the “Ferguson effect” follows in a long line of conservative efforts to undermine racial equality.
It takes decades to undo these crime fictions. It took years to dispel the fantasy of juvenile super-predators – with lasting effects on our juvenile justice system and devastating consequences for many youths. It would be decades before John DiIulio would recognize his myth and sign on to an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court trying to undo some of the more draconian measures. And it is only now that the myth of “broken windows” (revived again by NYPD Police Chief Bill Bratton) is starting to be recognized even by former believers as just that: an oversold tale.
Using crime to delegitimize a civil rights movement, sadly, is not new. The “Ferguson effect” has an ugly racial history.Denver's craft beer scene grew so fast in 2012 that it's hard to believe that
, which will host a big bash this Saturday,
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In just twelve months, the brewery has built a bustling customer base in its taproom and around town, where its high-gravity bottled beers have garnered awards and accolades, and even nationally, earning a couple of mentions in national publications. Over that time, River North released seven mainline beers, as well as five barrel-aged versions of those, which it sells in 22-ounce bomber bottles on local liquor store shelves.
See also: - Photos: A weekend at River North Brewery, Black Shirt and Our Mutual Friend - Utah's Epic Brewing will open new spot in Denver's RiNo neighborhood - Two new Denver breweries, Black Shirt and Our Mutual Friend, will open just for GABF
River North was also the first beer maker to open in a neighborhood that could be home to as many as five or six breweries by the end of 2012, making it a starting point for local brewery crawls and for out-of-staters looking to dive into the Denver scene.
And 2013 will be even bigger, says River North founder Matthew Hess. "I wouldn't be surprised if we added fermenters in the next six months or so," he says. "And I would hope that we would triple what we did in 2012. We did 295 barrels last year."
Hess also plans to begin canning two beers with Longmont's Mobile Canning LLC by April: River North White, a 5 percent ABV Belgian-style witbier, and a new, as-yet-unnamed hoppy red ale. "Canning is more suited to sessionable beers than are bombers," he explains. "It will be good to get some other, lower-gravity styles out there."
But River North will also continue to focus on its barrel-aging program, releasing some new styles or variations, along with some old favorites, Hess says. "We may get two more seasonals out in bombers this year as well."
On Saturday, February 16, the brewery will celebrate its birthday staring at 1 p.m. starting at 1 p.m. today by tapping a beer with a higher gravity than any of its previous concoctions: a 12.5 percent ABV imperial stout. The brewery made 120 cases of it.
River North will also open its barrel garden to the public and offer tours throughout the day on request, Hess says.
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Arsene Wenger is planning a summer shake-up to turn Arsenal into serious title contenders next season.
Gunners boss Wenger is targeting three big signings which proves he is thinking of the long term future and is determined to compete with Chelsea and Manchester City.
Southampton's Morgan Schneiderlin is top of their midfield wish list while they also want an experienced top class keeper and a new centre half.
They are weighing up a move for Petr Cech if Chelsea are prepared to sell to a direct rival as they look for a new No1.
Cech, 32, could be open to a move to get more regular first team football and Arsenal would offer him the chance to stay in London.
Arsenal scouts watched Borussia Dortmund defender Neven Subotic last weekend but he has been on their radar before and they did not bid.The FBI has been ordered to investigate allegations that claim the agency intimidated a witness and compelled him not to testify at a recent trial over evidence related to the Oklahoma City bombing.
According to theSalt Lake Tribune, US District Judge Clark Waddoups scheduled a November 13th hearing on the matter, in which Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue accused the FBI of threatening to eliminate a former undercover agent’s health benefits if he took the stand. The former agent reportedly knew convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh.
The core of the issue is that Trentadue claims the FBI has surveillance video revealing McVeigh carrying out the Oklahoma City bombing with an accomplice. The FBI adamantly denies that such video exists, and the government has insisted repeatedly that McVeigh acted alone in the event that killed 168 people.
The witness involved in this whole situation, John Matthews, was scheduled to testify regarding this alleged video in July, but withdrew at the last minute. Trentadue – as well as a freelance journalist named Roger Charles – stated that when he spoke with Matthews about his absence, the former agent told them the FBI threatened him.
“He was told he should take a vacation and that if he did testify he should suffer from a case of the ‘I don’t remembers,'” Trentadue told the judge back in July, as quoted by local Fox 13 News.
FBI attorney Kathryn Wyer told Waddoups on Monday that Trentadue’s allegations have no basis in reality, and that they are “another one of [his] conspiracy theories.” She said the agency did not present more evidence in its favor because there is no connection between the FBI and the decision to not testify. She added that the only time agents were in contact with Matthews was when he called the bureau himself to declare his decision to withdraw.
Wyer argued that the agent who took Matthews’ call dealt with him as they would have any other person, and that the individual should not be brought in to speak. However, the judge disagreed.
“The proceeding is going to document whether or not there was any inappropriate contact with Mr. (John) Matthews,” Waddoups said, as quoted by Fox 13. “No one is being accused at this point other than the question has been raised. He’s being given the opportunity to answer that.”
"If all of this is nonsense, let's bring this in and put an end to it," he added, according to the Associated Press.
These allegations come as part of a larger trial, in which Trentadue is suing the FBI to gain access to the alleged video that shows McVeigh acting with another person. He has cited various documents that suggest such a video exists, namely one by a Secret Service agent that describes a security video showing more than one person exiting the rental truck McVeigh was in minutes before the bomb went off.
As noted by the Salt Lake Tribune, this video was mentioned in a 2004 article by the Associated Press, but the article also states that the government claims it does not own video of the bombing scene in the lead-up to the explosion – and that it never had such footage at all.
The FBI says it has looked through its archives extensively, but that no such video is there to be found – nor is any of the evidence Trentadue is looking for. Trentadue is asking the judge to allow him to personally look through the FBI’s archives.
Trentadue’s search for this mystery video is personal. According to the New York Daily News, the lawyer’s brother, Kenneth Trentadue, was taken into the FBI’s custody in the months following the bombing. Kenneth reportedly looked extremely similar to a description given by witnesses regarding a second bombing suspect, dubbed “John Doe No. 2,” though no such suspect was ever pinpointed.
Kenneth, however, ended up dying in a federal holding cell, an incident that was labeled a suicide by state and federal officials. The Trentadue family disagrees, arguing that law enforcement strangled him to death during an interrogation that spiraled out of control.
Jesse Trentadue argues that this alleged video showcasing an accomplice would explain why his brother was taken into custody, and lend credence to his belief that he was killed by law enforcement.
“I did not start out to solve the Oklahoma City bombing, I started out for justice for my brother’s murder,” Trentadue said in July to the Daily News. “But along the way, every path I took, every lead I got, took me to the bombing.”It’s dress down week at my job and I know what that means–drabby, uninspired, frumpy get ups for the next five days. I don’t really talk about my blog at my job (politics and perception…), so I don’t expect any of of the people who could really use this advice to read it. However, for those of you who landed on this post via google or bing or other women who read my blog because they can identify with the journey of my evolving style, then this one is for you. Before I get into how you can make the jump from frump I guess I should tell you why my firm is going casual. It’s for a good cause to raise funds and awareness for breast cancer awareness.
Ok, so here are 7 ways to make the jump from frump to casual chic.
1) Get your hair done. It sounds like really simple advice, but I’ve seen it with my own two eyes. There are some people who don’t realize that messy hair, like black shoes (my mother’s fashion advice) can really kill an outfit.
2) Consider it a privilege if you are allowed to wear denim to work because even in the midst of this evolution of office wear, some companies still wont get with the times. If you are allowed to wear denim, go for the dark wash and black (yes, they do exist) denim in lieu of the lighter colored stone or acid wash. Darker denim looks more office appropriate and formal to me (if there is such a thing as formal denim). Also make sure the cut of the pants is modern (leave those frumpy Mommy jeans where they belong, in the past) and is appropriate for your body type.
3) Switch out the sneakers for flats or heels. Yes, I know they have those really cute wedge sneakers on the market now and maybe perhaps those would look more appropriate than the ugly gym/workout sneakers. But heels (not the granny ones) is a |
seized by a Muslim mob, beaten and thrown into a flaming kiln. The young man somehow survived the March 20 attack, though he suffered severe burns.
Reports suggest that Friday’s attack could be a result of heightened inter-religious tensions in Pakistan, after Christians lynched two suspected terrorists following the bombing of two churches in the same city.
A Pakistani branch of the Taliban planted and detonated bombs outside two Christian churches in Lahore on March 15 during Sunday morning services. The blasts killed 17 people and wounded another 80.
After the attacks, thousands of Christians erupted in revolt on the streets of Lahore, demanding more protection from the government, which by many accounts had been minimal.
Afterward, police took two suspected terrorists into custody, but they were intercepted by a mob of protesters, who seized the prisoners, beat them to death, and burned them.
After the lynching incident, Muslim hostilities against the Christian minority have increased, reports say. Christians make up roughly 2 percent of Pakistan’s more than 182 million people and have been the targets of increasingly intense violence in recent years.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter @tdwilliamsrome.Ohio State Buckeyes offensive coordinator Tom Herman hasn't even been officially announced as the new head coach of the Houston Cougars, but there's already a report from FooballScoop.com that former Texas Longhorns offensive coordinator Major Applewhite will join Herman in Houston.
Justin Wells of Inside Texas is reporting the same thing and the assumption is that Applewhite would become Herman's offensive coordinator, though it's possible that he might have to work his way up from the bottom again as a position coach.
The two haven't worked together before, but Herman did follow Applewhite as the offensive coordinator at Rice when the former Texas quarterback left Houston for the offensive coordinator position at Alabama in 2007.
The two do have a recent connection after Applewhite visited with the Ohio State coaching staff this fall.
If Applewhite does indeed land with the Cougars as the offensive coordinator, it would represent a chance for him to get his career back on track after spending the 2014 season out of coaching.
Once a rising star in the coaching ranks, Applewhite went from a graduate assistant at Texas in 2004 to the offensive coordinator job at Alabama in 2007, but after losing his play-calling duties late that season, he opted to take a backwards move back to Austin, joining former head coach Mack Brown's staff as the running backs coach in 2008.
Since then, Applewhite's career stalled as he went down with the floundering Brown regime, though he did eventually ascend to co-offensive coordinator with Bryan Harsin in 2011 and 2012 before taking over offensive coordinator duties in 2013.
He planned on implementing a spread attack utilizing run/pass plays, but the concussion suffered by quarterback David Ash in the season's second game ultimately derailed the offense, which had to morph into a heavier run-focused scheme because of limited quarterback options behind Ash.
Any buzz that was attached to Applewhite's name as an up-and-coming play caller dissipated by that point, even though it was tough to draw any conclusions about his ability as an offensive coordinator from what quickly became a lost season despite some mid-year success.
Now he may be headed to a school known for producing head coaches that go onto bigger jobs, joining a first-time head coach from a coaching tree that has produced a number of assistants who have gone on to success running their own programs, both positive signs for Applewhite.
If it does happen, the hope Herman is able to prove himself as a head coach and help Applewhite get his career back on track.Taking a leaf from the 1987 cyberpunk action film Robo Cop, a start-up firm H-Bots Robotics, will come out with a police robot — the world’s second — by December, for commercial use.
Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary, IT, Telangana, inaugurated Makers Leeway, a high-end robotics lab for start-ups and robotics enthusiasts here at Gachibowli, a first-of-its-kind facility in South India and second in India.
The IT secretary unveiled H-Bots card, which will enable robotics researchers to use research facilities in 40 such labs across India, and also the design of the police robot.
The world’s first humanoid robot was built in France and deployed in Dubai.
But, the police robot in India will be fully indigenous.
“The prototype will be ready by September. We will test it for two months and deploy it on December 31 at the Jubilee Hills check post. We will have to finalise those details with the police and government,” Kisshhan PSV, the founder of H-Bots Robotics Pvt Ltd informed.
He said, unlike the police robot in Dubai — which moves only on wheels — this robot can walk, recognise people, take complaints and also diffuse bombs.
“We are building a capacity to produce 10 such private police robots, which can act as private security guards and can be deployed in hotels, hospitals and offices,” he said. The 10 robots will be built in a year.Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee remain wedded to the goal of building a cost-friendly public safety network even though the White House and senators in both parties have backed a more expensive option.
A GOP memo drafted to prepare staff for a Wednesday hearing, obtained by The Hill, shows that cost is a serious hang-up for the committee Republicans as Congress debates how to build a communications network for police and firefighters.
The public safety lobby wants Congress to hand over a valuable chunk of airwaves known as the D Block along with billions in federal funding, a proposal with broad backing — but not among House Republicans.
"While we all share the goal of creating a nationwide interoperable public safety network, questions remain about how to achieve it," the memo says.
The Energy and Commerce memo pointed out that the center of gravity in this debate has moved away from fiscal hawks since the last Congress. This year, the administration sided with public safety advocates.
"In the last Congress, there was bipartisan agreement in the House Energy and Commerce Committee that the best approach was to auction the 10 MHz D-block for commercial purposes and encourage parties to create a public-private partnership. The FCC’s National Broadband Plan reached the same conclusion and Chairman [Julius] Genachowski continues to stand by that recommendation," the memo says.
The memo says public safety groups want the valuable spectrum for free despite the impact on the deficit.
"Many public safety officials believe... that the D-block should be reallocated to them for free," the memo says, noting that "the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has already scored the D-block as being sold pursuant to the [digital television] legislation and that reallocating it now would add in the neighborhood of $3 billion to America’s deficit — at a time when neither our Committee nor the Congress has a penny to spare."
The memo cites estimates for cost of the network as ranging from $12 billion to $20 billion. The GOP questions whether money and airwaves are really all the public safety community needs to ensure a network is built, pointing out that these ingredients have not led to seamless communications in the past.
"In the ten years since September 11, 2001, Congress has allocated $13 billion and cleared 24 MHz of spectrum nationwide for public safety use, yet First Responders still do not have ubiquitous interoperable voice communications and scant few, if any, have interoperable broadband," the memo says.
The memo notes that long-term investment is essential.
"Regardless of where one falls in this debate, sound federal spectrum policy and targeted, responsible, long-term network investment will play a critical role in bringing interoperable communications to First Responders," the memo says.
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller John (Jay) Davison RockefellerSenate GOP rejects Trump’s call to go big on gun legislation Overnight Tech: Trump nominates Dem to FCC | Facebook pulls suspected baseball gunman's pages | Uber board member resigns after sexist comment Trump nominates former FCC Dem for another term MORE (D-W.Va.) is ready to mark up his bill that reallocates the D Block, and generally has support from ranking member Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas).
Sens. John McCain John Sidney McCainGOP lobbyists worry Trump lags in K Street fundraising Mark Kelly kicks off Senate bid: ‘A mission to lift up hardworking Arizonans’ Gabbard hits back at Meghan McCain after fight over Assad MORE (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) introduced their own bill on the issue last week that takes a starkly different approach from Rockefeller’s. It would reallocate the D Block but not authorize incentive spectrum auctions, a top Federal Communications Commission request.
Witnesses at Wednesday's Energy and Commerce hearing include Jeffrey Johnson of the Western Fire Chiefs Association, Chris Imlay of the American Radio Relay League, Joe Hanna of Directions, Dennis Martinez of the Harris RF Communications Division and Joseph Hanley of Telephone and Data Systems.(Amy King/The Washington Post; iStock)
In the heart of what might be the most celebrated cuisine in the world, a curious thing is happening: people are clamoring for an unglamorous American food. "Le hamburger," as it's called in France, has bombarded restaurants in the country otherwise known for much fancier food, becoming one of the most popular dishes. The love is such that three quarters of all food establishments now sell at least one hamburger, and 80 percent of those say it's their best-selling item, according to a recent study.
(The Pink Panther, suffice it to say, would know better than to botch the word today.)
But France's hamburger fixation is hardly unique. Rather, it's emblematic of what has proved to be a common affair.
Just ask those who live in Australia, where people ingest nearly three times as many hamburgers per capita as they do in France (albeit with strange things on top). Or the British, who, let's face it, have pretty questionable taste in food, but still appreciate hamburgers more. Even the Russians appreciate them at least as much.
Or better yet, look to the hamburger's birthplace, where the sandwich has been defying major food trends for quite some time.
Ever since the mid-1970s, beef consumption has been tumbling in the United States, falling from a peak of 94 pounds per person per year in 1976 to 54 pounds in 2014, according to government data. Over the past 15 years alone, per capita beef consumption has dipped by 20 percent (and meat consumption has fallen off a cliff).
But hamburgers have done just the opposite, gaining in popularity even as Americans lose their taste for the broader beef and meat categories. A stroll through the archives uncovered a 1979 article by the Associated Press, which cited significantly lower per capita hamburger consumption than the 30 hamburgers per capita observed today, according to NPD Group. This is what it said:
According to industry and government estimates, there will be 17.2 pounds of hamburger produced this year for every person in the country. In 1978, there was 20.5 pounds of hamburger per capita; in 1976, there was a record 23.9 pounds per capita.
The year 1976 is a nice marker, both because of what happened then (it was, at the time, a record year for hamburger and beef consumption) and what has happened since (the two have clearly diverged). Today, we eat much less beef but many more hamburgers—about six extra burgers per person, or roughly 30 percent more than we did back then.
Those who have abandoned meat, or at least tried to, in other words, have likely found themselves pining for a hamburger and then acting upon the craving clearly are not alone. I certainly have.
There are other ways in which hamburgers seem to move against the stream. In recent years, for instance, they have shown resilience despite a tempered interest in sandwiches. In 2014, restaurants sold 2 percent fewer sandwiches than they had the year before, but 3 percent more hamburgers, according to a report by NPD Group.
"Americans simply love their burgers," Bonnie Riggs, who is NPD’s restaurant industry analyst, explained at the time.
The appeal of the hamburger owes to many things, the first of which is they it is a delicious meal. "It took the apple thousands of years to become the most widely distributed fruit tree in the world, whereas the hamburger established itself within half a century in almost every capital city," Louise Fresco explains in his 2015 book Hamburgers in Paradise: The Stories Behind the Food We Eat, alluding to the hamburger's near ubiquitous appeal.
The fact that hamburgers can be reproduced effortlessly and without compromising quality has helped too, propelling its rise, at the very least. This, Fresco touches upon, too:
What made McDonald’s, Burger King, Jack in the Box, the once ubiquitous White Castle, and their like such successful companies was not the hamburger itself, nor the franchise system that has enabled it to penetrate all markets, but the systems and technology used to ensure that identical hamburgers would roll off production lines all over the world to be served to a public that knew exactly what to expect.
The hamburger has also shown resilience because it is malleable. While its base components—lettuce, tomato, ground meat, and bread—are simple and cheap, it has thrived because of how adaptable it is to change. This has proven particularly important as of late, as the enthusiasm for chains like Shake Shack has supplanted the long-held allegiance to less shiny establishments like McDonald's. More expensive versions of the hamburger, meanwhile, have become staples on restaurant menus, incorporating different meats and adding pricier accoutrements. In Fresco's words:
The history of the hamburger is the story of a continual quest to reinvent a food item by sophisticated means, leaving the end product apparently unchanged and therefore completely dependable for the consumer while almost invisible introducing one innovation after another.
Vegetarians and non-beef eaters, can likely attest. They, have found themselves with a plethora of alternatives to satisfy their hamburger cravings.
Perhaps the most important selling point for hamburgers, however, at least today, is that they require little time to make and eat. They are convenient. And that convenience is about as appreciated as it ever has been. "Convenience is the one thing that’s really changing trends these days," Howard Telford, an industry analyst at market research firm Euromonitor, said last year.
This is true in the United States, where people gladly drink crappier but more efficient coffee, shun breakfast foods that require even the most modest forms of clean-up, and increasingly rely on delivery. But it's also true in France, where a tradition of long, drawn out meals appears to be dissipating. Forty years ago, the French spent an average of roughly an hour and twenty minutes on each meal, but today that's down to less than half an hour, according to data from French food consultancy Gira Conseil.
No matter the reason, the resilience of the hamburger is something to behold. If not because the otherwise unremarkable American creation has earned the appreciation of one of the most storied culinary cultures there are, then because of this, a tidbit I've left only for plate cleaners like myself: the hamburger has not only given life to itself, but also to the french fry. Per capita consumption of french fries (as measured in servings), is very nearly the same as hamburger consumption per capita for the countries listed above. A coincidence? I think not.Moments after dismissal, hundreds of students pour outside from the back doors of Frederick Elementary School.
Some hop into waiting cars while others begin the short walk to row homes on nearby blocks. But a small group of children hangs back, forming a single-file line against a chain-link fence, and wait to be led home by adults in what’s called a walking school bus, which doesn’t actually involve a bus.
The idea is simple. Under adult supervision, a group of kids walk to and from school together through Southwest Baltimore’s Mill Hill and Carrollton Ridge neighborhoods while playing games, singing songs and learning tips on crossing the street safely.
It's a more common practice in suburban communities, though it’s gaining popularity in Baltimore. School officials say the walking school bus helps neighborhood children facing a longer walk to school after the closure of the underutilized Samuel F. B. Morse Elementary school nearby.
Frederick and Samuel F. B. Morse merged this year as part of the 21st Century Schools program, a $1 billion initiative to rebuild some of the city’s aging school buildings. Frederick was one of the first schools to benefit from the massive investment. It reopened this year with $31 million worth of renovations.
Capitalizing on the new schools, the city is targeting areas immediately around those schools for improvements such as better sidewalks and tree planting.
Still the closure of Samuel F. B. Morse upset parents like Dannie Stubbs. The neighborhood school was a two-minute walk from his Carrollton Ridge home, and he could take his daughter My’asia there each morning with plenty of time for him to get to work.
Frederick is about half-a-mile further, along streets Stubbs doesn’t want his six-year-old daughter on alone, for fear of criminal activity. The city school system only provides yellow bus service to elementary schoolers who live more than a mile from their neighborhood school.
But Stubbs and My’asia, his first-grade daughter, have embraced the walking school bus.
“She gets to school happy and she gets home happy,” Stubbs said.
Now she travels to school alongside about 10 schoolmates. As they snake along sidewalks, the kids play I-Spy, Simon Says and sing songs.
Three adult staff members walk with the group, keeping an eye out for cars or other potential dangers. The staff doesn’t let the students embark on their walk until everyone’s shoes are tied — they want to eliminate the risk of tripping on loose laces.
Typically, such initiatives are volunteer-based, with a rotating cast of neighborhood parents acting as chaperones. In the Frederick Elementary model, though, the role is a paid, part-time job for local residents, adding to the program’s professionalism and providing a small economic boost to the community.
The Baltimore Curriculum Project, which runs Frederick Elementary as a public charter school, picks up the tab.
“The top concern of parents is how kids would travel safely to and from school,” said Larry Schugam, the Curriculum Project’s exective vice president. “We learned about walking school buses and identified that as one of the solutions.”
The walking school bus is beneficial for a variety of reasons, said Marieannette Otero of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership. Not only can adult supervisors ensure student safety, but it encourages physical activity, too, she said.
“The walking school bus lends itself well to getting kids moving and providing more safety,” Otero said. “I hope we’re going to start seeing it being replicated throughout the city.”
Sabrina Wiggins, Frederick Elementary’s community liaison, said her school’s walking bus is the first she’s heard of that pays its bus captains a stipend. Each staff member must pass a background check, and get trained on basic pedestrian safety skills. Their job doesn’t end when they drop off students in the morning — they join the children in the cafeteria for breakfast, and escort some of them to their first classes.
“We’re not just here to walk them back and forth,” said Michael Shumam, 33. “We’re here as mentors as well.”
CAPTION The star rating system for schools may be changed after some complaints that it was too easy to earn a high rating. The star rating system for schools may be changed after some complaints that it was too easy to earn a high rating. CAPTION Baltimore County Interim Schools Superintendent Verletta White announced that she was slashing her proposed operating budget. Baltimore County Interim Schools Superintendent Verletta White announced that she was slashing her proposed operating budget.
Thelma Terrell, 74, is retired and has lived near Frederick for almost her entire life. The $10.50 per hour she earns helps her pay bills. She also loves being around the children.
“You get attached to them,” said Terrell, whom the kids refer to as Mama T. “If a child had a bad night, you can see if they’re somewhat disturbed in the morning. You can give them inspiration to know it’s going to be a good day.”
Sometimes they talk about difficult matters, too. As the students walk home, they’ll sometimes step over broken liquor bottles, cigarette butts or drug paraphernalia. The children occasionally have to swerve around piles of dumped trash. And they often pass in front of boarded-up vacant homes.
“The kids know more than we think they do,” Terrell said. “They’ve very observant. We try to make them aware of what they need to avoid.”
Recently, though, the city has taken steps to improve the route Frederick students take to school. Along the “bus” route, children walk along recently repaired sidewalks, cross roads on freshly painted crosswalks and step under newly planted trees.
The city has committed more than $1 million to making such improvements within a half-mile radius of Frederick through its INSPIRE Program. The idea is that stronger schools lead to stronger neighborhoods, and vice versa.
The money has gone toward demolition efforts, street resurfacing and tree planting, among other improvements. City officials also have worked to clear out common dumping spaces.
The upgrades are focused mainly on areas the students see and use when they walk to school.
There are plans to make similar improvements in each of the neighborhoods immediately surrounding a 21st Century School. Between 23 and 28 school buildings are expected to be rebuilt under the program in coming years.
“Each of these buildings represents tens of millions of dollars in investments,” said INSPIRE planner Jennifer Leonard. “We recognized there was a real opportunity to leverage that to make other changes in the neighborhood, as well.”
The INSPIRE program is developing improvement plans for the neighborhoods surrounding eight other 21st Century schools. The idea is to focus on the quarter-mile area around each of the modernized buildings. The limited geographic area will allow for specific, implementable changes to be made quickly and with concentrated impact, officials say.
“If we don’t make an effort around this effort at this time, we’ve really missed an opportunity,” Leonard said.
In many of their preliminary plans for neighborhoods, the planning department recommends communities implement a walking school bus to ensure safe travel to and from schools.Government watchdog Judicial Watch issued a lawsuit Monday to the Department of Justice demanding emails belonging to former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates be turned over for review. Specifically, the group has requested emails sent and received during the Trump administration.
Yates testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee Monday and denied unmasking any Trump administration officials as part of her concerns over Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Yates met with Trump White House officials twice during the transition period and warned about misstatements by General Michael Flynn about his contacts with Russian officials. Flynn served as the President's national security advisor at the time.
In late January, Yates was fired for refusing to uphold President Trump's executive order banning travel from seven terror specific countries.
“Between her involvements in the Russian surveillance scandal and her lawless effort to thwart President Trump’s immigration executive order, Sally Yates short tenure as the acting Attorney General was remarkably troubling,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton released in a statement. “Her email traffic might provide a window into how the anti-Trump ‘deep state’ abused the Justice Department.”Plus Lenovo & Intel feed Linux users another shit sandwich, take a look at Greyhole & chat up the new desktop releases.
Two long-time FreeNAS users test the Debian-based OpenMediaVault, we share our favorite features FreeNAS doesn’t have, where FreeNAS still pulls ahead, standout features of version 3 over version 2 & why we think the project has a very bright future.
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OpenMediaVault in Practice Review
OpenMediaVault is the next generation network attached storage (NAS) solution based on Debian Linux. It contains services like SSH, (S)FTP, SMB/CIFS, DAAP media server, RSync, BitTorrent client and many more. Thanks to the modular design of the framework it can be enhanced via plugins. OpenMediaVault is primarily designed to be used in home environments or small home offices, but is not limited to those scenarios. It is a simple and easy to use out-of-the-box solution that will allow everyone to install and administrate a Network Attached Storage without deeper knowledge.
Overview
GPLv3 license
Debian Linux
ExtJS
AJAX
PHP
Modular design
Event driven configuration change management
Has Support for Raspberry Pi and Odroid-C2
OpenMediaVault 2.x
Debian 7 (Wheezy)
+Revised GUI supports configuration of WiFi, VLAN, et a
OpenMediaVault 3.x
In development for a while now
Based on Debian 8 (Jessie).
Developers are required to update their plugins to work with OMV3.
OMV 3.x
The Setup
NUC
4th Generation Intel Core i5-4250U processor
2014 Model BOXD54250WYKH1
4 USB3.0 Ports
DISK
WD 4TB My Book Duo Desktop RAID External Hard Drive
Two USB 3.0 expansion ports on back give cramped NUC more USB
Up to 290 MB/s file transfers
Dual-drive enclosure
WD RED drives
Hardware RAID controller
LED dummy lights for each drive
Have not tested a drive failure
ANG DISK
Synology DS412+
Just over three years old, running great, still getting updates.
205.68 MB/sec Reading, 182.66 MB/sec Writing
2 LAN with Failover and Link Aggregation Support
Features SuperSpeed USB 3.0
CPU Passive Cooling Technology & System Fan Redundancy
OpenMediaVault 3 Pros
Debian 8 is very secure and solid, around for a while.
I live in a systemd world.
OpenMediaVault Super Plugins:
Greyhole is worth the price of adition alone.
SnapRAID could give you real data protection.
The user defines it’s storage pool by listing all the paths of the different disks he wants to use.
When files are added on Greyhole shares’ Landing Zones, the Greyhole daemon moves those files into 1+ of the paths defined as the storage pool. It then replaces the original file (on the share) by a symbolic link pointing to one of the copy created in the pool.
Samba is configured to use opaque symbolic links, i.e. what are in fact symbolic links in the shares appear as normal files to clients.
OpenMediaVault 3 Cons
Base system and plugins are still a moving target.
No UI to connect to external NFS shares, NFS mounts don’t show up in UI.
No built in UI to configure UPS support, plugin.
UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) plugin finished
— PICKS —
Runs Linux
The Moto Mods Development Kit (MDK), allows you to contribute to the ecosystem and bring your own Moto Mod to life.
Desktop App Pick
An application that uses Samba to create a storage pool of all your available hard drives, and allows you to create redundant copies of the files you store, in order to prevent data loss when part of your hardware fails.
Next Steps
Try out QNAP’s Ubuntu Running NAS
NAS and iSCSI-SAN unified storage solution for server virtualization
Supports VMware(r), Citrix(r), and Microsoft(r) Hyper-V and advanced virtualization features
AES-NI hardware-accelerated encryption for efficient cryptographic performance up to 412 MB/s
Supports hardware decoding and transcode 4K (H.264) videos on-the-fly or offline
Dual HDMI outputs for switching between mirroring and extended desktop options
Supports the Linux(r) OS with direct output via HDMI
Equipped with 24-bit digital to analog converter (DAC) for amplifier and clear audio
Check out the new unRAID Server OS 6.2 d
Spotlight
Upcoming OSS Events
Come say hi at the OpenDaylight Summit this Tuesday, Sept 27th.
Ask Noah: Call in: 1-877-347-0011 this Tuesday on LUP while Chris and Wes are away.
SeaGL, Seattle GNU/Linux Conference is coming up November 11th and 12th, 2016.
Ubuntu Online Summit: 15-16 November 2016
— NEWS —
Device maker Lenovo today issued a statement confirming that its Yoga 900 and 900S convertible laptops cannot boot Linux — only Windows 10. “requires very specific, complex and unique drivers that require even greater amounts of testing, to ensure class-leading performance with Windows 10”. “support our Yoga products and our industry-leading 360-hinge” before stating it “does not intentionally block customers using other operating systems”.
Compounding matters, a ‘Lenovo Product Expert’ seemingly responded to a Best Buy customer’s complaint online with the following: “This system has a Signature Edition of Windows 10 Home installed. It is locked per our agreement with Microsoft.”
Here’s the problem: Linux doesn’t support internal solid-state drives in RAID (Intel RST) mode. Linux can see the drive in AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) mode. However, certain Lenovo laptops don’t allow the mode to be changed in the BIOS. You can boot Linux from a USB drive, but not install it on the laptop’s SSD.
A hardware hack has enabled AHCI support on the Lenovo Yoga 900 ISK2, undermining Lenovo and Microsoft’s claims that Linux is “missing drivers”. Unfortunately, the procedure to flash the BIOS is too complicated for most people because the person who did it had to use external flashing equipment to bypass Lenovo’s ROM signature check and load the modified BIOS, and he can’t provide the BIOS ROM because it only supports his computer and has private info in it, such as the Windows 10 license for his machine.
Software, the GNOME app store, is looking a lot nicer in GNOME 3.22.
“After 6 months of development the MATE Desktop team are proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.16. We’d like to thank every MATE contributor for their help making this release possible,” says Martin Wimpress. “The release is focused on improving GTK3+ compatibility, migrating components to newer libraries, fixing bugs and code hygene.”
“The 3.22 release is the last development release in the GTK+ 3. series. GTK+ 3.22 will be maintained as the long-term stable version of GTK+ 3, and new development will move to the GTK+ 3.90.x releases. To learn more about the GTK+ roadmap, read: https://blog.gtk.org/2016/09/01/versioning-and-long-term-stability-promise-in-gtk,” says Matthias Clasen in today’s announcement.
“”
Major new features include:
The Wayland backend has support for drawing tablets
The Wayland backend requires xdg-shell v6
We have a gesture API for tablet support, GtkPadController
GdkMonitor offers an API for richer information about connected outputs
GdkGLContext supports GLES
GtkScrolledWindow has new max-content-width/height properties that can
affect the sizing behavior
affect the sizing behavior GtkShortcutLabel is a new widget that can display keyboard shortcuts
in the same way that GtkShortcutWindow does
in the same way that GtkShortcutWindow does A number of GTK+ APIs will now transparently use portals when used
in a Flatpak sandbox, including GtkFileChooserNative, GtkPrintOperation,
gtk_show_uri.
Versioning and long term stability promise in GTK+ – GTK+ Development Blog
Mail Bag
Name: Kristiyan D Subject: Proper use of Touchpad Message: Hello guys. My question may be silly but I am trying from a year and more to find a proper way to use and configure touchpad/clickpad on GNU/Linux. Could you suggest me some information online because I am looking in particular how to use it (position of hands), proper configuration under GNU/Linux (palm tracking, sensitivity, coasting, scrolling, etc)? Name: Jeff P Subject: Wallpaper Changer Message: Hi Chris. I think it was in last weeks LAS that you were showing your desktop with the wallpaper changer app that took random wallpapers from an online source and set them for you. I like doing something similar because it is good to have variety. You said you are just collecting your favourite background images to a single folder so that you can cycle through them instead randomly grabbing from an online source. Because wallpaper slideshows do not seem to be baked in to the GNOME DE and I cannot find a wallpaper changer that I like I am instead using a script which I keep running in the background to change my wallpaper every 10 minutes. I don’t know if I already shared it with you but here is my script for changing wallpapers.
#!/bin/bash WP_DIR="/home/drthpnguin/Dropbox/Wallpapers/HD-Wallpapers" cd "$WP_DIR" while [ 1 ] do set -- * length=$# random_num=$((( $RANDOM % ($length) ) + 1)) gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri "file://$WP_DIR/${!random_num}" sleep 600 done
Call in: 1-877-347-0011
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Catch the show LIVE SUNDAY:
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Chris Fisher (@ChrisLAS) | Twitter
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Follow us on FacebookJames Michael McAdoo is one of six players to have both rings from the Warriors’ recent championships. Yet, although he has done nothing wrong, it appears he may be on the way out.
After re-upping McAdoo last year on a one-year contract, the Warriors elected to not tender the qualifying offer to him prior to free agency. This means the Warriors can’t match offers to keep him. More importantly, it signals that the organization is perfectly willing to let him walk away.
This one hurts. For such a marginal player, there was something about McAdoo that caused people to pull for him. As Sleepy Freud said in our Slack chat:
Nooooooooo! I love Big Mac. The latest in the line of “mediocre but lovable Warriors-Tar Heels” that included Antawn Jamison and Harry B... At least if he leaves he has his two rings to keep him warm. :slightly_smiling_face:
Strengths: defense and versatility
Early in the season, we saw some solid performances from McAdoo, enough so that there was a minor trend pushing the “McBench” moniker — a lineup that also included Patrick McCaw and JaVale McGee. But as the season wore on, McAdoo slipped further and further out of the primary rotation.
The problem?
Every other player did one aspect of his game better. The strength of a player like McAdoo is versatility. He is quick enough to cover guards on the perimeter, yet rangy and strong enough to adequately man the post in a small-ball lineup. At 6-foot-9, with a 7-2 wingspan, McAdoo shows a number of very desirable traits on the defensive end.
But was it enough?
For bench players, it’s often informative for a coach to normalize a player’s statistics over 36 minutes to see what he may look like as a starter. In McAdoo’s case, the averages over his three-year career with Golden State aren’t bad: 13.7 points, 7.8 rebounds, 1.9 blocks and 1.4 steals. Any average team would be generally happy with those numbers from a defensive specialist.
McAdoo is also something of a seasoned veteran now. He’s been with the Warriors for three straight seasons, two of which ended with a ring. That’s championship experience is valuable and it will serve him well wherever he ends up.
Lost in the crowd
As mentioned above, in spite of his solid, all-around contribution, it’s really hard to find one thing that McAdoo does better than anyone else on the roster. For rim protection, go with Zaza Pachulia. Dynamic athleticism? JaVale McGee. Versatile stopper who can handle some perimeter play? David West, probably, due to his playmaking and superior shot. It’s really hard to imagine the scenario that calls for McAdoo over any of those other guys.
And this is pretty much the picture that has emerged with McAdoo — out on the edge of the bubble. His highest scoring total in any game this season was 10 points. He never pulled in more than 9 rebounds in a game. He got 30 DNP-Coach’s Decisions. He was good and ready, but it simply came down to the harsh calculus of not being as good as that person in front of him on the depth chart.
In the NBA Finals, Kerr tried to use McAdoo as a rim-protecting big who was agile enough to cover various screen-and-rolls, while still managing something resembling respectable rim protection. Unfortunately, he just couldn’t maintain traction. He was able to generally stay around plays, but seemed to do little to actually favorably affect the outcomes.
The Warriors only have so many contract spots to use on non-rotation players. At this point, the team has seen enough to know what to expect with McAdoo. The writing was really on the wall when the Warriors bought into the recent draft and selected Jordan Bell in the second round.
Bell’s hallmark? Bob Myers stated:
“We love his ability to defend. He can probably defend most positions.... That’s huge.”
And since it was a pick that they used cash to secure, the Warriors are going to guarantee Bell’s contract, which has huge implications for McAdoo’s future in Oakland.
Outlook
There was some joking in the moderators’ offline chat about lumping this season review in with Anderson Varejao’s, as both players seemed to find their way into Steve Kerr’s good graces, even when traditional stats — and eyeball tests — didn’t seem to warrant much confidence.
At only 24, and with two rings on his fingers, it is almost certain McAdoo will get another look from an NBA team.
There’s a certain lovable underdog magic to the players at the very end of the bench. For McAdoo, this magic will travel with him, hopefully to a team where he can live higher up in the rotation. McAdoo stated:
“Everybody wants to play 48 minutes. But when it’s your third year and you’re on the best team in the NBA, it’s tough to complain.”
What do you say GSoM? How would you rank McAdoo’s season?Mr Blackburn said the application was based primarily on two causes of action |
/or in uppercase with `--up` (default=lowercase).
The final console call should be something like:
somemsg --message='Good Morning' Nicola Bruno --color=green --up
and the output should be:
GOOD MORNING NICOLA AND BRUNO
Implementation
First, we need to define a PHP Message, used in every console implementation, to handle the example.
Below is some pretty straightforward code:
class Message { /** * Construct the class and initializes the properties. * * @param $names * @param string $message * @param bool $uppercase */ public function __construct($names, $message="Hello", $uppercase=false) { $this->names = implode(' and ', $names); $this->message = $message; $this->uppercase = $uppercase; } /** * Generates the output. * * @return string */ public function getMessage() { $output = $this->message.''. $this->names; if ($this->uppercase) { $output = strtoupper($output); } return $output; } }
Symfony console
In order to create a console command in Symfony, it’s necessary to:
Create the command class
– Configure the arguments and options
– Write the logic
– Configure the arguments and options – Write the logic Create the application
Create The command
use Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command; use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputArgument; use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputInterface; use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputOption; use Symfony\Component\Console\Output\OutputInterface; class MessageCommand extends Command { /** * Configures the argument and options */ protected function configure() { $this ->setName('demo:msg') ->setDescription('Simple message delivery') ->addArgument('names', InputArgument::IS_ARRAY | InputArgument::REQUIRED, 'Who do you want to message?') ->addOption('message', null, InputOption::VALUE_REQUIRED, 'Set the message', 'Hello') ->addOption('up', null, InputOption::VALUE_NONE, 'Set the output in uppercase') ->addOption('color', null, InputOption::VALUE_REQUIRED, 'Which colors do you like?', 'white') ; } /** * Executes the logic and creates the output. * * @param InputInterface $input * @param OutputInterface $output */ protected function execute(InputInterface $input, OutputInterface $output) { $names = $input->getArgument('names'); $message = $input->getOption('message'); $uppercase = $input->getOption('up'); $color = $input->getOption('color'); $message = new Message($names, $message, $uppercase); $messageString = $message->getMessage(); $coloredMsg = '<fg='.$color.'>'.$messageString.'</fg='.$color.'>'; $output->writeln($coloredMsg); } }
The configure method is used to set up the arguments and options for the command.
The addArgument method can receive the following parameters:
addArgument($name, $mode, $description, $default)
type name description string $name The argument name int $mode The argument mode: InputArgument::REQUIRED or InputArgument::OPTIONAL string $description A description text mixed $default The default value (for InputArgument::OPTIONAL mode only)
The addOption can receive the following parameters:
addArgument($name, $shortcut, $mode, $description, $default)
type name description string $name The option name string $shortcut The shortcut (can be null) int $mode The option mode: One of the InputOption::VALUE_* constants string $description A description text mixed $default The default value (must be null for InputOption::VALUE_REQUIRED or InputOption::VALUE_NONE)
There are three options available to color the output:
Use a preset tag (es: $output->writeln('<info>foo</info>'); for green output)
for green output) Define a style using the OutputFormatterStyle class
class Set the color inside the tag name es:
// red text on a cyan background $output->writeln('<fg=red;bg=cyan>foo</fg=red;bg=cyan>');
The available foreground and background colors are: black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan and white. The available options are: bold, underscore, blink, reverse and conceal.
More information in the official Symfony documentation.
Note: by default, the Windows command console doesn’t support output coloring. You’ll need (and should install) Git tools or another more advanced command console.
Create The application
After the configuration and the execution, we’re almost done. The last step is creating a PHP file to run the command.
//file myconsole.php require __DIR__.'/vendor/autoload.php'; use MessageCommand; use Symfony\Component\Console\Application; $application = new Application(); $application->add(new MessageCommand()); $application->run();
Console call example:
php myconsole.php demo:msg Nicola Bruno --message='Good Morning' --color=blue --up
The Symfony console also automatically provides the output helper with the --help argument.
Hoa console
The Hoa console follows a less structured approach to configuring the console command.
That process consists of the following steps:
Parse the command
Get options and input
Execute the logic
Parse the command
/** * $argv contains an array of all the arguments passed to the script, * the first argument is always the name of the PHP file. * the Hoa Parser->parse method accept a string in input, so it's necessary to convert the $argv array in a string without the first argument as below. */ unset($argv[0]); $command = implode(' ', $argv); $parser = new Hoa\Console\Parser(); $parser->parse($command); //options definition //['longname', TYPE,'shortname'] $options = new Hoa\Console\GetOption( [ ['up', Hoa\Console\GetOption::NO_ARGUMENT, 'u'], ['message', Hoa\Console\GetOption::REQUIRED_ARGUMENT,'m'], ['color', Hoa\Console\GetOption::OPTIONAL_ARGUMENT, 'c'] ], $parser );
Get options and inputs
//definition of default values $uppercase = false; $message = "Hello"; $color = "white"; $names = $parser->getInputs(); //The following while with the switch will assign the values to the variables. while (false!== $shortName = $options->getOption($value)) { switch ($shortName) { case 'u': $uppercase = true; break; case'm': $message = $value; break; case 'c': $color = $value; break; } }
Execute the logic
$message = new Message($names, $message, $uppercase); $messageString = $message->getMessage(); Hoa\Console\Cursor::colorize('fg('.$color.')'); echo $messageString; Hoa\Console\Cursor::colorize('fg(white)'); //reset the cursor to default white
For coloring the output, it’s possible to change the Cursor color.
The Hoa console supports a wide range of colors.
The color can be set by name (black, red, green, yellow…), by number (from 0 to 256 representing the 264 color palette) or by hexadecimal code #rrggbb, example:
Hoa\Console\Cursor::colorize('fg(yellow) bg(#932e2e) underlined');
The basic usage in the example doesn’t provide an automatic helper output, and is not strongly OOP oriented but extending the Hoa\Console\Dispatcher\Kit (requires hoa/dispatcher ) could add more flexibility (more information in the official documentation)
The command can be called with:
php message.php -u --message=Hello --color=green Nicola Bruno
One of the strongpoints of the Hoa console is that it provides additional API classes to manipulate important elements, supporting the different terminal profiles:
The Cursor (move, clear, show, colorize, …)
(move, clear, show, colorize, …) The Mouse (listening to mouse action)
(listening to mouse action) The Window (setSize, scroll, minimize, …)
(setSize, scroll, minimize, …) The terminal line with Readline (history, autocompletion, etc)
Webmozart console
The Webmozart console command creation workflow consists of:
configuring the argument and options
writing the logic
creating the application
Webmozart’s console follows an approach similar to the Symfony Console, but with a clear separation between the configuration and the logical execution.
Configuration
use Webmozart\Console\Api\Args\Format\Argument; use Webmozart\Console\Api\Args\Format\Option; use Webmozart\Console\Config\DefaultApplicationConfig; /** * Configuration of arguments and options */ class MsgApplicationConfig extends DefaultApplicationConfig { protected function configure() { parent::configure(); $this ->setName('msg') ->setVersion('0.1') ->beginCommand('msg') ->setDescription('Show a nice message') ->setHandler(new MsgCommandHandler()) ->addArgument('names', Argument::MULTI_VALUED | Argument::REQUIRED, 'Who do you want to message?') ->addOption('message', null, Option::OPTIONAL_VALUE, 'Set the message', 'Hello') ->addOption('up', null, Option::NO_VALUE, 'Set the output in uppercase') ->addOption('color', null, Option::REQUIRED_VALUE, 'Which colors do you like?', 'white') ->end() ; } }
Logic
use Webmozart\Console\Api\Args\Args; use Webmozart\Console\Api\IO\IO; /** * Handling the command logic */ class MsgCommandHandler { public function handle(Args $args, IO $io) { //gets the argument and option $names = $args->getArgument('names'); $message = $args->getOption('message'); $uppercase = $args->getOption('up'); $color = $args->getOption('color'); $message = new Message($names, $message, $uppercase); $messageString = $message->getMessage(); $coloredMsg = '<fg='.$color.'>'.$messageString.'</fg='.$color.'>'; $io->writeLine($coloredMsg); } }
The strong separation of configuration and logic allows more flexibility for easy testing and for a project that will grow with additional commands.
Other advantages of the Webmozart’s console are:
sub commands support: php mycommand.php msg send --arg1 --arg2 php mycommand.php msg receive --someoptions=somevalue
support for manpage documentation (like with “git help remote”)
adapters for the Symfony console (to use Symfony’s classes like ProgressBar)
Creating The application
The application file to run the command is similar to the Symfony one:
require'vendor/autoload.php'; use Webmozart\Console\ConsoleApplication; $cli = new ConsoleApplication(new MsgApplicationConfig()); $cli->run();
Console call:
php myconsole.php msg --message='Good Morning' Nicola Bruno --color=blue --up
Final Thoughts
Each console covered above provides different functionalities for different use types and user preferences.
The Symfony console is well tested, robust, with good documentation and features to solve most of the average use cases.
The Hoa console is more industry oriented, perfect for manipulating the terminal environment (mouse, cursor, window, and so on).
The Webmozart console is new (there will be a stable release soon) but it’s very useful for handling projects that tend to grow to large sizes.
Do you use any of them regularly? If so, which one? Why? What would you say the pros and cons of each are? Do you have other contenders to suggest? Let us know!This is a basic introduction to the issue of small arms/light weapons trafficking and national and international efforts to control it.
[email protected]
Introduction
Illicit arms trafficking fuels civil wars, contributes to sky-rocketing crime rates and feeds the arsenals of the world's worst terrorists. Particularly troubling is the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons (SA/LW). SA/LW account for an estimated 60-90% of the 100,000+ conflict deaths each year (Small Arms Survey 2005) and tens of thousands of additional deaths outside of war zones. They are also the weapons of choice for many terrorists. Of the roughly 175 terrorist attacks identified in last year's State Department report on Patterns of Global Terrorism, approximately half were committed with small arms or light weapons. Stemming the flow of these weapons is incredibly difficult. Unlike weapons of mass destuction, small arms and many light weapons have legitimate military, law enforcement, and/or sporting and recreational uses. These uses preclude the types of outright bans on manufacture, stockpiling and sales imposed - with some success - on landmines and chemical and biological weapons. Instead, governments try to prevent the diversion and misuse of SA/LW without unduly infringing upon legitimate use and trade. This is no small feat. Plentiful, easy to conceal, and lethal, SA/LW are a smuggler's dream and a law enforcement nightmare. Hundreds of thousands of small arms in leaky government arsenals are vulnerable to theft, loss and diversion. Once acquired by traffickers, these weapons are smuggled across national borders in every conceivable way. They are hidden under sacks of vegetables in the back of pick up trucks, packed into household appliances that are then loaded onto cargo ships, even air-dropped out of old Soviet military transport planes. In the hands of terrorists and other criminals, these weapons have the capacity to kill dozens, even hundreds, of innocent civilians. A shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile - available on the black market for as little as a few thousand dollars - can bring down a commercial airliner. Even a couple of $100 assault rifles can inflict horrendous casualties, as evidenced by the November 1997 terrorist attack in Luxor, Egypt, during which 6 terrorists armed only with assault rifles, pistols and knives systematically slaughtered 58 tourists. For these reasons, small arms trafficking is not a problem you solve; it is a problem you manage. By enacting strong export and border controls, safegaurding (or destroying) stockpiles, dismantling trafficking networks, and addressing the root causes of the civil conflicts and soaring urban crime rates, governments can reduce the supply of, and demand for, these weapons.
Terms and Definitions
Ammunition : cartridges (rounds) for small arms; shells and missiles for light weapons; mobile containers with missiles or shells for single-action anti-aircraft and anti-tank systems; anti-personnel and anti-tank hand grenades; and landmines.
(Source: Report of the United Nations Panel of Government Experts on Small Arms) Illegal black market transfers (from Small Arms Survey 2001): "In clear violation of national and/or international laws and without official government consent or control, these transfers may involve corrupt government officials acting on their own for personal gain."
(Source: Small Arms Survey 2001, p. 167) Illicit grey market transfers (from Small Arms Survey 2001): "Governments, their agents, or individuals exploiting loopholes or intentionally circumventing national and/or international laws or policies"
(Source: Small Arms Survey 2001, p. 167) Legal Transfers (from Small Arms Survey 2001): "These occur with either the active or passive involvement of governments or their authorized agents, and in accordance with both national and international law."
(Source: Small Arms Survey 2001, p. 167) Light weapons : heavy machine-guns; hand-held under-barrel and mounted grenade launchers; portable anti-aircraft guns; portable anti-tank guns, recoilless rifles; portable launchers of anti-tank missile and rocket systems; portable launchers of anti-aircraft missile systems; mortars of calibers of less than 100 mm.
(Source: Report of the United Nations Panel of Government Experts on Small Arms) Small arms: revolvers and self-loading pistols; rifles and carbines; sub-machine guns; assault rifles; light machine-guns
(Source: Report of the United Nations Panel of Government Experts on Small Arms)
Statistics
Value of Conventional Arms Transfers in 2004 (Deliveries, Worldwide): $34.75 billion (Source: Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1997-2004, Congressional Research Service, 29 August 2005)
Top Five Arms Exporters (Worldwide, 2004)
#1 - United States ($18.55 billion)
#2 - Russia ($4.6 billion)
#3 - France ($4.4 billion)
#4 - United Kingdom ($1.9 billion) (Source: Congressional Research Service)
Recent Cases
The following cases reveal some of the sources, routes, and methods that gun runners use to acquire and deliver small arms and light weapons.
The Otterloo incident - In 2001, an Israeli arms dealer operating out of Panama duped the Nicaraguan government into selling him 3000 AK-47s and 2.5 million rounds of ammunition. The broker said that he was procuring the weapons on behalf of the Panamanian National Police, a claim ostensibly substantiated by a Panamanian end-user certificate. It was a lie. The end-user certificate was a forgery and the Panamanians had no knowledge of the deal. On November 2nd, the weapons were loaded into a Panamanian-registered ship named the Otterloo, which departed from the Nicaraguan port of El Bluff the next day. Two days later, it arrived in Colombia where the actual recipients - members of Colombia's vicious paramilitary groups - were waiting to claim their prize. Sources: Small Arms, Terrorism and the OAS Firearms Convention (pages 24-25 & 28-29)
The OAS General Secretariat's Report on the incident. Victor "The Devil" Infante : On July 30th, 2003 U.S. law enforcement officials observed an associate of Victor "The Devil" Infante sending a Federal Express package from Los Angeles to the Philippines. Infante was under investigation at the time for operating a multinational firearms and methamphetamine distribution ring. Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE) officials interdicted the Fed Ex package and the accompanying airway bill, which falsely identified the contents as a $30 camera tripod. Inside the package, agents found parts for M-16 and AR-15 assualt rifles. Source: "Victor "The Devil" Infante Charged with Weapons Exportation and Methamphetamine Distribution--Arrested in the Philippines" (ICE news release) Victor Bout, Pecos and Liberia : Unhappy with a consignment of assault rifles they had ordered from a Slovak manufacturer, the Ugandan government requested that the Egyptian who had brokered the original deal return the rifles to the manufacturer. The broker agreed and dispatched an Ilyushin-18 transport plane to pick up the rifles. Unbeknonwst to the Uganda government, the broker had found a new buyer, a Guinean arms brokering company (Pecos) founded by a Slovak broker after criminal investigations in Europe forced him to shift his operations elsewhere. Seven tons of the rifles were loaded onto the plane and flown to Monrovia - a clear violation of a UN arms embargo on Liberian President Charles Taylor's thuggish regime. Three days later, the plane returned to Uganda to pick up the rest of the firearms. By this time, the Ugandan government had caught wind of the diversion and had impounded the guns. Subsequent investigations uncovered a vast arms trafficking network comprised of front companies operated by the infamous Victor Bout and his associates. Source: Report of the Panel of Experts pursuant to Security Council resolution 1343 (2001), paragraph 19, concerning Liberia, United Nations Security Council, S/2001/1015, 26 October 2001
The International Response
United Nations Program of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects (UN Program of Action, or POA).
Protocol against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Their Parts and Components and Ammunition, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (Firearms Protocol)
UN Resource: Protocol webpage
Organization of American States (OAS) Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives and Related Materials (CIFTA Convention, Organization of American States (OAS)Firearms Convention)
Southern African Development Commmunity's Protocol on Control of Firearms, Ammunition and other related materials
The U.S. Response
The United States leads the world in efforts to secure and destroy surplus and obsolete small arms and light weapons and eliminate terrorist access to man-portable air defense systems. Below are brief descriptions of these and other U.S. SA/LW initiatives:14
SA/LW Destruction and Stockpile Security - Since 2001, the State Department's Small Arms/Light Weapons Destruction Program has facilitated the destruction of over 800,000 surplus small and light weapons and 80 million rounds of ammunition in 23 countries. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency has worked with officials in 19 countries to improve the security and management of additional SA/LW stockpiles.
Man-portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS) - Since the late 1990's, the U.S. has led a global campaign to eradicate terrorist acquisition and use of MANPADS. Their efforts have resulted in several international agreements on the manufacture, transfer, and storage of MANPADS, the destruction of over 13,400 excess missiles in 13 countries, and national controls on MANPADS exports and end-use monitoring that are among the most rigorous in the world.
Hearing Transcript, "The Terrorist Threat from Shoulder-fired Missiles, House International Relations Committee, 30 March 2006.
U.S. Report to the Second Biennial Meeting of States (BMS), July 2005.
FAS Resources: Publications
Additional FAS commentary on illicit arms trafficking can be found on the Strategic Security Blog
FAS Resources: Data and Documents
Other Resources: Government
Other Resources: Non-governmental OrganizationsIn February 2014, Nigel Lawson and Brian Hoskins (Chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change) appeared on the BBC’s Today show to answer whether there was “a link between the rain in recent days and global warming”.
Lawson, an experienced man of affairs though not a “climate scientist”, briefed himself on the matter and gave an answer was in accordance both with the findings of the most recent IPCC report and even with Hoskins’ own prior statements. In contrast, Hoskins, though an eminent climate scientist, gave a woolly response that quickly digressed into Green talking points.
Predictably, green activists complained both about Lawson’s answer and even his appearance on the show. The Today show rejected the initial complaints. However, green activists, including Bob Ward, who like Hoskins is supported by a Grantham institute, filed further complaints. In late June, the Guardian reported that a decision by Fraser Steel of the BBC Complaints Unit had issued a finding that Lawson’s views were “not supported by the evidence from computer modelling and scientific research”:
Lord Lawson’s views are not supported by the evidence from computer modelling and scientific research … and I don’t believe this was made sufficiently clear to the audience …
Steel went on to make other adverse findings against Lawson. However, in respect to the issue raised by the programme – the “link between the rain in recent days and global warming” – Lawson’s views were supported by scientific research, while Hoskins evaded a direct answer, instead quickly digressing into green talking points not directly to Somerset rainfall.
In today’s post, I’ll examine the answers of both Lawson and Hoskins against IPCC statements and, ironically, against Hoskins own prior statements (which are inconsistent with the complaints.)
The Question in the Today Programme
The Today interview in controversy is available in transcript here and audio here.
In January 2014, the UK had experienced intense precipitation – 185.1 mm, ranking in the top percentile of UK rainfall months – 16th in the historic series reaching back to 1766, but nonetheless ranking behind four 18th century and three 19th century months. The rainfall was particularly severe in the UK southwest.
Justin Webb, the BBC presenter, commenced the program by asking Hoskins, whether there was a “link” to global warming:
Is there a link, Sir Brian, between the rain we have seen falling in recent days and global warming?
Both Hoskins and Lawson gave answers to this question before digressing to their respective talking points.
IPCC on Heavy Precipitation
IPCC AR5, consistent with earlier reports, projects that increased temperatures will result in more water vapor in the atmosphere. Based on the Clausius-Clapeyron rate, they estimated a global increase in precipitation of ~7% per deg C., with the base case for increase in precipitation extremes also being ~7% deg C. (For an observed increase of ~0.8 deg C, this would be ~5.6% increase in precipitation extremes.) IPCC:
Trenberth et al. (2003) provided a physical explanation for why increasing atmospheric temperature might result in an increase in heavy precipitation and suggested that extreme precipitation should scale with the water content of the atmosphere (see also Allen and Ingram 2002). The water content has been found to scale roughly at the Clausius-Clapeyron rate of ~7% K^-1 based on both observational and modeling studies, with the possible exception of the drier land regions, where the scaling appears to be lower (O’Gorman and Muller 2010; Sherwood et al. 2010a; Simmons et al. 2010; Willett et al. 2007). Therefore, based on this hypothesis, one would expect annual maximum daily precipitation to increase in most regions globally at a rate of ~7% K^-1.
While the IPCC anticipated an overall global increase of ~7% per deg C, it definitely did not expect such increase to be uniform: indeed, IPCC presumes that precipitation in some regions may not increase at all.
In its Figure 7.21, IPCC showed GCM estimates of increased precipitation as much lower than the CLausius-Clapeyron rate (visually about 1-3% per deg C). These figures were not reported in the text. Instead, IPCC said that IPCC observed that GCMs were “generally poor” at simulating precipitation extremes and “are not usually thought of as a “source of reliable information regarding extremes.”
Because GCMs are generally poor at simulating precipitation extremes (Stephens et al., 2010) and predicted changes in a warmer climate vary (Kharin et al., 2007; Sugiyama et al., 2010), they are not usually thought of as a source of reliable information regarding extremes.
Further, the IPCC’s section on paleoclimate reported that there was convincing proxy evidence that 20th century floods were not only not anomalous, but were easily surpassed by historic floods, with higher flood frequency in the UK in cool phases:
Reconstruction of past flooding from sedimentary, botanical and historical records (Brázdil et al., 2006; Baker, 2008; Brázdil et al., 2012) provides a means to compare recent large, rare floods, and to analyse links between flooding and climate variability. During the last few millennia, flood records reveal strong decadal to secular variability and non-stationarity in flood frequency and clustering of paleofloods, which varied among regions. In Europe, modern flood magnitudes are not unusual within the context of the last 1000 years (e. g., Brázdil et al., 2012)... In the Alps, paleoflood records derived from lake sediments have shown a higher flood frequency during cool and/or wet phases (Stewart et al., 2011; Giguet-Covex et al., 2012; Wilhelm et al., 2012), a feature also found in Central Europe (Starkel et al., 2006) and the British Isles (Macklin et al., 2012).
…
In summary, there is high confidence that past floods larger than recorded since the 20th century have occurred during the past 500 years in northern and central Europe, western Mediterranean region, and eastern Asia.
The conclusion of AR5 chapter 2 (observations) reported a similar conclusion:
there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in
the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale
Macklin et al 2012, cited above by IPCC for the UK, stated explicitly that changes in flooding regimes evidenced from (recent) paleoclimate records in the UK were greater than the instrumental record, with flooding greater in the cold LIA:
the floodplain sedimentary archive is compared with long-term proxy NAO records [108- Trouet et al 2009], which shows a marked reduction in the occurrence of large floods during the MCA, a time of generally warmer temperatures and a more positive NAO, compared with the period before AD 1000 and particularly after AD 1550 during the cooler LIA (figure 10b). These studies demonstrate repeated and significant changes in flooding regime in the last 500–1000 years, which were very much greater than those that have been observed in recent instrumental flow records
Macklin and Lewin 2008 (EPSL) estimated UK flooding regimes through the Holocene, with their Figure 6 showing especially high flooding incidence in the LIA.
The IPCC also considered the specific question of tropical storms(hurricanes), where it conceded (resiling from AR4) that observations did not indicate a long-term upward trend:
Over periods of a century or more, evidence suggests slight decreases in the frequency of tropical cyclones making landfall in the North Atlantic and the South Pacific, once uncertainties in observing methods have been considered. Little evidence exists of any longer-term trend in other ocean basins.
IPCC chapter 2 (observations) considered heavy precipitation only in the context of the past 50 years, where it stated:
Regional trends in precipitation extremes since the middle of the 20th century are varied (Table 2.13). In
most continents confidence in trends is not higher than medium except in North America and Central America and Europe where there have been likely increases in either the frequency or intensity of heavy precipitation.
UK January 2014 rainfall in Context
UK concern over heavy January 2014 precipitation arose largely because of flooding in Somerset (see e.g. here). At the time, there was considerable discussion about the degree to which changes in floodplain management practices had made the region more vulnerable to heavy (but precedented) rainfall, as opposed to vulnerablity arising from supposedly unprecedented rainfall.
The UK has a long dataset of historic precipitation measurements: their England and Wales series goes back to 1766 i.e. commencing after the LIA extreme in the UK.
Precipitation in the UK occurs throughout the year, heavier in the late fall and winter than in the summer. Median monthly precipitation is 72.8 mm, but is highly variable: the 2.5-97.5% quantile spread of 138 mm. January 2014 rainfall was in the 99th percentile but not unprecedented. The England and Wales series (shown below) is not HS-shaped as shown below:
Figure 1. England and Wales Monthly Precipitation Anomaly (1766-2014). 61-month gaussian smooth in red.
Hoskins 2012
In 2012, Hoskins (see here), in response to questions about links between heavy precipitation and global warming, had explicitly stated that asserting such links “goes beyond” what can be said with confidence, though it “does a great job of keeping climate change in the news”:
I know that some scientists, like high profile NASA climate expert James Hansen, already say there is a definitive link between the occurrence of the extreme events and increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This does a great job of keeping climate change in the news, but to me it goes beyond what we can say with confidence based on current scientific understanding and evidence.
He observed that one of his students had been trying to examine projections of extreme storms, reaching an agnostic conclusion. Hoskins ironically observed that perhaps the media who claimed that we were going to get “more and stronger storms” knew “more about it than [he] did”:
One of my PhD students, Erica Thompson, has been looking into how extreme storms might change in the future but she has concluded that the models and records we currently have aren’t good enough to make a confident prediction. You often hear in the media that we’re going to get more and stronger storms, but maybe they know more than I do about it!
Hoskins observed that many periods of extreme weather in UK latitudes came from “blocking highs”, observing that the cold UK winter of 2010 was accompanied by relative warmth in Greenland.
Many of these prolonged periods of extreme weather in our latitudes occur because of an atmospheric pattern called a blocking high. Regions get stuck under the same weather system for entire seasons and this interrupts the region’s normal weather patterns….All the events we’ve seen recently have happened before; the question is whether we have altered the climate to the extent that they’re occurring more often or with greater intensity.
“Marking” the Answers
After this brief review of IPCC positions on heavy precipitation and flooding, let’s now examine answers by Hoskins and Lawson’s to the question from the Today program presenter.
Justin Webb, BBC: Is there a link, Sir Brian, between the rain we have seen falling in recent days and global warming? Sir Brian Hoskins: There’s no simple link – we can’t say yes or no this is climate change. However, there’s a number of reasons to think that such events are now more likely. One of those is that a warmer atmosphere that we have can contain more water vapour and so a storm can bring that water vapour out of the atmosphere and we’re seeing more heavy rainfall events around the world. We’ve certainly seen those here. Justin Webb: So it’s the heavy rainfall; it’s the severity of the event that points us in this direction? Sir Brian Hoskins: Well, in this event we’ve had severe rainfall but we’ve also had persistence, and that’s where I say we just don’t know whether the persistence of this event is due to climate change or not.
In his December 2012 interview at Imperial College, Hoskins’ position on persistence was apparently rather different. At that time, he had observed that blocking highs were a feature of mid-latitude circulation. IPCC AR4 had reported a decline in North Atlantic blocking events. This was cited in AR5, which concluded “there is low confidence in characterizing the global nature of any change in blocking.”
While the IPCC relied on the Clausius-Clapeyron rate as indicating a ~7% increase in precipitation (and precipitation extremes) per deg C increase in temperature, the IPCC also emphasized that there could be major differences between regions. Indeed, in respect to the UK, they cited paleoclimate evidence (see above) which linked high UK flooding to cool periods rather than warm periods.
But even if one applied the Clausius-Clapeyron rate itself to UK precipitation, the expected change in precipitation resulting from the observed increase in temperature of ~0.8 deg C is much smaller than internal variability of UK precipitation. For argument’s sake, applying the Clausius-Clapeyron rate to the observed temperature increas of ~0.8 deg C yields an expected increase of ~5.6% increase in monthly precipitation. Applied to UK precipitation, this would increase the median by approximately 4.1 mm (from 72.8 mm to 76.9 mm). For rare events (e.g. 185.1 mm), a ~5.6% increase in monthly precipitation would reduce the return time of a 185.1 mm event. Alternatively, a 5.6% increase would mean that an event that was formerly a 175 mm event was now a 185.1 mm event.
In my opinion, one can argue that climate change might have marginally exacerbated the problem arising from an uncommon (but precedented) blocking high, but it is not possible to claim that the blocking high and related high precipitation was “caused” by climate change – a position that that is surely entirely consistent with Hoskins’ December 2012 interview.
This was Lawson’s position as well. When invited to comment, Lawson stated:
Certainly it is not the case, of course, that this rainfall is due to global warming – the question is whether global warming has marginally exacerbated it. Nobody knows that.
The rest of the interview diverged away from links between floods and global warming to more general issues of extremes around the world, with Hoskins citing recent Australian temperature, Arctic sea ice, Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets – all prominent green talking points, but not immediately relevant to precipitation and flooding in Somerset.
Bob Ward’s Complaint
Bob Ward, also from a Grantham institute, published a lengthy complaint taking particular umbrage at Lawson’s (IMO reasonable) position that the salient issue in respect of flooding and global warming was “marginal exacerbation”:
Lord Lawson was obviously determined to dispute the science during the interview, despite his lack of expertise, and made a number of false claims which were not challenged or corrected by Justin Webb, the presenter who was carrying out the interview. For instance, Lord Lawson contradicted the scientific explanation for the link between climate change and the floods provided by Professor Hoskins, stating: “I think that Sir Brian is right on a number of points. He’s right first of all that nobody knows. Certainly it is not the case of course that this rainfall is due to global warming. The question is whether global warming has marginally exacerbated it. And nobody knows that.” In fact Professor Hoskins had laid out the scientific case very carefully, pointing out that it is not yet clear to what extent climate change may have contributed to the specific bouts of extreme weather that have occurred since late December, but also noting that the increase in intense rainfall that the UK is experiencing is likely to be the result of the warming of the atmosphere.
However, Hoskins’ remarks to the Today show were hardly the “careful” laying out of “the scientific case” claimed by Ward. In his written comments in December 2012, Hoskins took the entirely opposite position, saying that such claims did a “great job of keeping climate change in the news” but went beyond “what we can say”:
I know that some scientists, like high profile NASA climate expert James Hansen, already say there is a definitive link between the occurrence of the extreme events and increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This does a great job of keeping climate change in the news, but to me it goes beyond what we can say with confidence based on current scientific understanding and evidence.
The BBC Complaints Unit Decision
On June 25, 2014, the Guardian published that Fraser Steel of the BBC Complaints Unit had written to complainant Chit Chong, a Green Party politician, stating that “Lord Lawson’s views are not supported by the evidence from computer modelling and scientific research”.
In respect to the linkage between the floods and global warming, Fraser Steel’s views are unequivocally wrong. Even IPCC – surely the most fervent advocate of climate models imaginable – stated that GCMs did not provide useful |
is tenant liability AKA renters insurance?
Cheap insurance for Mustang GT?
I am 21 years old, and its hard to find an affordable insurance rate. Does anyone know of an insurer in Ontario that has very good insurance rates for a Mustang GT and young male drivers?"
Where can I find insurance for me? I am 18 years old...?
Hello I have a Mini Cooper S (2005 and 1.6litres engine) and turning 19 in two weeks. However, I have looked mostly everywhere for insurance and no-one is quoting me apart from Cooperatives insurance (normal one) for 5300 where my dad is the first driver and I am second. I have tried : AVIVA DIRECTLINE AA IKUBE COVERBOX Cooperatives YOUNG drivers insurance Admiral Elephant AND NONE OF THE ABOVE CAN EVEN GIVE ME A QUOTE? Can anyone SERIOUSLY help me?"
Cheap goods in transit van insurance?
anyone know of any budget goods in transit insurance?
Auto insurance wrong information!!?
Relatively, I am a new resident in the USA, I have been here for 18 months only, and I am trying to get a car insurance. The problem is the insurance companies give a huge discount for those who got licensed in the USA or Canada at age 16, but they do not consider other countries. For this reason I have to pay a ridiculous amount of money to get the state minimum requirements for auto insurance. In fact I have been licensed in my country since 1998.. I wonder what's the influence if I choose to answer yes"" when the insurance company agent asks me whether I got licensed at age 16 or not in the USA or Canada? Because technically I am already licensed at that age but not here!!"""
Insurance males/females?
In my state, car insurance is still more for males. Guess the change (if any) has not been made yet."
I don't have home owner insurance.. please help!?
I owned a condo in New Hampshire. the owner of the unit below me filed a claim to her ihome owner insurance because of water damage that I created. what are my rights to protect myself from her charging me extensive unecessary amounts that were not created by my damage?
Car insurance questions?
Can you buy a car and not have to pay for car insurance? If you must have car insurance, can you use your parent's, like a family plan?"
Orlando Condo Insurance Rates?
I am starting to look at condos and townhouses in the Orlando/Sanford area and am trying to figure out my budget for what I can afford. Does anyone know a ballpark rate for condo insurance in this area that I can use for planning? I know generally this is covered in the HOA dues, but the bank may require additional coverage. Also, does anyone know what the ballpark rate is for single family homes in case I peruse that path?"
HIV and Life Insurance Reinstatment?
In March 2004 I purchased some term life insurance. When I moved to Washington State (from Colorado where the policy was writen) I changed my bank accounts and closed the account that my life insurance premium was automatically being paid from. My life insurance coverage lapsed (currently 120 days). In the policy contract it says you can reinstate the policy by (1) provide evidence of insurability and (2) pay all overdue premiums plus 6% interest. Now here is the BIG question.... Am I Insurable? This Jan I was diagnosed with HIV. I have health insurance paperwork signed by my doctor showing my HIV+ status and saying that I do not have AIDS. In all the life insurance medical underwriting questions it asks... in the past 10 yrs have you been (a) Diagnosed by a member of the medical profession as having Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) or AIDS-Related Complex (ARC)? (b) Treated by a member of the medical profession for AIDS or ARC? By my understanding of these two questions can answer NO to both of them. Does this mean I can go about reinstating my life insurance?
Under parent s insurance. marrying soon. will they kick me off?
So I m getting married soon. it s kind of a secret marriage. i don t want my parents to know. well not until later. my fianc is in the army and was planing to put me under is health insurance. the thing is I m still under my parents and i heard that they ll send a letter explaining why they re kicking me off. is that true? and also is it possible to be on two insurance?
Will Progressive check my marital status?
I need insurance for my car and Progressive is the most affordable. When getting the quote online I said I was married, which I legally am, but that I didn't want my spouse covered since he won't be driving my car. I live in Washington so it's illegal to drive without insurance and my grandparents who helped me buy my car want to go with me to an agency to buy a policy. The kicker is my family doesn't know I'm married. So if I'm talking with the agent and I say I'm single, will they look it up and find out that I'm married?"
Which type of life insurance does a person like me need?
Hello, I am 27 yr old female, healthy, not married, no kids. Ex smoker (quit many months ago). All in all healthy life. Non-risky office job. I want to get life insurance for my mother. Criteria needed in the insurance: 1) at least $100,000 paid out to beneficiary 2) Paid no matter when I died. Whether 2 months or 2 years or 20 years after my death, I want my mother to be covered 3) Not crazy expensive. Especially that I'm such low risk and the amount is not too high. Which type of insurance should I be shopping for?"
How much would it cost for a 50cc scooter to insure?
I dont want l plates anymore i think its 50-100 lol, and how much would it cost to fully insure it and the test aswell. Im 19
ANSWER: I might suggest you to try this web site where one can get quotes from the best companies: COVERAGE-FINDER.NETJAMAL Idris has obtained an immediate release from the Gold Coast to sign a three-year contract with Penrith.
Idris informed the Titans of his desire to return to Sydney on Monday due to compassionate reasons.
He had three years remaining on his contract at Gold Coast, who signed him from Canterbury in 2011.
"I've enjoyed my time here at the Titans and I'm grateful that the club has favourably considered my request for a release,'' Idris said.
"For personal reasons, I have decided it would be best to be closer to my family as my mum has been ill for the past year and it's been difficult living interstate."
IS JAMAL IDRIS A GOOD SIGNING FOR PENRITH? HAVE YOUR SAY BELOW
The former NSW Origin and Test centre will make a formidable addition to Penrith's backline, which is already bristling with speed and youthful potential.
"It is a major coup to recruit a player of such a high profile and tremendous ability," said Panthers executive general manager Phil Gould. "Jamal will be a wonderful acquisition for Penrith, both on and off the field."
media_camera Jamal Idris during Gold Coast Titans training.
However, Penrith have been forced to release a player to accommodate Idris, with former Knights centre Brad Tighe joining the Titans on a two-year deal, also effective immediately.
Idris, 23, is expected to commence training with the Panthers in the next fortnight.
Both of Idris's parents live in Sydney's west. He also purchased a property in the area while playing for Canterbury.
media_camera Penrith centre Brad Tighe looks set to move to the Gold Coast Titans to facilitate the arrival at the Panthers of star Jamal Idris.
Titans CEO Graham Annesley said the club put the interests of Idris, not the club, first.
"We are dealing with people's lives and at times, we have to put the best interests of people first,'' said Annesley.
"Jamal has a really close relationship with his family and we respect his desire to spend more time with them in Sydney.
"Jamal has been great on and off the field during his time at the Titans and while we're disappointed to see him go we fully understand and appreciate his personal circumstances.
"We now look forward to the arrival of Brad Tighe, who is a well-credentialed centre with plenty of NRL experience.''On Wednesday April 25th, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) released a new paper, Success and the City: How charter cities could transform the developing world, by Paul Romer and Brandon Fuller. The Executive Summary is presented below, with the permission of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
___________________
The United Nations expects the urban population in less developed regions to double in the next four decades alone, from roughly 2.5 billion to over 5 billion people.1 This wave of urbanization presents a unique opportunity for billions of people to live healthier, greener, and more prosperous lives. The Charter Cities Initiative aims to channel this unprecedented scale of urban growth in a positive direction, offering new choices to reform minded political leaders as well as new choices to migrants in search of better places to live and work.
A charter city is a new type of special zone, one that can serve as an incubator for reform. In partnership with credible allies, a developing country can pursue reforms in a special zone large enough to one day accommodate a city with millions of residents. By starting on a new and undeveloped site, the formal rules in a charter city, and the norms that these rules encourage, can differ markedly from the ones that prevail elsewhere in the country.
These rules can nevertheless be legitimate in the eyes of the migrants to the zone, just as the rules in high-income countries are legitimate in the eyes of the few immigrants that manage to move from less developed countries.
Honduras recently decided to pursue a path that is based in part on the charter cities concept. The Congress there defined a new legal entity, la Región Especial de Desarrollo (RED). The government will soon use the RED to establish a reform zone to which families can move safely and legally. The RED government will be largely independent from the Honduran central government. The leadership in the RED will have the power to partner with foreign governments in critical areas such as policing, the courts, customs, and anti-corruption.
By participating in the governance of the RED, credible partner governments can make the new city a more attractive place for would-be residents and investors. With protections from a modern system of law and administration, foreign direct investment in infrastructure can support the growth of a new city in the RED, a city that can eventually become a hub for the Americas.
The RED presents an opportunity to tackle directly the biggest obstacle to growth and development all over the world: the dysfunctional systems of rules and enforcement that keep people from reaching their true potential. It is possible for Canada, along with other reputable governments, to help establish institutional credibility in an undeveloped region in Honduras to which millions of people could move.
Such a partnership can do what traditional aid cannot: offer people a chance to live and work in a safe and well-run city, a city that provides economic opportunities for Canadians and Hondurans alike, and a city that has the potential to inspire reform in Honduras and throughout the Americas.
1. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2010). The World Urbanization Prospects: The 2009 Revision. United Nations. Available on the Internet at: http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/index.htm, as of February 11, 2012.
Paul Romer is a professor of Economics and the director of the Urbanization Project at the New York University Stern School of Business. Brandon Fuller is the director of Charter Cities and visiting scholar in the Urbanization Project at New York University’s Stern School of Business. To view the full paper click here.
Mr. Romer will be speaking on April 25 at an event hosted by the Ottawa Economics Association in partnership with MLI.If you’ve been following along with major news outlets over the past few months, DreamHost has been in something of a deadlock with the Department of Justice.
Why Bother?
At risk is the personally identifiable information of many, many thousands of internet users who chose to visit or otherwise interact with DisruptJ20.org, a website created and maintained by one of our customers.
While we regularly work with law enforcement and hand over certain types of data as part of various ongoing investigations, this particular request for customer data was overly broad, and we objected to it on those terms.
The court chose, in this case, to act as an intermediary between DreamHost and the Department of Justice to ensure that user rights remained protected and that First and Fourth Amendment protections were respected.
We had been awaiting Chief Judge Morin’s final order, which would spell out the exact nature of the data that DreamHost would be required to hand over while mulling over a decision to appeal the court’s general order.
Today’s Order
Today Chief Judge Morin of the Washington D.C. Superior Court issued the court’s final order, and we’re elated to see significant changes that will protect the constitutional rights of innocent internet users worldwide.
Under this order, we now have the ability to redact all identifying information and protect the identities of users who interacted with disruptj20.org before handing over any data to the court. Chief Judge Morin acknowledged that the government “does not have the right to rummage through the information contained on DreamHost’s website” to “discover the identity of... individuals not participating in alleged criminal activity.”
The new order is a far cry from the original warrant we received in July and validates our decision to raise questions about the original order.
We Saw Something, so We Said Something
We are now required to hand over a drastically reduced amount of data to the government and will redact any identifying information from every scrap of it that relates to non-subscribers.
The Department of Justice will have to submit proposed search protocols and procedures (and the court will have to review and approve these) before the DOJ can begin a detailed review of the redacted data.
The DOJ will then have to file an itemized list of information which it believes constitutes evidence of D.C. Code §22-1322 (DC’s rioting statute) and call out the specific reasons why the data is relevant to the DOJ’s investigation with the court.
Finally, the court must find probable cause that the requested data is “evidence of criminal activity” without identifying innocent users of disruptj20.org. Only then will the DOJ be able to obtain non-redacted data from DreamHost.
We applaud this course of action as it goes a long way toward negating any fears of a “digital dragnet” and targets individual, specific users to whom probable cause has been found by the court. The contact information of simple website visitors, journalists, historians, and any other users who may have interacted with the DisruptJ20 website with innocent intentions is now explicitly protected.
Absent a finding by the court that probable cause of criminal activity exists, the government will not be able to uncover the identities of many thousands of website users. There are also quite a few modifications within the court’s order that further reduce the government’s ability to review unrelated data.
Appeal?
As it stands today, the sum total of requested data in this case very closely aligns with hundreds of other government requests that DreamHost has received, and complied with lawfully, in the past.
We do not intend to appeal the court’s ruling.
There’s really no need. Any sweeping requests for data that could personally identify website visitors not directly related to an ongoing criminal investigation are now off the table. It’s sort of a moot point!
The law makes it clear that the Department of Justice does have a right to request some customer information throughout the course of ongoing criminal investigations. We respect that right and appreciate the court’s oversight in this case as a step to help protect users and reign in what we considered to be a problematic, overly-broad records request.
Next Steps
We’re preparing to compile the mass of data requested by the court.
As part of that effort, we plan to pore over every single email and scrap of data that we’ve collected to redact any information that could be used to identify anyone who may have visited or otherwise used DisruptJ20.org. This excludes, of course, our own customer who is a confirmed subject of an ongoing investigation.
To be clear, DreamHost has been deputized to redact sensitive information. No government employee will see this data until we’ve personally gone over it with a fine-toothed comb, and our commitment to user privacy is strong and unwavering.
We see this as an absolute victory not just for DreamHost, but for online service providers throughout America and for internet users around the world. As a result of this ruling, internet users retain the ability to simply browse the internet without fear of being swept up in a criminal probe.
Thank you for your very vocal support over the last few weeks.
Media Requests
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Previously…Novel experience and learning new skills are known as modulators of brain function. Advances in non-invasive brain imaging have provided new insight into structural and functional reorganization associated with skill learning and expertise. Especially, significant imaging evidences come from the domains of sports and music. Data from in vivo imaging studies in sports and music have provided vital information on plausible neural substrates contributing to brain reorganization underlying skill acquisition in humans. This mini review will attempt to take a narrow snapshot of imaging findings demonstrating functional and structural plasticity that mediate skill learning and expertise while identifying converging areas of interest and possible avenues for future research.
Introduction
Neuroplasticity, which refers to the brain's ability to change its structure and function, is not an occasional state of the brain, but rather the normal ongoing state of the human brain throughout the life span (Zilles, 1992; Pascual-Leone et al., 2005; Kempermann, 2006; Jancke, 2009). Plastic changes in the human brain lead to brain reorganization that might be demonstrable at the level of behavior, anatomy, and function and down to the cellular and even molecular levels (Kolb and Whishaw, 1998; Kelly and Garavan, 2005; Kleim et al., 2006).
Intentional practice in sports and music has been shown to contribute to acquisition of expertise (Schlaug, 2001; Baker et al., 2003; Hutchinson et al., 2003; Lotze et al., 2003; Calvo-Merino et al., 2005; Ericsson, 2005; Cross et al., 2006; Hung et al., 2007; Nielsen and Cohen, 2008). Acquisition of expertise is accompanied by structural and functional changes of the brain and the advent of brain imaging methods has bolstered the study of these changes in the human brain. Understanding of the neural mechanisms underpinning expertise may provide a basis for determining what types of practice or training are most likely to be beneficial for performance enhancement. This knowledge may also provide a clue as to why some people show improvement at different rates than others or reach much higher levels of achievement. Thus, the study of plastic changes associated with skill learning and expertise in the human brain is one of the most challenging areas of current neuroscience research.
This mini review provides a summary of the in vivo imaging evidence of longitudinal and cross-sectional studies on structural and functional plasticity of the human brain in skill learning and expertise with emphasis on sports and music. In the literature, a cross-sectional approach has been most widely used, and many interesting findings have been reported. However, one of the criticisms of cross-sectional studies is that the differences in brain organization are possibly correlational, and, thus, caution should be used in order not to draw overly strong causal inferences from the cross-sectional data. The concept of plasticity can involve many levels of organization involving molecular, neuronal, or chemical events, and these molecular views of neuroplasticity are beyond the scope of this mini review.
Structural Neuroplasticity in Skill Learning and Expertise
Cross-Sectional Studies
Cross-sectional imaging studies have demonstrated structural changes of the human brain as a result of experience and learning in sports and music (Amunts et al., 1997; Gaser and Schlaug, 2003; Bangert and Schlaug, 2006; Jacini et al., 2009; Jäncke et al., 2009; Park et al., 2009; Hänggi et al., 2010; Wan and Schlaug, 2010; Wei et al., 2011; Di Paola et al., 2013). For example, Jacini et al. (2009) reported that elite judo players had significantly higher gray matter volume in the frontal lobe, related to motor planning and execution and in regions of the prefrontal cortex, related to working memory and cognitive processes, compared to control subjects. Training induced enlargement in gray matter structure was not limited to brain regions associated with motor planning and execution. When compared to age-matched control subjects, world-class mountain climbers showed significantly larger vermian lobule volumes, possibly associated with highly dexterous hand movements and eye-hand coordination in detection of and correction of visuomotor errors (Di Paola et al., 2013). In the music domain, with measurement of the length of the posterior wall of the precentral gyrus as an estimate of the size of the hand motor area, Amunts et al. (1997) identified substantial structural differences in the hand motor area between professional musicians and non-musicians: in general, the hand motor area was larger in professional musicians than in non-musicians. More importantly, the authors also found that the measures of hand motor area on both hemispheres showed correlation with the age of commencement of musical training, implying that earlier musical training results in a stronger impact on structural changes in the hand motor area.
In a study using the voxel-based morphometry (VBM) technique, it was found that skilled golfers (professional and low handicap golfers) had larger gray matter volumes in a fronto-parietal network, including premotor and parietal areas (Jäncke et al., 2009). Using the VBM approach, Gaser and Schlaug (2003) reported that professional keyboard players showed differences in gray matter volume in motor, auditory, and visual-spatial brain regions when compared with a matched group of amateur players and non-keyboard players. While the majority of studies on structural neuroplasticity have reported increased gray matter density or volume in expert brains, few studies have reported on the inverse relationship, that is, decreased gray matter volume (Draganski et al., 2006; Hänggi et al., 2010). The several possible reasons for discrepant findings were suggested (Hänggi et al., 2010).
A handful of studies have investigated differences in white matter structure between experts and non-experts, using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI); however, the results have been inconsistent. Using DTI, Jäncke et al. (2009) demonstrated decreased white matter volume and fractional anisotropy (FA) values in several brain structures, including the corticospinal tract (CST), in skilled golfers, compared with less-skilled golfers. Additional evidence for decreased white matter volume and FA values was reported in a study of professional ballet dancers (Hänggi et al., 2010). Contrary to decreased FA values in white matter structures, a very recent study on professional gymnasts showed increased FA values in the bilateral CST in elite gymnasts, possibly in response to long-term gymnastic training as compared to the control subjects (Wang et al., 2013). Inconsistent results have also been reported in the music domain. Imfeld et al. (2009) reported significantly lower FA values in both the left and the right CST in professional musicians compared to non-musicians. However, in another study, pianists who practiced frequently showed higher FA values (Han et al., 2009). Therefore, it appears that acquisition of further evidence will be necessary in order to make a conclusion with regard to whether specific structural changes in white matter can be induced by extensive training.
Longitudinal Studies
To date, only a small number of longitudinal studies have investigated structural brain reorganization as a result of experience and learning. Draganski et al. (2004) investigated the training effect of juggling in inexperienced young jugglers. After a 3-month training period, subjects in the training group showed changes in gray matter density in the intraparietal sulcus and the midtemporal area of visual cortex. The intraparietal sulcus is involved in transforming retinotopic into body centered information necessary to visually control movements. The midtemporal area of visual cortex is a highly specialized brain area for analyzing visual movement information. Of particular interest, the authors also found that after another 3 months without juggling practice, the increase in gray matter density following practice had diminished in all subjects in juggling practice, indicating that structural plasticity is reversible. In a recent study of 60-year old elderly individuals who were able to learn juggling, gray matter changes related to skill acquisition were observed in the midtemporal area of visual cortex similar to that found in young subjects, suggesting that age is not in itself a limiting factor for structural brain plasticity driven by skill learning (Boyke et al., 2008). In a more recent longitudinal study using VBM, in golf novices between the ages of 40 and 60 years, 40 h of golf training showed an association with gray matter increases in a task-relevant cortical network encompassing sensorimotor regions and areas belonging to the dorsal stream (Bezzola et al., 2011). More importantly, in that study, a strong positive relationship was observed between the increase in gray matter and training intensity in the parieto-occipital junction (POJ), a critical structure of the dorsal stream. A recent review provided evidence of a close association of the POJ with visuomotor processes, particularly in the on-line control and on-line correction of visually guided arm movements (Kravitz et al., 2011). For musical training, Hyde et al. (2009) found that 6-year-old children receiving instrumental musical training for 15 months showed structural change in brain areas such as the precentral gyrus, which is known to be involved in control of playing a musical instrument. Most of these brain areas are part of the cortical motor system; however, structural changes in the auditory system, such as the Heschl gyrus and the corpus callosum, were also observed. These structural changes in the brain showed correlation with performance on various auditory and motor tasks. In addition, in the music domain, the evidence suggests that training-induced plasticity in musicians appears to be most prominent in those who engaged in practice early in childhood (for a review, see Wan and Schlaug, 2010).
Functional Neuroplasticity in Skill Learning and Expertise
Cross-Sectional Studies
In motor function, a common finding is the functional enlargement or focused activation of the motor area involved in control of that particular skill (Krings et al., 2000; Pearce et al., 2000; Lotze et al., 2003; Haslinger et al., 2004; Meister et al., 2005; Bangert and Schlaug, 2006). For example, Pearce et al. (2000) reported that the cortical representation of the hand used for playing is larger in professional racquet ball players as compared with novices. In music, one study demonstrated a differential brain adaptation depending on instrument played (Bangert and Schlaug, 2006). More specifically, keyboard players had the left motor area more pronounced as they predominantly use the right hand. In contrast, string players had the right motor area pronounced as the left hand is crucially engaged while playing.
Recent neuroimaging studies have attempted to elucidate the neural activity during action observation in expert brain (Calvo-Merino et al., 2006; Pilgramm et al., 2010; Kim et al., 2011). For example, Calvo-Merino et al. (2006) demonstrated the neural bases of motor influences on action observation in expert ballet dancers. They have shown an effect of motor expertise on neural activation within the ventral premotor area and also stronger activation in the inferior parietal and cerebellar regions when observing dance videos, suggesting that the action observation network is more extended than previously suggested (Di Pellegrino et al., 1992). For motor planning in expertise, an fMRI study using motor imagery task, which refers to the mental rehearsal of motor acts, demonstrated that the task-related neural networks of expert golfers are focused and efficiently organized, whereas novices have difficulty filtering out irrelevant information (Milton et al., 2007). This finding is consistent with the notion of relative economy (neural efficiency) in the cortical processes of elite athletes during the specific challenge in which they are highly practiced. Similar finding was also observed in professional musicians. Lotze et al. (2003) reported that professional violinists showed focused cerebral activations in the contralateral primary sensorimotor cortex, the bilateral superior parietal lobes, and the ipsilateral anterior cerebellar hemisphere as compared to amateur violinists during the imagination of violin-playing movements.
As for the visuospatial abilities in sport, evidences seem to suggest that experts differ in visuospatial abilities directly tied to their domain of expertise. For example, one study reported that expert athletes did not differ in their visuospatial capacity than novices as measured on the general visuospatial test (Furley and Memmert, 2010). However, a recent study using fMRI reported quantitative differences in brain activation during visuospatial processing between elite rugby players and novices, indicating the possible existence of a strategy (a bird's eye view) regarding visuospatial cognitive processing for elite rugby players that differs from that of novices (Sekiguchi et al., 2011). More recently, Seo et al. (2012) investigated possible difference in cognitive strategy between archery experts and novices in visuospatial working memory processing. According to their results, archery experts have increased activation in cortical regions important for visuospatial attention and working memory, suggesting that degree of expertise may modulate higher order brain functioning. Taken together, these studies therefore demonstrated that the differences in visuospatial abilities are pronounced in specific domain but those differences did not transfer outside the domain to general visuospatial ability. The possible modulation on function of working memory and attention by expertise was also recently demonstrated in music training. In their multilevel cross-sectional study, Oechslin et al. (2013) found evidence for stepwise modulation of brain responses according to level of music expertise in a fronto-temporal network hosting functions of working memory and attention.
Longitudinal Studies
For motor skill acquisition, previous studies using fMRI demonstrated that learning of sequential finger movements initially leads to a functional expansion in the primary motor cortex (M1) and this change in M1 follows more dynamic, rapid changes in the cerebellum, striatum, and other motor-related cortical areas, suggesting an experience-dependent shift of activation from a cerebellar–cortical to a striatal–cortical network with extended practice (Karni et al., 1995; Doyon et al., 2002). In addition, repetition of movements has been suggested to result in motor memories in the primary motor cortex and probably other cortical areas that encode the kinematic details of the practiced movements (Classen et al., 1998; Butefisch et al., 2000; Stefan et al., 2005; Cross et al., 2009). Of particular interest, previous studies have demonstrated that motor memory can also be encoded by action observation and this form of action observation can enhance the effects of motor training on memory encoding, possibly through modulation of intracortical excitatory mechanisms (Stefan et al., 2005; Celnik et al., 2006).
Formation of multisensory connection during motor learning has often been reported in music. In a longitudinal EEG study (Bangert and Altenmüller, 2003), beginning pianists, who had never played an instrument before, were trained on a computer piano over a period of 5 weeks. They listened to short piano melodies, and, after a brief pause, they were then required to replay the melodies using their right hand. After 5 weeks of practice, listening to piano tunes produced additional activity in the sensorimotor regions and in turn, playing on a keyboard produced additional activity in the auditory regions. Therefore, this study nicely demonstrates how dynamic brain adaptations accompany these multisensorimotor learning processes. In another longitudinal study using fMRI (Herdener et al., 2010), the neural responses of musical students in acoustic novelty detection were compared before and after two semesters of intensive aural skills training. Following the training period, hippocampal responses to temporal novelty in sounds were increased in music students. A previous study suggested involvement of the hippocampus in various forms of novelty detection in addition to its role in memory (Knight, 1996; Strange et al., 1999). Therefore, this study provides evidence for functional plasticity in the adult hippocampus related to musical training.
Concluding Remarks
Over the past decades, advances in human brain imaging have provided new insights into the neuroplastic changes underlying skill learning and expertise in both sports and music (Table 1). These plastic changes can be seen at both structural and functional levels (Figure 1). A main finding of structural plasticity is increased volume and gray matter density of brain areas involved in control of the practiced task. Another major finding in structural plasticity is that experience dependent structural changes can disappear when practicing stops, indicating that structural plasticity is possible in all directions. In musical expertise, one of the distinctive features of structural neuroplasticity is that brain plasticity can be found more clearly if practice starts at a young age. That is, a period might exist, beyond which music-induced structural changes and learning effects are less pronounced. Unfortunately, such studies on a sensitive period are missing in the sport domain.
TABLE 1
Table 1. Imaging evidences for structural and functional plasticity in sports and music.
FIGURE 1
Figure 1. Advances in neuro imaging technique have provided new insights into the neuroplastic changes underlying skill learning and expertise at both structural and functional levels. At structural level, a main finding is increased gray matter volume or density of brain areas associated with skill learning. In functional reorganization, functional imaging evidence has shown that functional neuroplasticity occurs not only in the motor domain but also in cognitive and perceptual domains associated with improved performances.
In functional reorganization, a common finding is the functional enlargement or focused activation of the motor area involved in control of that particular skill. In addition, because expert performance is mediated by cognitive and perceptual motor skills, functional imaging evidence has shown that functional neuroplasticity occurs not only in the motor domain but also in cognitive and perceptual domains associated with improved performances. Furthermore, in music, evidence has demonstrated a strong coupling of sensorimotor and auditory processing for music expertise. Practice in playing a music instrument involves constant improvement of complex sensory-motor coordination through repeated execution of motor activities under the controlled monitoring of the auditory system.
Despite accumulation of significant imaging evidence, as discussed in the current mini-review, understanding of mechanisms underlying these plastic changes is still far from complete—which opens a broad avenue for future research. For example, neuroplasticity can be traced to cellular and molecular levels, and, thus, one of the main challenges is linking human brain imaging findings to the underlying molecular events. Because the poor specificity of macroscopic MR imaging signals largely precludes molecular information, other non-invasive approaches would be needed. Of these methods, molecular imaging using positron emission tomography (PET) is a good candidate. Although there is still a lack of prospective studies on plasticity, integration of PET into MRI with simultaneous recordings of molecular and hemodynamic brain responses opens new and promising prospects for the future (Judenhofer et al., 2008). Another challenge for the understanding of neural mechanisms underlying plastic changes is time scale of neural activity, because the temporal resolution of fMRI in the order of seconds is approximately three orders of magnitude away from the time scale of neural events in milliseconds order. Therefore, for measurement of brain activity on a time scale of neuronal activity and for assessment of specific neurophysiological events in human, combined fMRI with non-invasive electrophysiological methods such as electroencephalography (EEG) would be beneficial for simultaneous measurement of neuronal and neural brain responses. Combined EEG and fMRI studies can thus take advantage of both, the good spatial resolution of fMRI and the good temporal resolution of EEG (Thees et al., 2002; Debener et al., 2005).
Conflict of Interest Statement
The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments
This study was supported by a grant of the Korean Health Technology R & D Project, Ministry for Health, Welfare, and Family Affairs, Republic of Korea (A092106).
References
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Classen, J., Liepert, J., Wise, S. P., Hallett, M. and Cohen, L. G. (1998). Rapid plasticity of human cortical movement representation induced by practice. J. Neurophysiol. 79, 1117–1123. Pubmed Abstract | Pubmed Full Text
Debener, S., Ullsperger, M., Siegel, M., Fiehler, K., von Cramon, D. Y., and Engel, A. K. (2005). Trial-by-trial coupling of concurrent electroencephalogram and functional magnetic resonance imaging identifies the dynamics of performance monitoring. J. Neurosci. 25, 11730−11737. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3286-05.2005 Pubmed Abstract | Pubmed Full Text | CrossRef Full Text
Ericsson, K. A. (2005). Recent advances in expertise research. Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 19, 233–241. doi: 10.1002/acp.1111 CrossRef Full Text
Furley, P., and Memmert, D. (2010). Differences in spatial working memory as a function of team sports expertise: the Corsi Block-tapping task in sport psychological assessment. Percept. Mot. Skills 110, 801–808 |
With a bit of processing of the in-game 3D world, the system renders relevant, real-time color and intensity data for those LEDs, to add 60 degrees to the total functional field of view. This isn't all that demanding from a processing overhead point-of-view, since only a few "pixels" of data have to be sent to the headset.
Xiao says this reduces nausea and improved situational awareness in VR experiences no matter whether movement is controlled by turns of the head, by users' presses of keys, or by an automated, roller-coaster-styled sequence. The nausea-reduction effect surprised Xiao, in particular, because all of what he calls "surprisingly spotty" research on the subject up until that point said the opposite would happen.
"There is some academic research... suggesting that expanding field-of-view [in VR] with a full-resolution, high-fidelity display would increase the sensation of sickness," Xiao said. "The primary reason is that you’re introducing a greater disparity between a person’s visual periphery and their sense of vection—their internal inertia sensors that tell them if they’re actually moving. Increase that and you increase the possibility of nausea."
Since that earlier research had been conducted primarily with larger simulator systems, Xiao and Benko guessed that they might achieve different results with screens closer to the face. The idea of using suggestive LEDs was proposed solely as a way to test a cheaper, lower-energy solution. The duo's first public report stated that 11 out of 14 testers reported reduced nausea when using a "DK2" unit with the periphery hack, which was bolstered by a "counter-vection" processing of visual data when movement was simulated.
These results validated some of the ideas behind the researchers' design.. "When we looked at how the eye works, we discovered the periphery is very low-density compared to the retina," Xiao said. "It doesn’t need as many cells, and the cells in the periphery are more sensitive to light; both of these have specific, evolutionary reasons for existing. We thought, we can take advantage of that to create a low-resolution display that simulates the periphery in much the same way. Because it’s sparse, you won’t be wanting to look at the periphery. You’re still focused on content in the central field, and you can tilt your head around to get a better look."
There's still a disconnect when a sideways, peripheral turn of real-life eyes within a VR headset is greeted only with glowing dots as opposed to real detail. Xiao and Benko acknowledge this in their paper, and suggest smaller-sized LEDs might both improve the effect and make even more sense in an open-glasses, augmented-reality system. Xiao's experience with the system has him hopeful for future applicability in everything from games to productivity applications.
"Think of working on a big project, like sculpting, and offering a perspective on where someone is contextually," Xiao said. "Think of virtual architecture. You can maintain the context of where [users] are through sparse periphery, queues to orient themselves, to know intuitively where they are. Hopefully, they can more quickly understand as they move around the environment what they’re doing and where they’re going."
Xiao wouldn't say if the pair's hardware-hacking efforts had gotten any farther since the project was completed roughly a year ago. Still, he did offer hints about possible future work with Microsoft Research. "Maybe AR's in my near future," he said, without mentioning HoloLens by name. When asked about his findings being made public or open-sourced for other VR developers to test or for hardware tinkerers to create their own LED inserts and appropriate wirings, Xiao could only say that "Microsoft has previously open sourced a few of its projects, such as RoomAlive."
CHI'16, 2016. DOI: 10.1145/2858036.2858212 (About DOIs).The Commerce Department has revealed the list of the 37 major deals signed between U.S. and Chinese companies around President Donald Trump's trip through Asia.
The dollar value of those deals is in excess of $250 billion. Catepillar Boeing, and Goldman Sachs are just some of the notable names on the list of companies that made deals with China, the full list of which is below.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the deals were a good example of Trump helping to build bilateral trade relationships between the two nations.
"American businesses are the most innovative in the world and, when given access, can compete with anyone," Ross said. "I believe these deals can provide a solid foundation for a stronger relationship that is more free, fair, and reciprocal between the U.S. and China."
"It was a great honor for these [deals] to be witnessed by President Trump and President Xi today," Ross added. "A special thank you to our CEO delegation for their hard work in support of this historic event."
Trade has been one of Trump's core priorities in his first year in office. He held talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping during his visit about the multibillion-dollar U.S. trade deficit with China.
According to Chinese customs data, China's trade surplus with the U.S. expanded by 12.2 percent in October from a year earlier to $26.6 billion. For the first 10 months of the year, the total surplus widened to $223 billion. China is the U.S.'s No. 3 export market, just behind Canada and Mexico.
Speaking in Beijing on Thursday, Trump laid the blame for the ballooning deficit on "past administrations for allowing this out-of-control trade deficit to take place and to grow."
The 2017 U.S. CEO Delegation to China deals:
Air Products (APD) Air Products and Yankuang Group Co., Ltd. – $3.5 billion The State of Alaska, Alaska Gasline Development Corporation (AGDC), China Petrochemical Corp (Sinopec), China Investment Corporation (CIC), and Bank of China (BOC) – $43 billion. Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) and COFCO Bell and Reignwood signed an agreement for 60 Bell 505s, valued at $50 million. Boeing and China Aviation Supplies Holding Company -- $38 billion. Caterpillar Inc, and China Energy Investment Corp Cheniere Energy and China National Petroleum Dais Analytic Gouanrui (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd Delfin Midstream and China Gas Holdings – $8 billion Digit group and Gateguard – $100 million Digit group and Foton – $310 million Digit Group and HeDa Group – $1.5 billion The Dow Chemical Company Dow and Mobike Drylet, LLC and Nanjing Hoyo Municipal Utilities Investment and Administration Group – $100 million GE and Juneyao Airlines – $1.4 billion GE and ICBC – $1.1 billion GE and China Datang Group – $1 billion Goldman Sachs China Investment Corporation ("CIC") – $5 billion Honeywell and Oriental Energy Honeywell and Spring Airlines I. M. Systems Group, Inc. (IMSG) and Civil Aviation Telecom Co., Ltd. Qualcomm and Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo – $12 billion SAS and Shenzhen Zhenghong Technology Co. Ltd. – $30 million Stine Seed China and Beijing W. Seed – $10 million TEREX and Xuzhou Handler – $250 million Thermo Fisher Scientific, Beijing Municipal Commission of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing Novogene Bioinformatics Technology Co., Ltd, and Innovent Biologics (Suzhou) Co., Ltd – $35 million U.S. Soybean Export Council (USSEC) and the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Foodstuffs, Native Produce and Animal By-products (CFNA) – $3.4 billion Viroment and Hangzhou Iron and Steel – $800 million Viroment and Guangye Guangdong Environmental Protection Group, Co, LTD. – $100 million Westinghouse Electric Company, Nuclear Power Technology Company (SNPTC) and subsidiaries, State Nuclear Power Engineering Corporation (SNPEC) and State Nuclear Power Automation & Engineering Company (SNPAS)
Non delegation deals:
American Ethane and Nanshan Group – $25 billion Ford Trading Company LLC. And Ford Motor (China) Ltd. – $10 billion GM and SAIC-GM – $2.2 billion. The Montana Stockgrowers signed and Jingdong Century Trade Company (JD.com) – $200 million. Smithfield Food Inc. Smithfield Food Inc and Jingdong Century Trade Company (JD.com) – $1 billion. The state of West and Shenhua corporation – $83 billion
See a descriptions of the major deals struck in China below:A Euro Can Hide Another
Maybe the solution to the Euro crisis cannot be found in politics, economic, finances, but in soccer. The Euro 2012, taking place this month of June in Poland and Ukraine, has offered the opium needed to the peoples of Europe. The final four counts Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Germany, meaning that at least one of the PIGS will be playing the final. How ironic? As claimed by a Portuguese citizen, “We can have a break from the crisis of at least a month with Euro 2012, but I think both are coexisting, the cheerful mood and the crisis,” said Ricardo Teixeira, a 30-year-old doctor. “Our life is completely dominated by the crisis.” Anne Sinclair, a French journalist, was right when titling her latest column “From the euro to the Euro.”
Even though the argument of this article is mainly subjective – I could not find any charts illustrating the European national feeling – the Euro 2012 has offered a feeling of national pride again to deeply hurt nations – and not states. The PIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain – have been at the heart of the media and European attention since 2008. Very little positive movement has emerged from these countries trying to restore clean sheets, growth, and clean up their debts. The main approach has been found in austerity measures. The charts below illustrates the reality of the financial and economic climax of Europe, which do not seem to improve especially with the latest news emerging from the Spanish banking sector and Cyprus.
In a very refreshing article published in the Guardian following the famous Greece-Germany quarterfinal, Helena Smith and Kate Connolly wrote:
Greek fans did not expect their side to overcome Germany in Friday’s European Championship quarter-final, a match so heavy in political and economic significance it was billed in Athens as the “mother of all games” and in Berlin as the “ultimate euro stress test.”
The success of the national soccer team does affect positively the national mood and identity. This statement can be proven right after the victory of France in the World Cup final in 1998. The French team, nicknamed the Black, Blanc, Beur, symbolized the new French identity encompassing all ethnic groups. In the case of the Euro 2012, the mood in Portugal, Spain, and Italy is positive and hopeful. Even though soccer can bring the worst of men – read racism and hooligans – it does bring a nation all together for 90 minutes. The sense of national harmony and unity, which goes beyond political and economic beliefs and ideologies, could very much be the best remedy to a weakened and wounded nation. Pascal Boniface, Director of the excellent French think tank IRIS and football addict, talked extensively on the importance of symbols, which a victory in soccer can offer. When reflecting on the past game between Germany and Greece, he argued that it was about promoting the pride of a country on a soccer field.
The Huffington Post also ran a very charming story on politics and the Euro 2012. On the case of the Spanish team, the authors, Menelaos Hadjicostis and David Rising, wrote:
Fans said the win was redemption for a proud country and maybe – just maybe – a sign that Spain will emerge from its crushing financial chaos intact.
“Spain’s economy is against the ropes, but watching our team struggle, suffer and win against tough opposition inspires us to think that if you work hard you can overcome,” said Diego Escalante, a 28-year-old lawyer. “You can read a lot into this beautiful sport and translate it to life. Preparation and talent make up the base, and teamwork adds the cherry on top. Many Spaniards are talented, excellently prepared and educated to good levels. If we work together we will come through this.
Until one team is crown champion of Europe, the European mood will be at the rhythm of soccer. National soccer songs have never felt so good. Analysts have already killed Europe; they may have made a mistake as the frontrunner for leading Europe could very be one of the PIGS. Who said that the European dream was dead?Democrats Know That Tax Cuts Increase Revenue, So Why Do They Lie About the Facts?
RUSH: The amount of money coming into Washington is not a factor when the Democrats start spending it. Witness Obama. National debt doubled in eight years. It didn’t matter what the tax revenue was. Didn’t matter. He was gonna spend the money anyway.
The Democrats are about punishing achievement and punishing success and saying it’s unjustified, it’s unfair, and it may involve cheating and scandal. They stigmatize success because their voters are people who cannot achieve those things. The Democrats have made sure they don’t even want to try.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Folks, it works the other way too. If you start raising taxes, you’re gonna slow down economic activity, and you’re gonna create fewer taxpayers. All I have to do to prove this is turn your attention Obamacare. What happened with Obamacare? Well, the mandates of this massive new spending, meaning you have to buy a policy, became law. Look at it as a tax. If you don’t pay it, you get a fine, and you have to pay that. You have to pay something. Then there were new tax increases as part of Obamacare that businesses had to pay.
What happened to our economy in the last eight years? It went in the tank. But tax revenue soared because Obama was mandating people buy things that the government was getting the revenue for, and there were tax increases, business and personal, regarding Obamacare. But the economy was in the tank and more and more people were out of work and we had close to, what was it, 94, 95 million Americans not even in the workforce. There’s no way you can grow an economy with that, with that many people not working and not paying taxes, you can have any kind of government solvency, you can’t have any kind of growing economy, which is exactly what the Democrats want, by the way.
Puts more people in more need. And when they don’t care what government spends and you you need this handout or that handout, food stamps or 99 weeks of unemployment, why, the Democrats, they would just as soon pay you to not work for 99 weeks as soon as you get a job. Much better for the Democrats that you don’t work. The more you work, the less dependent on them you are. If this sounds hideous, I’m sorry, it’s true.
If it’s hard to understand lowering tax rates and increasing revenue, let me ask you this. Have you ever seen a store put things on sale? Obviously you have. Why do they do it? Why do they lower the cost of certain things to entice you to come in and buy them? Well, because they’ll sell more of it. The lower the price of an item, the more likely people are to buy it, and the more people that buy it, the more are sold, by lowering the price. When airlines are feeling the heat of competition, what do they do? They lower fares. If one airline lowers ’em, they all have to on the same routes. Or they’ll throw you off, right, or kill your rabbit, but don’t confuse me here.
On a government-run transportation system, what happens? When the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is in a crunch and it’s not collecting enough money, what do they do? They stupidly raise fares. They do not try to get more people riding; they rip off the people who still are by charging them more. Does it ever work? Why don’t they reduce fares? Why don’t they lower the price of going across a bridge or getting on the subway? They never do. Well, I can’t say never. But you know as well as I do that mostly those costs increase. When a business raises the price of an item that you’re used to paying X for, are you more likely to go out and buy it again, or less likely, maybe look for someplace else to get something like it, something close to it?
Look, this is simple math. It’s not even arguable. The Democrats have so corrupted our understanding of economics and productivity that lowering tax rates is now considered to be some kind of sop to the rich. I mean, it’s just profound to me, the damage inflicted on this country by the Democrats in their pursuit of perpetual power.
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RUSH: Hey, by the way, it was just pointed out to me that the left does understand how raising taxes reduces economic activity. How about their desire for increasing cigarette taxes, soda taxes? What are they trying to do? Get you to buy less. They know. They know that higher taxes reduce activity. It’s real simple: If you want more of an activity, lower taxes on it. If you want less of an activity, raise taxes. So if you want more jobs? (chuckles) It’s very simple. You lower payroll taxes. If you don’t want as many jobs, then you raise corporate taxes. It’s that simple, folks. The left is gonna spend the next whatever — six months, however long this takes — lying through their teeth every day about Trump’s tax cuts.
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RUSH: John in Charleston, South Carolina. Welcome to the EIB Network. How are you doing?
CALLER: I’m doing great, Rush. Just did the math. I’m a 26-year listener.
RUSH: Thank you, sir! I appreciate that.
CALLER: I think we need to change the narrative on this “building” and “paying” for a wall. We have to “invest” in the wall. And, of course, the irony is the greatest beneficiary of the “investment” will be sanctuary cities. So we take the federal funds from the sanctuary cities and build the wall — and then to show our benevolence, we send them all a participation trophy.
RUSH: You know, this raises an interesting question. You said that the greatest beneficiaries of an investment in the wall would be sanctuary cities. Seriously, do you mean because there will be fewer people living in these cities, and then fewer demands on the services in them? Is that what you meant?
CALLER: Exactly. The social service cost should plummet.
RUSH: Right. Would you be stunned to learn that sanctuary cities are not interested in that? Just like the Democrat Party’s not interested in tax rate reductions that result in you keeping more of what you earn. Now, there’s a caveat here. The Democrats are never gonna object to you keeping more of what you earn. They’re not that stupid. What they’ll say is, “You’re getting ripped off ’cause the tax cuts are for the rich only, and the Republicans only care about the rich, and Trump only cares about the rich. Trump only cares about corporations like him!”
But the fact is the Democrat Party is threatened… Folks, please don’t doubt me on this. I know it sounds odd, but it’s true. They are threatened by self-reliant people, self-sufficient people. They’re threatened by you being independently self-sufficient. Sanctuary cities? You might think that these people would love to offload some of the burden on their social services. You’d be dead wrong. This is how they define their worth. This is how they define their compassion, by forcing the taxpaying, working citizens of their communities to pay for all of this. That’s how they get to run around and tell people how great they are.
“We’re good people! We care for the disadvantaged!”
That’s why they’re opposed to any measure whatsoever that would reduce the sanctuary population. They’re opposed to it. Why? There are reasons, and they are political and ideological. They’re not economic. Being a sanctuary city, for the people of organize and run it, is a great source of pride. ‘Social justice! Fairness, equality, diversity!” All the things that make liberals great people and make you a schlub. The more pressures and demands on their social services, the better people they are.
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RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, the Reagan tax cuts turned the deepest recession since the Great Depression into the largest 20-year economic boom in American history. The Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and ’86. And the same thing can happen here again. Democrats just cannot let it.ALLEN PARK, Mich. -- When Jimmy Graham was going through his arbitration hearing with the New Orleans Saints, Detroit Lions rookie tight end Eric Ebron was paying attention intently. He knew that eventually, he could be in a similar situation.
Editor's Picks Rothstein: Ebron's goal is to make Michigan proud Eric Ebron's goal is to make the state of Michigan proud the Lions picked him in the first round of the draft, Michael Rothstein writes.
And after it was ruled that Graham was a tight end, not a wide receiver, Ebron changed his Twitter profile from tight end to "pass catcher for the Detroit Lions."
On the day he reported for his first NFL training camp, he explained the switch was not a political statement at all.
"I like it," Ebron said. "I'm just messing around. It's just funny."
He got the idea after he saw another tight end, Jordan Cameron, do something similar, and his agent had nothing to do with his Twitter profile switch.
Although Ebron was drafted as a player who could stretch the field for the Lions with rare tight end speed, he understands part of his role is to block. He said his position coach, Ron Prince, made sure of that.
Lions rookie tight end Eric Ebron says his Twitter bio in which he refers to himself as a "pass catcher" is just him "messing around." Elsa/Getty Images
Ebron has at least a few seasons before he can renegotiate his contract and would be a long way away from any sort of franchise tag situation, but the former North Carolina tight end knows the game is changing and more players like Graham could be coming.
"They still considering him a tight end and that's what we came to play," Ebron said. "But I believe it's evolving. That's really it. Everything evolves. The game evolves. Planet evolves. Things change.
"He's deserving of the money that he got and I thoroughly believe that through and through."
Detroit's rookies were required to report to camp Tuesday. Veterans report Sunday.Kansas City, Kansas, police are investigating a man's shooting death early Friday morning.VIDEOPolice were called to a home near 42nd Street and Booth Avenue just after 4 a.m.Detectives said a man in his 20s was shot twice and died. He was later identified as 35-year-old Gerardo G. Jiminez.Police said when officers arrived at the scene, the person who called 911 was performing CPR on the victim.Investigators said they know there was a disturbance just before shots were fired.No arrests have been made.11833402
Kansas City, Kansas, police are investigating a man's shooting death early Friday morning.
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Police were called to a home near 42nd Street and Booth Avenue just after 4 a.m.
Detectives said a man in his 20s was shot twice and died. He was later identified as 35-year-old Gerardo G. Jiminez.
Police said when officers arrived at the scene, the person who called 911 was performing CPR on the victim.
Investigators said they know there was a disturbance just before shots were fired.
No arrests have been made.
AlertMeWhile I was doing the Paleo Diet last year, an acquaintance suggested that I try eating vegan. In his opinion it was healthier, and he pointed out that some top athletes are vegan.
So last month I finally gave the vegan diet a try, and something happened that I never expected (more on that later).
Although the vegan diet can arguably be healthy, it’s of course possible to eat a very unhealthy vegan diet also. The only requirement is to eliminate animal products; there’s no requirement to eliminate junk food. So I could have eaten nothing but Oreos for the month and my diet would still have qualified as vegan.
But I decided to eat a mostly healthy vegan diet based on the book “Thrive” by Brendan Brazier and monitor the effects. I didn’t do a detailed analysis involving blood tests like I did with the Paleo Diet, but instead just weighed myself and observed how I felt.
The Effects
I felt no different eating vegan than I did eating my regular (also healthy) diet. I felt good off the vegan diet, and I felt good on the vegan diet. No difference.
Sticking to the diet was easier than I’d anticipated. I didn’t feel like I was missing anything important and didn’t have any cravings for meat, milk, butter, or anything else that I’d eliminated. Of course it would have been nice to eat those things, but not because I felt I “needed” them.
I felt less deprived eating vegan than I did eating paleo, but the comparison isn’t really valid because when eating paleo I ate 100% healthy (nothing remotely processed) whereas on the vegan diet I allowed myself to eat some less than 100% healthy food – like Oreos.
According to the scale, I dropped 3 pounds. It’s possible that in normal circumstances I would have lost more than 3 pounds, because when I weighed myself at the start of the month I’d just been mostly sick and not exercising for a week so my weight may already have been down a bit.
Due to the small weight difference and my non-precise fat calipers (that I bought while eating Paleo), I’m not quite sure what types of flesh I lost. I’m going to guess that I lost some fat, some muscle, and maybe a little bit of brain also. Just kidding about the brain.
Ethical Issues
I decided to try eating vegan primarily out of curiosity – to see what it would be like and what effects it would have on my health. However, I think MOST vegans follow their diet primarily for ethical reasons rather than health reasons. So to have a more complete experience of eating vegan, I decided to investigate some of those ethical reasons more thoroughly.
I started by watching the movie “Earthlings” after a couple weeks of eating Vegan (you can watch it for free online at Earthlings.com). The movie has some major flaws (one example: they discount all animal testing as useless, claiming that results of animals tests aren’t relevant to humans). But despite its flaws and its unpleasant images, I think it’s an important movie, because if we have choices about how to eat, dress, etc (as we do), then I think we have a moral obligation to make ourselves aware of what we’re participating in. And “Earthlings” does a good job of making that clear.
After watching the movie, I spent many hours researching how accurately the movie had depicted the reality of how animals are treated. And I spent many hours thinking through what I’d learned, and debating with myself to decide how to eat going forward. For a few weeks there was quite a war happening inside my head. Below I’ll explain some of the issues I was considering.
In the end, I made a decision that I never expected would happen when I first started eating vegan – I decided to stick with it (mostly). I’m not eating 100% vegan now (more on that in a bit), but am pretty close.
Here’s some of the debate that I had with myself:
Meat Is An Unnecessary Luxury
Leo Tolstoy pointed out that if humans can live healthy lives without eating meat (and we can – just look at the millions of vegans who do it), then meat can be considered a luxury. If you like, you can check out this excerpt from an essay Leo wrote on that topic.
Can I justify killing an animal simply so that I can enjoy food that tastes good? I don’t think I can. To put it more broadly: Is it ok for me to cause suffering so that I can enjoy a luxury that I don’t need? I don’t think it is.
But the situation isn’t that simple…
Vegans Kill Animals Too
I learned from the Wikipedia article on Veganism that a guy called Steven Davis pointed out that vegans cause animals to die also. Many small animals (field mice, gophers, etc) are accidentally killed during the production and harvesting of the crops that vegans eat.
If you look at the numbers of animals that are killed, it can be reasonably argued that certain types of omnivorous diets cause less overall deaths than a vegan diet. For example, Steven Davis calculated that killing and eating pasture-raised cows likely results in fewer animal deaths than eating vegan.
“Pasture-raised” is important here, because typical cows sold in grocery stores were fed unnatural diets of grain, and that grain needs to be harvested. So eating grain-fed cows would have killed many more small animal deaths than a vegan diet, in addition to the killing of the cow.
Davis’s argument brings to light an unfortunate reality: We can’t live without causing death and suffering. But that fact doesn’t justify causing suffering willy-nilly. Of course it’s important to minimize the suffering we cause.
I think Davis’s argument is a strong one, and I think it comes pretty close to justifying the eating of some meat. Furthermore, I think slaughterhouse deaths are probably shorter and less painful than the deaths that those same animals would experience in nature at the teeth of their predators.
But again there’s more to the story…
Considering Not Just Death, But Quality Of Life
When we eat meat, I think it is necessary to consider not only the fact that we’re causing animals to die, but also the conditions in which we’re forcing animals to live.
A field mouse lives a happy natural life before it accidentally gets sliced up in a farming combine. A typical beef bull on the other hand goes through dehorning, castration, and branding all without anesthetic, and then spends most of its life on an overcrowded feedlot living and sleeping in a carpet of its own manure, before being slaughtered at about 10% of its natural lifespan.
As Davis pointed out we’re going to cause animals to die whether we eat meat or not. So I think the new question to consider is: “Can I justify causing animals to live miserable lives so that I can enjoy food that tastes good?”
Again I don’t think I can. I think causing them to live terrible lives may be even worse than killing them.
So, if I can find meat from animals that I know:
lived happy lives, and
lived in such a way that they didn’t cause the deaths of other animals
…then is it ok to eat it? I think this is getting closer to the right answer. But there were a few more issues that I considered, including…
Levels Of Consciousness
I think most people would agree that the more advanced/complex a life form is, the worse it is to destroy it. So for example it is worse to kill a dog than it is to kill an ant.
I think what makes us more averse to killing dogs than ants is the fact that we’re aware that dogs have access to a wider range of experience and emotions. To put it another way, I think you could say that a dog is “more conscious” than an ant. And I think we have a natural aversion to destroying consciousness.
So if we’re going to be killing animals, I think it is best to kill less conscious animals (i.e. lower life forms). So if we have a choice between eating a pig and eating a fish, it’s probably best to eat the fish, all else being equal.
Humans Are Designed To Be Omnivores
Before I decided to try eating vegan, my primary justification for eating meat (which I’d never thought about deeply) was that eating meat is just the way things are meant to be. It’s natural. In nature, animals eat other animals. Looking at the human body, there are compelling signs that we’re designed to be omnivores.
Those facts led me to previously conclude that “there’s nothing wrong with killing and eating animals”.
After having thought through all the issues more thoroughly, my current response to those facts is: “Yes, I agree that humans were designed by an at least somewhat random process of evolution to eat meat, but so what? Society has advanced to the point where we do have feasible alternatives to torturing and killing animals in order to survive. And as a species we’ve not only evolved to eat meat… we’ve also evolved to the point where we can reflect on whether our evolutionarily-designed urges lead us to the most ethical and compassionate outcomes, and to the point where we have the freedom to choose our actions based on those reflections.”
The Environment
The production of meat does many times as much harm to the environment as producing an equivalent quantity of plant foods. ’nuff said. You can do some searching online to confirm this for yourself. Environmental harm was another factor that I considered when deciding how to eat.
A Few Other Considerations
And there were a few other issues I considered that I still haven’t mentioned yet. For the sake of brevity, I’ll just list them off here in point form:
Is it morally worse to intentionally kill an animal in a slaughterhouse (or require someone else to do so) than it is to accidentally kill an animal when harvesting crops?
If I wouldn’t kill a pig or a cow in a slaughterhouse myself, can I justify requiring someone else to do it for me?
What is the meaning and implications of Leo Tolstoy’s statement that “as long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields”?
What if there is a God who intended us to eat meat?
As a vegan I might need to drive farther to get my food, and I might buy more plastic (i.e. vegan protein powder comes in big plastic jugs). The plastic and driving both harm the environment, which indirectly causes animals to die.
How extreme is too extreme? For example – How far can one go with attempting to analyze the precise level of harm caused by every action before doing so just becomes ludicrous? Should I wear a mask over my mouth 24/7 to avoid killing bugs or microorganisms by unintentionally inhaling them? (I think not)
The Final Decision
After pondering the issues for a few weeks, these are the foods that I’ve decided to eat going forward:
Anything Vegan – Of course.
Fish – A relatively low life form that lived a “happy” life in its natural environment.
Dairy & Eggs from happy animals – But happy cows & chickens are pretty rare. Even “free-run” chickens usually spend their lives crowded warehouses walking around in their own feces and never see sunlight. So although I’d eat milk and eggs from truly “happy” cows & chickens, they’re so hard to come across that I probably won’t do so anytime soon.
Earthlings Again
Despite its flaws, I have to credit the movie “Earthlings” with motivating me to more thoroughly research the implications of my diet, and to think deeply about how to eat in the future. I knew before watching the movie that I was causing animals to die and live unnatural lives, but I didn’t really know. To put it another way: my head knew, but my heart did not know. The movie helped my heart to know.
I’d encourage anyone who watches the movie not to make any knee-jerk emotional decisions about how to live, but to take the time to do more research and consider all relevant issues.
I Might Have The Wrong Answer
I’m not certain that I have the right answer about the best way to eat, and I don’t think everyone should eat exactly how I’ve decided to. I’m very open to new points that I haven’t considered yet, and to changing my diet in the future. So if you have anything to add to what I’ve written here (or have any disagreements), please let me know in the comments below.Thursday, May 7, 2015
NOVOSIBIRSK, SIBERIA—A stone bracelet unearthed in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia in 2008 is being called the oldest-known jewelry of its kind. Anatoly Derevyanko, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, and the research team believe that the cave’s Denisovan layers were uncontaminated by human activity from a later period. The soil around the two fragments of the jewelry piece was dated with oxygen isotopic analysis to 40,000 years ago. “In the same layer, where we found a Denisovan bone, were found interesting things; until then it was believed these were the hallmark of the emergence of Homo sapiens. First of all, there were symbolic items, such as jewelry, including the stone bracelet as well as a ring, carved out of marble,” Derevyanko told The Siberian Times. Details of the ring have not been released, but the bracelet, fashioned from imported chlorite, is fragile and thought to have been worn only on special occasions by an elite woman or child. “The ancient master was skilled in techniques previously considered not characteristic for the Palaeolithic era, such as easel speed drilling, boring tool type rasp, grinding and polishing with a leather and skins of varying degrees of tanning,” Derevyanko said. Wear near a hole drilled on the outer surface of the bracelet suggests that it may have held a leather strap attached to a heavy charm. This wear also suggests that the bracelet was worn on the right wrist. “The bracelet is stunning—in bright sunlight it reflects the sun’s rays, at night by the fire it casts a deep shade of green,” he said. To read more about our recently discovered relatives, see "Denisovan DNA."I think it's messed up how NewEgg is screwing people on 7900 Series returns.
If you're not exhanging it, and just returning it (to buy antoehr brand 7900 at the same price for example).
They will Deduct $169 from your Credit for the price of the "Promo Codes"
the promo games should not be deducted, they are promo codes from AMD, not newegg.
if you pay $409 for the card, you should get $409 worth of credit, They should not be taking away the value of each game.
the coupons arent in the GPU Box this time around either (least mine werent, they were stapled to the invoice).
So when they ship you a different brand, the warehouse guy should have a note to NOT include a Promo Card with the invoice.
but yeah, the AMD Promo Games, are a GIFT for buying an AMD Card, AMD foots the Bill for those, not NewEgg.
So they |
can last years. Most criminal defendants never make it to trial, instead they take a plea bargain. The plea bargain is presented to a defendant as a panacea. Pulled from their jail cells and placed into a room with the prosecutor, the accused is told that if they go to trial they will most certainly lose. Due to mandatory minimum sentencing laws they face 5-10 years in prison. But if they take the plea deal the sentence will be lowered. The accused knows they cannot afford a proper lawyer. They know the jury will not be selected from his/her community. They are coerced into accepting the plea bargain.
Most black prisoners find themselves being arrested due to circumstances out of their control. The official unemployment rate of the black community is 8.1%. This percentage does not take into account the amount of black Americans that have dropped out of the labor force, or are only working part time due to economic conditions (In regards to the entire country, the U6 unemployment rate, which takes into account people who have stopped looking for work or have been forced into part time work, has been stuck at around 9.7 all year). The jobs that are available don’t pay a living wage. Some turn to selling drugs to make ends meet. Others turn to doing drugs to escape the poverty. These people, and the majority of black Americans who have nothing to do with drugs, are constantly harassed by a heavily militarized police force made up of officers living outside the community they work in. CCTV cameras are set up for surveillance of certain neighborhoods. “Community Policing” is used to encourage white or more affluent gentrifiers to assist the local police force in criminalizing black and brown people. Police are armed to the teeth, routinely brutalize whoever they want with no repercussions, and are trained to shoot first and ask questions later.
The rise of “Broken Windows Policing” ensures the local population is constantly ticketed and subject to search for minor infractions. It means that “stop and frisk” policies are normalized and quota systems are implemented. The police force patrols segregated black neighborhoods confronting, citing, imprisoning, and killing members of the community for offenses like jaywalking, hanging out on stoops, selling lose cigarettes, parking illegally, and more often than not- for simply having black skin.
Just as private prisons and corporations profit off of black prison labor, municipalities and private probation companies profit from the mere existence of a black community. Municipalities with large black populations treat the community as a gold mine and make a large majority of the town’s income via citations and court fees. If defendants convicted of misdemeanors or small infractions cannot pay their fines they are routinely jailed and given the bill for their stay in jail. Take the case of Ferguson, where one woman received a ticket for parking illegally; by the end of her experience she had paid more than 1,000 dollars in fines and spent six days in jail. Another man was approached by police while resting in his car after playing basketball. The police accused him of being a pedophile due to the presence of children at the park, drew their guns on him, searched him and his car, and gave him eight arbitrary citations including a citation for the “false statement” of claiming his name was Mike, instead of Michael. The man later lost the job he had held for years due to these charges. These stories are illustrative of the oppression black communities face. This is the everyday experience of millions across the country. There are hundreds of Fergusons and thousands of Eric Garners and Philando Castiles.
Those who are convicted of a crime and serve out their sentence often return to their communities worse off than before. The few employers that do exist are hesitant to hire someone with a criminal record, welfare benefits are denied to felons, public housing is no longer an option, and all the while the former prisoners must carry with them the trauma they endured while incarcerated.
III. The Conditions of the Incarcerated
This segregated population, occupied by the domestic armed wing of the state, are routinely ripped away from their homes and families and forced to labor under inhuman conditions. A prisoner is stripped of all dignity. Their every waking moment is regulated. They are routinely brutalized by guards both physically and mentally (in the Mother Jones article cited earlier a guard is quoted as threatening rape if prisoners don’t comply). The beatings are savage, often four or five guards thrash a single prisoner. Medical care is severely lacking. The guards do not care whether you live or die- someone will be coming to replace you and higher ups will always cover up the viciousness of their underlings. Literature is censored, letters are read, visitation time is short. Many people are incarcerated far from their homes where their family cannot travel.
One of the most egregious parts of the prison system is the use of solitary confinement. People sent to solitary live in a single room, ranging from 6×9 to 8×10 feet, for 23 hours a day seven days a week. They are allowed one hour for exercise and some inmates don’t even receive this hour every day. Sometimes a small window is cut into the wall. Lights are kept on continuously. In some places the bathroom is just a hole in the center or corner of the cell. Meals come through slots in the door, as does most communication, which is only with their guards. These men and women are denied all physical and almost all social contact with other human beings. Some are there for weeks, others for decades. Human rights groups all over the world (including the United Nations) condemn the use of solitary confinement and yet it continues.
The isolation decimates the psychology of its victims. Prisoners in solitary experience a psychiatric disorder characterized by “hypersensitivity to external stimuli, hallucinations, panic attacks, cognitive deficits, obsessive thinking, paranoia, and a litany of other physical and psychological problems” and demonstrate “anxiety, nervousness, obsessive ruminations, anger, violent fantasies, nightmares, trouble sleeping, as well as dizziness, perspiring hands, and heart palpitations”. Solitary destroys human beings, 80,000 to 100,000 of whom are subject to this torture on any given day in the United States.
The offenses that earned many of these unfortunate men and women their stay in “the hole” include: disobedience, political opinions or political activity, religious beliefs, possessing contraband, testing positive for drug use, reporting abuse by prison guards, using social media, and mental illness. It is the go to method of punishment and retribution. Just this year Chelsea Manning was put in indefinite solitary confinement for an alleged suicide attempt.
IV. The Strike
It has been shown that the conditions of the modern American prison are akin to the conditions of the slave camp. Today’s prison strike is about ending this slave system. The initial call to action states,
Slavery is alive and well in the prison system, but by the end of this year, it won’t be anymore. This is a call to end slavery in America. This call goes directly to the slaves themselves. We are not making demands or requests of our captors, we are calling ourselves to action. To every prisoner in every state and federal institution across this land, we call on you to stop being a slave, to let the crops rot in the plantation fields, to go on strike and cease reproducing the institutions of your confinement. This is a call for a nation-wide prisoner work stoppage to end prison slavery, starting on September 9th, 2016. They cannot run these facilities without us.
Today’s action is a direct attack on white supremacy and the capitalism that thrives off of it. The prison strike is a denial of the profit extraction at the heart of the prison industrial complex. It is the act of throwing one’s body onto the gears of the machine and preventing it from functioning at all. These men and women are risking harsh retaliation by standing against oppression and for human dignity. I urged everyone to join the oppressed against the oppressors today. We on the outside have freedom of movement and communication. Join a solidarity protest. Donate to a prisoner rights group. Educate yourself, your friends, and family about the prison industrial complex. Spread the word about the strike- the media won’t be covering it.
This is a list of solidarity actions by city.
You can donate to the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee here
V. The End
There was a popular slogan that came out of the 2015 Baltimore Uprising: “Resistance is justified when Baltimore is occupied”. It is as true for prisoners as it is for the people of Baltimore. The resistance of the oppressed is the engine of history. We can make no meaningful social progress if we refuse to fight for a better future.
If humanity is to advance then prisons must be left in the past. It is clear that prisons are not used to keep murderers and rapists out of society. Its primary purpose is to extract profit and maintain white supremacy. The majority of prisoners are not criminals, but victims. They are the victims of a system that has abandoned communities of working people of every color to unemployment, debt, and drug use. They are victims of a system that sees black bodies as less than human, that occupies their communities, and kills their sons and daughters. They are victims of a system whose sole purpose is to extract profit no matter how much it costs in human misery and environmental destruction.
We can punish murderers and rapists. We can keep them from committing crimes again by separating them from society. We are capable of building institutions that rehabilitate members of our communities that, for any number of reasons, must be rehabilitated.
Keeping human beings locked in cages on an industrial scale is barbarism. The system that profits from this barbarism has zero credibility. Prison is but one example of capitalism’s savagery. It must go to where it belongs- the ash heap of history. Today it is one step closer.
In solidarity,
J.R. Murray
[Image: During the Attica Uprising, inmates wearing cloaks and football helmets, some of them with makeshift weapons, wait to negotiate their demands with state officials].
Further Reading
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis
If They Come In The Morning: Voices of Resistance by Angela Davis
Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault
From Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga Taylor
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
America’s Reconstruction by Eric Foner
Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur
Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women by Victoria Law
Inside This Place, Not of It, Narratives of Women’s Prisons by Robin Levi & Ayelet Waldman
AdvertisementsTwo Reuters journalists jailed in Myanmar for obtaining “important secret papers” were arrested just after being handed rolled papers by police officials in a restaurant to which they had been invited for dinner, their family members say.
The journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who worked on Reuters coverage of ongoing state-sponsored violence against Rohingya Muslims in the western state of Rakhine, were arrested on December 12 during a meeting with two police officials over dinner.
Authorities said they were “arrested for possessing important and secret government documents related to Rakhine State and security forces.”
Speaking at a news conference on Thursday, the family members of the two, who met the detainees in prison a day earlier, suggested that police may have fabricated a case for arresting them.
Wa Lone’s wife, Pan Ei Mon, said her husband told her that he and Kyaw Soe Oo had a meeting at a restaurant with two police officers they had not met before.
“They took the two rolled papers and paid the bill and went out from the restaurant,” she said. “They were immediately grabbed by around seven or eight policemen who handcuffed them and arrested them. He told me that.”
“Wa Lone and [the] other [journalist] didn’t know what was inside the paper,” she said.
Journalists hold a protest to demand the release of Reuters reporters in Pyaye, Myanmar, December 27, 2017. (Photo by AFP)
Nyo Nyo Aye, Kyaw Soe Oo’s sister, also said that her brother had given her a similar account of the incident. “As he didn’t commit any crime, he believes he will be released soon,” she said.
The journalists, however, were remanded in custody for another 14 days at the request of police on Wednesday.
The two, who had been held in a police compound for the past 16 days, were taken to Yangon’s Insein prison later, a notorious jail that was once run by Myanmar’s former junta.
Meanwhile, some 100 journalists, lawyers, and farmers took to the streets in the town of Pyay, north of Yangon, to demand the release of the two journalists.
Myanmar’s government has said the policemen who met with the reporters have also also arrested, but it has not provided any further information about them.
The officers had reportedly worked in Rakhine State, where the military, over the past three months, has engaged in rapings, killings, arbitrary arrests, and mass arson attacks to destroy houses in predominantly-Rohingya villages.
Rohingya women line up at a relief center at the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh, November 28, 2017. (Photo by AFP)
Rohingya people, who according to the UN are “the world’s most persecuted minority,” have been subject to state-sponsored violence since late last year. A crackdown accompanied by a military siege has been ongoing since then. That violence intensified on August 24, and more than 655,000 Rohingya people have fled the violence to Bangladesh ever since.
More than 6,700 Rohingya Muslims have also been killed in the month after the crackdown intensified in late August, according to aid agency Doctors Without Borders.
United Nations Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee, who has been denied access by the Myanmarese government to the country, also criticized Myanmar’s crackdown on the media. She said the authorities were creating “a national gag” that would prevent journalist from reporting what they see.
“That will have consequences on the general public too; people will not be able to speak as freely,” Lee said on Thursday.
Lee had been due to visit the Southeast Asian country in January to assess the human rights situation there, including widespread abuses against the Rohingya Muslims. She has said that Myanmar’s non-cooperation indicates that it has something “terribly awful” to hide in Rakhine.AN EXCLUSIVE City development of £1m apartments has been scandalised by the revelation that someone lives there.
More than three-quarters of the Renzo Piano-designed Cube Point apartments overlooking the Thames are up for sale after the discovery that bond trader Joseph Turner has been living on the premises for long as six months.
Prince Rashad Al Maddah said: “This used to be a lovely mixed-use residential and high-end retail complex.
“You could stand out on your balcony and hear nothing but the gentle hum of your property accumulating value before returning to your suite at the Dorchester.
“But the other weekend I noticed a man dodging furtively into the elevator like he actually knew the place.
“Turns out he’s been living there full-time. Food in the cupboards, sleeping in the bed, showering, the lot.
“He may as well be a squatter.”
Turner said: “I know I’ve broken the service agreement, but my place in Dubai’s tied up in my divorce, the apartment in Paris is being sublet and the house in the Cotswolds was set on fire for tax reasons.
“If it helps at all I am a non-dom.”Sorry, this content isn't available on your device.
Watch the full interview above - skip to 10 minutes in to get to the start
Theresa May has taken questions in her first ever Facebook Live session with the voting public, in an event hosted by ITV News. Around 40,000 comments were posted during the Q&A, with the prime minister asked questions on a range of subjects by ITV News Political Editor Robert Peston, including:
The NHS
Fox hunting
Arms sales to Saudi Arabia
Brexit
Legalising cannabis
Her diabetes
On the NHS, Mrs May was asked if she would be willing to put more money into the service on top of what has already been pledged. She said half a trillion pounds was being spent in the five years from 2015, adding: "We need to make sure the money we are spending is being spent as effectively as possible with an absolute focus on patient care."
The prime minister denied claims the NHS was being "sold off" and said the only way to ensure a strong health service was to have a strong economy. She said: “Labour’s nonsensical economic policy would wreck the economy – that would mean less money for the NHS in future.”
Mrs May admitted there was "more to do" to when it came to tackling mental health issues within the NHS. She said she wanted to remove the stigma around mental health, bring legislation up to date and ensure all primary and secondary state schools have members of staff trained in how to deal with mental health issues.
The issue of disability payments was also raised by many questioners. The decision to replace the Disability Living Allowance with Personal Independence Payments has faced heavy criticism, but Mrs May said the reforms were "part of trying to ensure that we focus payments on those who most need it, those who are most vulnerable". She added: "There are a number of issue people raise around PIPs. One is about the assessment process and we have been making changes in that to make that a better process for people. We want to try to help those disabled people able to get into the workplace to do so." In the first question, Mrs May was asked about the help her government was providing for young people. She said this election "is about young people" and that the Government was using schemes like "Help to Buy" to benefit them. Among those to question Mrs May was Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who highlighted a range of issues including housing, policing and the NHS and asked why the prime minister would not debate with him. Mrs May said that it was more important to take questions directly from voters. "I don’t think people get much out of seeing politicians having a go at each other," she said.
The issue of British arms sales to Saudi Arabia was raised on Facebook, with one questioner asking why the UK was still selling them to the Saudi government when there was evidence of them being used against civilians in Yemen. Mrs May replied that there were strict rules surrounding arms sales and that where there have been reports of civilians being killed and injured, the UK has asked the Saudi government to investigate. But she said the partnership with the Saudi government was an important one for the UK, saying: "Our partnership with Saudi Arabia has helped to keep lives safe here in the UK."
Asked about proposals to bring back fox hunting, Mrs May said she had "always supported foxhunting" and that there would be a "free vote" in Parliament on the issue if the Conservatives won the election. She later admitted she had never been fox hunting. Mrs May acknowledged fox hunting was something people "do feel strongly about" but said there are "many other issues" people will look at when they go to vote on June 8.
On the EU, Mrs May was asked about guaranteeing the rights of EU nationals living in the UK, but said her top priority was the rights of British citizens. "It’s important that we are able to guarantee the rights of EU citizens living here, but I also want to see the rights of UK citizens living in the remaining 27 EU countries being guaranteed as well," she said.
The subject of a second Scottish independence referendum was also raised, with the prime minister saying it was not right to discuss the issue at the moment and urging the Scottish National Party to focus on Brexit. "The UK should be working together not pulling apart," Mrs May said.
Here is what Theresa May had to say on:
Personal Independence Payments
Legalising cannabis
School funding
Mrs May also said:
she was against reducing the voting age to 16
she would try to simplify the system of train fares to give people easier access to the cheapest fares
she would not support a burka ban as it should be up to women to choose how they dress
she will serve a full term as prime minister if the Conservatives win the election
The prime minister laughed off a question suggesting former Ukip leader Nigel Farage should get a knighthood. She also discussed how she coped with her diabetes. Mrs May, who is Type-1 diabetic, said she injects herself with insulin "four or five times a day". "You just get into a routine," she said. "The crucial thing to me is being a diabetic doesn’t stop you from doing anything."
In the final question, Mrs May confirmed if she was re-elected on June 8 she would serve a full term as prime minister and would see through the Brexit negotiations, which are due to conclude within the next two years. "If I am elected I will certainly serve my full term," she said. "I am pretty certain it (Brexit) can be done in those two years. "A new parliament will take us through to 2022 which is three years beyond the 2019 and I will be round."Ottawa Fury FC announced Wednesday that assistant coaches Bruce Grobbelaar and Jed Davies will return to the club for the 2017 season where the club will makes its debut in the United Soccer League (USL).
Grobbelaar has been part of every season in club history since signing on at the Goalkeeper Coach in August 2014. The legendary Liverpool goalkeeper has brought a wealth of experience to the club making his presence known through the success and development of all goalkeepers since the club’s inception.
“To have someone of his caliber re-signing is huge for the club and myself personally,” said GM and head coach Paul Dalglish. “Bruce is a real character off the field, he livens up the locker-room and the players love him. On the field, his resume speaks for itself. The guy has won so many trophies and he probably forgot more about football than I’ll ever know, so to have him back is huge.”
The most decorated goalkeeper in the history of English Football, Grobbelaar made 816 professional appearances that also included 24 appearances with the Vancouver Whitecaps during the 1979-80 season.
Born in Durban, South Africa, Grobbelaar, 59, was raised in neighboring Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and would go on to be capped 36 times from 1980-1998. He would turn to coaching in 1999 upon his return to South Africa starting with the Seven Stars. He was also twice briefly player-manager of Zimbabwe’s National Team.
Davies returns for his second season with the club after signing with Fury FC for the Fall Season of 2016. Prior to joining Fury FC, the 28-year-old Welshman worked at Oxford University alongside Mickey Lewis and Jon Collins from 2013 to 2014 before going on to work with Magnus Pehrsson, Manager of the Estonia National team from 2015 during their European group qualification matches. Davies also worked for the Iran National Team in preparation for their 2015 Asian Cup fixture against UAE.
“Jed is very important to me, he’s the first member of staff that I brought in that wasn’t here already and he’s a huge asset for us,” said Dalglish. “He’s an academic when it comes to football. He does a lot of analysis for us, not just on ourselves, but on the opposition as well. The attention to details that he brings along with his level of intelligence is key for us, so I’m delighted to have him back.”
Davies was one of the company founders of Inspire Football Coach Education UK, a coach education company that has featured the likes of Dick Bate, Raymond Verheijen, FC Barcelona's Albert Capellas, England rugby's Brian Ashton and many other reputable presenters.
He also published two books, one in 2013: Coaching the Tiki-Taka Style of Play and one in 2016: The Philosophy of Football: In Shadows of Marcelo Bielsa.What comes to mind when you think about cyber criminals? Hackers in a basement, perhaps a cafe? You may be surprised to learn that cyber crime is just as organized as your business, perhaps better in some cases. In the past year there has been increasing revelations about the sophisticated business models and expert support that cyber criminals employ. This means that cyber crime is a fully organized black market industry.
Cyber criminals from this underground economy have one distinctive target and that’s your data. The credential thefts, DDoS attacks, and malware installations all are attempts for gaining access to your data and selling it. Now with cybercrime-as-a-service offerings to anyone willing to pay. Insiders at your organization may have even deeper motives than just access to data, they may want disruption, not the positive kind either. The Senior Vice President of McAffee Labs, Vincent Weafer, has stated that:
“They even had a ready and efficient black market for selling the stolen credit card information, including an anonymous, virtual-currency-based point-of-sale payment system. Raw materials, manufacturing, marketplace, transaction support — it’s all there for thieves to use.”
In recent times you may have heard of this black market referred to as the “Dark Net” where all the shady data dealing happen in the modern age. Your data assets are a hot commodity in the dark net markets. All sorts of people are willing to pay for the data. The profit motive can be one of the most relentless motivations currently. So you know cyber criminals will stop at nothing to get the assets they need to serve themselves or their customers very well. Let’s identify some of the critical data assets you should be protecting.
Data Assets at Risk
While technology has had an amazing effect on streamlining operations and work in business and people’s personal lives, there is a great risk in using technology. Business operations and people’s lives depend on the security of information. So what data assets are most important to darknet cyber criminals? The obvious one is financial/personal data, which includes credit card information, bank information, transactions, vendors and clients.In the medical sector, patient health records and data are more valuable than their financial data at times. So depending on your sector the definition of personal could change. There is also operations data, which includes any information about your employees, contracts, locations, shipments, etc. Anything material to the operations of your business. Data breaches that impact your operations data can have serious ramifications and may put your organization to a grinding halt. These are the two most sought after types of data.
If there is any type of data breach and your data assets are seized then you face multiple layers of repercussions. These repercussions include direct financial loss from theft, brand depreciation, financial loss from halted operations, and a general loss of confidence from future customers or clients. The impacts of a data breach can be felt within and outside the organization.
Motives of Cyber Criminals
Cyber Criminals can have a variety of motives. Since there is now an industry and business model for cyber crime it would be naive to assume it is for low level financial gain. Sometimes it may be just customer service they are providing. Imagine a scenario where an employee was not happy with working at your company, while on two week notice he seeks out some way to leave a lasting impression. So instead of doing anything obvious himself, he decides to hire a cyber crime organization to install ransomware on your networks, forcing you to pay for restoration of your data. Your customers find out about the breach and you lose business. He leaves, and the cyber criminals have made out with a nice paycheck. In this scenario it was an insider contracting cyber criminals in a business agreement. So the motivation can be sabotaged by way of an insider or the basic profit motive that comes with being in business. Insider threat is an ever present factor here that contributes to your data asset risks.
Cyber criminals have formed organized businesses and an established industry in the dark net or underground economy. Their forces and motivations can be just as ambitious as what you would find from any other business. They want just one thing to keep themselves and their clients happy, your data. Now more than ever it is important to recognize your data as an asset, any breach of your data can put your business and the lives of those engaged with it at risk. How far will you go to keep your data safe in today’s world of high risk information technology?“They give lip service to international broadcasting, but it’s an afterthought.”
A report Mr. Wimbush helped write, based on interviews with more than 30 public diplomacy experts, said government international broadcasting should be “rebuilt from the ground up” so that it is fully aligned with foreign policy objectives. The report was financed by the Smith Richardson Foundation, a Connecticut-based group that provides grants to conservative causes but also to centrist and liberal organizations like the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute.
Founded in 1942 as a part of the Office of War Information, the Voice of America started with a goal of countering Nazi and Japanese propaganda. It was widely credited with helping to end the Cold War by providing unfiltered news to dissidents and countering communist propaganda in the Soviet Union and Soviet-backed countries.
Image David Ensor announced his resignation last week as the director of Voice of America. Credit Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But the agency has been in decline since that time, pulled between providing credible news and supporting American policy. In 2013, Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state, said that the Broadcasting Board of Governors was “practically defunct in terms of its capacity to be able to tell a message around the world.”
And in the Facebook and Twitter era, some have even asked if the Voice of America, whose budget is about $200 million a year, is still relevant.
Mr. Ensor pointed to a string of successes during his time at the agency. It has expanded its reach through social media and mobile and has created new television programming in Russian, Ukrainian, Persian, Mandarin, Burmese and Creole, among other languages. According to survey data prepared for the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the Voice of America’s international radio, television and online audience has reached 172 million people a week, an increase of 49 million during his tenure.
“The V.O.A. is keeping itself renewed and refreshed to face the challenges of today’s fast-changing media environment,” said Mr. Ensor, who added that his resignation was not related to uncertainties on the board.
Obama administration officials said the Voice of America and its sister agencies were vital to the nation’s diplomatic efforts.Two women were taken to hospital with serious injuries on Tuesday after a pickup truck crashed into a parked rental truck they were getting equipment from, paramedics say.
It happened at about 11 a.m. in the 100 block of Calderwood Way in Barrhaven, a residential street off Jockvale Road near the Stonebridge Golf & Country Club.
The two women were unloading equipment when a pickup truck crashed into their truck.
The women were dragged about three metres, paramedics said.
A 34-year-old woman was found sitting beside the driver's side door of the rental truck with obvious leg and head injuries, paramedics said.
Her leg was trapped under the rental until bystanders lifted the truck to release her leg. She was taken to hospital in serious condition.
A 30-year-old woman suffered head and rib injuries and was also taken to hospital in serious condition.
The driver of the pickup truck, a 34-year-old woman, suffered an arm injury and was taken to hospital in stable condition.
Ottawa police are investigating, along with Ontario's Ministry of Labour.How big is a City Block?
A couple of Acres is a lot of land, and I hope this gives you a perspective of just how big they are.
City Blocks differ in size, but the typical square city block reaches 16 or 17 per mile, or 2.21 to 2.50 Acres.
Engineers use a typical city block as 100,000 sq. ft. for calculation estimates, which is about 17 blocks per mile or 2 1/4 acres.
(A football field is 300 feet by 160 feet, which is 1.1 Acres.)
City Blocks per Mile length of City Block Square Feet of City Block Total Acres of City Block 15 352 123,904 2.84 16 330 108,900 2.50 17 311 96,465 2.21 18 293 86,044 1.98 19 278 77,225 1.77 20 264 69,696 1.60
Portland Oregon's downtown city block is 68,000, while Chicago's uses a double block size of 217,000. The average city has from 15 to 20 blocks per mile, which range from a 264' to 352' frontage which is usually a square, or about 69,000 to 123,000 sq. ft. or 1.60 to 2.84 AcresOn May 8, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 5th grader Aarin Moody reached into his pocket to retrieve a “late note” from his mother and a Nerf gun foam “bullet” fell out. Officials at the Atlantic City School District categorized the toy bullet as a “self-constructed weapon” because “it had a toothpick stuck in it.”
As a result, Moody received “a five-day, in-school suspension and a notation on his permanent record stating that he brought a makeshift weapon to school.”
According to Fox News, the 5th grader put toothpicks in the Nerf bullets “so they would stick to the ground when he fired them from his Nerf gun.” Moody said he did not put the toothpicks in to cause mischief.
The 5th grader said, “They want me to like say that I did it on purpose, [that] I put it in my pocket to hurt someone.”
The school initially told Moody’s mom “her son would be expelled.” The school’s weapons policy bars “Anything readily capable of lethal use or inflicting serious bodily injury.”
Moody’s mom said, “her son suffers from attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and has suffered in the past from anger management issues.” But she believes her son’s suspension was the result of “a complaint [she filed] against the board claiming harassment issues from a supervisor during her time as a substitute custodian in the district.”
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.The Walt Disney Co. on Thursday said it would buy selected assets of 21st Century Fox, in the latest multibillion-dollar deal of 2017. Also on Thursday, details began to emerge over the Republican tax deal, which includes cutting corporate taxes and a plan to repatriate the untaxed profits of U.S. firms held overseas.
The two events are separate, but point to a longstanding issue in the economy, which is that while economic growth has been steady and solid, companies are using non-organic means to boost their earnings and share prices, a method that may grow less effective with time, and which the tax bill—should it be signed into law—may not alleviate.
The Disney DIS, -0.08% acquisition of Fox FOXA, +0.26% comes at a time when the amount of cash that S&P 500 SPX, -0.08% companies have on hand is at historic highs, totaling 12% of assets, according to Goldman Sachs data.
Read: J.P. Morgan economist says Trump tax plan will create one-tenth the jobs Jamie Dimon says
The passage of the tax bill would boost that total, and the acquisition “shows no one knows what to do with their money,” said Luis Maizel, senior managing director at LM Capital Group, referring to companies. He noted that Disney also announced a $10 billion stock buyback program when it made the acquisition news official.
“There’s no investment in brick and mortar, and if the tax bill does bring cash back, no one will be using it to build a new factory; there will be no rise in demand for steel or anything like that.”
Maizel speculated companies would use any new money in the way they have been, by returning cash to shareholders, either in the form of dividends or buybacks, or to make acquisitions. “It won’t mean anything for organic growth, and little by little the bubble will keep getting bigger.”
The government has claimed the tax bill would spur demand and accelerate hiring, something CEOs have disputed. President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, said the plan would stimulate the economy, and that businesses could hire more and pay better wages with the money they save. However, when a room full of CEOs were asked whether they would make capital expenditures if the corporate tax rate was cut, only a few put their hands up, to Cohn’s chagrin.
VIDEO: CEOs asked if they plan to increase their company's capital investments if the GOP's tax bill passes.
A few hands go up.
"Why aren't the other hands up?" Gary Cohn asks.#WSJCEOCouncil pic.twitter.com/TD2oAlN27S — Natalie Andrews (@nataliewsj) November 14, 2017
The last time there was an one-time tax on the foreign profits of U.S. companies—following the Homeland Investment Act of 2004, which created a repatriation “tax holiday” with an effective rate of 5.25%, as opposed to 35%—buyback activity surged, jumping 84% in 2004 and 58% in 2005, according to Goldman data.
Corporate financial officers have already been spending their money in this way. Buybacks by companies in the S&P 500 rose 15.2% in the third quarter, while dividend payouts hit a record in that same period.
“The tax plan is unlikely to lead to rapid growth and the current state of the economy doesn’t suggest the plan is needed,” wrote Jim McDonald, chief investment strategist at Northern Trust, in a November report. He implied that the primary driver behind the plan was more political than economic necessity. “Republicans are in desperate need of a legislative win and the plan supports their platform.”
Read more: Share buybacks spike—dropping a strong hint at what CEOs plan to do with tax savings
Companies repurchasing their own stock can lift profitability, as profits are measured in earnings per share and reducing the number of shares will have the same mathematical impact as increasing the earnings itself.
Such activity means little for organic economic growth, however, when compared with the stimulative effect of capex spending. In addition, there is data showing a focus on shareholder returns over capital expenditures can lead to share price underperformance.
Since the start of 2016, according to data from Goldman Sachs, companies deploying funds for capex and research and development have outperformed the S&P 500 by 4.4%. They have also outperformed “total cash return” stocks, a trend the investment bank said was likely to continue.
Chart courtesy Goldman Sachs
Goldman expects S&P companies to increase their total cash use by 6% in 2018, “as uncertainty fades.” Of the $2. |
ian directed his generals Arbogast and Bauto to help drive the Goths back into Thrace, which they successfully accomplished by the summer of 381. Theodosius meanwhile left for Constantinople, where he stayed. After years of war, the defeat of two Roman armies and still locked in stalemate, peace negotiations were opened.[88][89][90]
Peace and consequences [ edit ]
Richomeres and Saturninus conducted the negotiations for the Romans and peace was declared on 3 October 382.[91] By then, the Gothic commanders from Adrianople were gone; Fritigern, Alatheus and Saphrax are never again mentioned in the ancient histories and their ultimate fates are unknown. Speculation ranges from death in battle to overthrown as the price for peace.[92][93]
In the peace, the Romans recognized no overall leader of the Goths and the Goths were nominally incorporated into the Roman Empire. The Romans gained a military alliance with them as foederati: the Goths would be drafted into the Roman army and in special circumstances could be called upon to field full armies for the Romans. What differed from established Roman practice was that the Goths were given lands inside the Roman Empire itself, in the provinces of Scythia, Mœsia and possibly Macedonia, under their own authority and were not dispersed. This allowed them to stay together as a unified people with their own internal laws and cultural traditions. To seal the agreement, Theodosius threw the Goths a large feast.[94][95]
Themistius, a Roman orator and imperial propagandist, while acknowledging that the Goths could not be militarily defeated, sold the peace as a victory for the Romans who had won the Goths over to their side and turned them into farmers and allies. He believed that in time the barbarian Goths would become steadfast Romans themselves like the barbarian Galatians had before them.[96]
“ For just suppose that this destruction was an easy matter and that we possessed the means to accomplish it without suffering any consequences, although from past experience this was neither a foregone nor likely conclusion, nevertheless just suppose, as I said, that this solution lay within our power. Was it then better to fill Thrace with corpses or with farmers? To make it full of tombs or living men? To progress through a wilderness or a cultivated land? To count up the number of the slaughtered or those who till the soil? To colonize it with Phrygians and Bithynians perhaps, or to live in harmony with those we have subdued.[97][98] ”
“ All that [military] ingenuity of ours has proved useless; only your [Theodosius'] advice and your judgment provided an invincible resistance and the victory you won through these inner resources of yours was finer than it would have been had you prevailed by arms. For you have not destroyed those who wronged us but appropriated them. You did not punish them by seizing their land but have acquired more farmers for us. You did not slaughter them like wild beasts but charmed away their savagery just as if someone, after trapping a lion or a leopard in nets, were not to kill it but to accustom it to being a beast of burden. These fire-breathers, harder on the Romans than Hannibal was, have now come over to our side. Tame and submissive, they entrust their persons and their arms to us, whether the emperor wants to employ them as farmers or as soldiers.[99][100] ”
Despite these hopes, the Gothic War changed the way the Roman Empire dealt with barbarian peoples, both without and within. The Therving Goths would now be able to negotiate their position with Rome, with force if necessary, as a unified people inside the borders of the Empire and would transform themselves into the Visigoths. At times they would act as friends and allies to the Romans, at other times as enemies. This change in Rome's relationship with barbarians would lead to the sack of Rome in 410.[101][102]
The Gothic War also affected the religion of the Empire. Valens had been an Arian Christian and his death at Adrianople helped pave the way for Theodosius to make Nicene Christianity the dominant form of Christianity for the Roman people. The Goths, like many barbarian peoples, converted to Arianism.[103]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ [19] Peter Heather finds it unconvincing that Valens, who wanted the Goths as auxiliaries in his army, would have them disarmed. ^ [43] The exact location is unknown but it is surmised that it was between Tomi and the mouth of the Danube, or perhaps nearer to Marcianopole. ^ [60] "three hundred soldiers from each legion" ^ [80] What happened is disputed. Our two primary sources for the event, Ammianus and Zosimus, give differing accounts and dates. The account given here is Kulikowski's reading of the sequence of events. ^ [87] The exact cause is disputed. Peter Heather speculates the split happened because the combined Gothic forces were simply too hard to feed.
References [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ]
Primary sources
Ammianus Marcellinus, The History, XXXI.
Secondary sourcesWashington (CNN) House Democratic leaders dealt a blow to President Barack Obama's free trade agenda Wednesday by backing an alternative measure that has no chance of becoming law -- but complicates passage of a bill Obama needs in order to secure what would be one of the largest trade deals in history.
On Thursday, the House Ways and Means Committee will decide whether to grant Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership a vote in Congress without amendments, a condition that trade negotiators see as crucial to getting the 11 other countries involved -- particularly Japan -- to finalize the deal. The TPP has broad bipartisan support, and Obama has pushed the agreement as being good for the American middle class.
But liberals, including labor unions and environmental groups, bitterly oppose the trade agreement, which they fear will hurt jobs in the U.S.
So Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and the rest of her leadership team have decided to back a separate version that Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan is set to introduce Thursday.
Read MoreNORMAN, Okla. – I don’t smoke. I don’t vape. I’m no fan of inhaling anything other than air, except for maybe the occasional helium huff.
Nevertheless, I know people who smoke, who vape, and who have made the switch to vaping. I also see the plight of the millions of smokers who are unable to severe their ties to combustible tobacco.
It’s sad, because they know the path they’re on, where it leads to, but they just can’t break free. The stench, the cost, the health problems, smokers are very aware of their lot.
Which is why the ridiculous, dehumanizing, federally-subsidized shaming campaigns do no good whatsoever. They just make smokers feel like crap for being unable to quit.
Contrary to what these inveterate scolds may believe, smokers are painfully aware of what they’ve gotten themselves into. And usually on the heels of those mindless, Puritanical television commercials that depicts a decrepit old man hooked up to an iron lung is the obligatory chiding about smokers not using a nicotine patch or some other lame cig substitute as a viable way to quit. The 42 million smokers in the United States are subjected to this, constantly.
So, in the midst of this campaign of fear and shame, vaping moonwalks in. A new, “cool” way to smoke, except for the fact that…there is no smoke.
There is no combustion going on whatsoever. Through water vapor, the nicotine connoisseur imbibes their stimulant in the safest way possible, and in style!
Smokers are stampeding to the local vape shop to see what the craze is all about, and they’re finding that they can finally tell the cigarette companies to go to hell as they toss their stinking poison in the garbage forever and buy an endlessly customizable, and endlessly “cool”, vape gadget. A normal person would look at vaping and think, “Great! A real solution to smoking! The anti-smoking crowd must be ecstatic!”
That person would be wrong. The Tobacco Prohibitionists, along with public health officials, have had a reaction similar to that of a cat when encountering a cucumber, equally as rational, and have opposed vaping at every turn.
It’s just as grim as you’d expect. They say things like, “it’s just as bad as tobacco!”
Yeah, tell that to former smokers who now vape, jerk. And now, in a perverse distortion of reality, the Puritanical tight-asses behind the tobacco shaming campaigns are joining with Big Tobacco in their objection to vaping. Satan, somewhere, is smiling.
The irrational hatred of vaping by the same morons that seek to banish combustible tobacco from the face of God’s Creation seems to stem more from “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” Mencken’s accurate definition of Puritanism. They’re not smoking, but they look like they’re smoking! And they’re enjoying it!
Nothing infuriates the tobacco prohibitionist crowd more than that. Consuming nicotine shouldn’t be enjoyable, in their eyes.
It should be a hassle, and uncool in the extreme. It’s the same crowd that agitated for the $5-a-pack tax in New York, which generated a massive black market in “loosies”, cigarettes sold individually and illegally and which led to Eric Garner’s choke death by NYPD cops policing that ridiculous experiment in social-engineering-by-decree.
In the perfect, sterile, Hell on Earth of the Neo-Puritan prigs, no one would smoke, no one would drink, and no one would get high (among an endless list of other prohibited activities). It would be all sunshine, rainbows, and self-flagellation. It reminds me of a quote from Albert Jay Nock, writing on the type of civilization most likely to tolerate Prohibition:
“The ideals and instruments of Puritanism are simply unworthy of a free people, and, being unworthy, are soon found intolerable. Its hatreds, fanaticisms, inaccessibility to ideas; its inflamed and cancerous interest in the personal conduct of others; its hysterical disregard of personal rights; its pure faith in force, and above all, its tyrannical imposition of its own Kultur: these characterize and animate a civilization that the general experience of mankind at once condemns as impossible, and as hateful as it is impossible.”
“An inflamed and cancerous interest in the personal conduct of others.” I know of one or two public officials this could describe. We are fortunate enough to not live in their Puritanical fantasy, but that won’t stop them from attempting to implement it.
And so, a message for those too blinded by their Prohibitionist fantasy to see the solution to the problem of combustible tobacco that is right in front of their noses: get the hell out of the way of the vaping revolution and let it solve the problem that you’ve failed to solve. Variations on “Laissez Faire!”, and “From my cold, dead hands!”
Vaping doesn’t need “regulation”, which means it doesn’t need some cabal of Washington bureaucrats dividing up the vaping market to favored cronies. Big Tobacco has their own E-cigs, and I have it on very good authority that they suck. Royally.
No one would buy that crap unless they had to, which is probably the idea behind the regulatory push. Let the vaping industry breathe the free air of the free market, so more former smokers might be able to also breathe the free air again.WINDSOR, Ont. — A 14-year-old Windsor girl is in critical condition and her family is seeking answers after a golf club punctured her skull during a physical education class.
Madison Arseneault was running with her Gordon McGregor Public School gym class at the city-operated Ford Test Track park on May 25 when she fell on a sawed-off golf club that punctured and fractured the back of her skull, according to a lawyer representing her family.
The teen tripped on a wire that was strung from the golf club to assist in marking chalk lines on a soccer field, said lawyer Jennifer Bezaire.
With the club still impaled in her head, Arseneault was rushed to Windsor Regional Hospital and later transferred to the pediatric critical-care unit of Victoria Hospital in London, Ont.
Early investigations suggest city workers had been using sawed-off golf clubs stuck in the ground with low-hanging wire connected to each one to mark long straight chalk lines on the grass infield, Bezaire said.
City officials confirmed the incident.
“Our thoughts and prayers are certainly with the girl and family, but because of litigation we won’t be saying anything further,” said spokesman Jason Moore.
Arseneault is awake, but heavily medicated in hospital, Bezaire said.
“Madison’s family is devastated and has been at her bedside around the clock since this horrible incident occurred,” she said. “They want to know what happened, but right now their priority is Madison’s well-being.”
How much the girl will recover is unknown, but she is likely to need “extensive rehabilitation” and may be facing some paralysis given the golf club entered her brain, Bezaire said.
“It’s just a horrible accident. The parents are looking for answers on what happened and how the golf clubs came to be in the grass,” she said.
A spokesman for the Greater Essex County District School Board said Wednesday he could not say much at this point about the accident.
“Due to privacy regulations, we can’t comment on any incident or situation involving a student,” Scott Scantlebury said.
He said the board’s insurance provider has been contacted and is handling the situation, along with a board superintendent responsible for the school.
Many of the public board’s schools use the Ford Test Track and other municipal parks for physical education classes and other recreational activities, Scantlebury said. The 24-hectare Ford Test Track, a major venue for local sports activities, was the original test track facility for the Ford Motor Company of Canada. Ford has leased the park to the City of Windsor since 1979.
Scantlebury would not say much about the effect Arseneault’s accident has had on students and staff at Gordon McGregor, other than “obviously this has had an impact on the school community.”
Social services workers are available to anyone at the school who needs them, he said.Something happened the other day that hadn’t happened in nearly 17 years, and had only happened twice in the last 50. Not counting Little League, I mean. It happens all the time in Little League. It happens in Little League because catchers aren’t great at catching the baseball, relatively speaking. Little League catchers aren’t great at catching the baseball, and there’s a (bizarre?) rule where batters can attempt to advance on dropped third strikes, and so we’ve all seen plenty of batters reach on strikeouts while we sigh from our positions on the field and wonder how we’re going to sneak out of our friend Gabe’s house to hang out with the girls across the street once Gabe’s parents go to sleep later that night. And then we hope our team’s pitcher strikes out the rest of the guys, too, because striking out more batters than there are outs in an inning is fun.
But it doesn’t happen as often in the big leagues, because, y’know, catchers are good. When it does happen, it’s usually because the pitcher’s stuff is so nasty that it becomes difficult to catch, even for the catcher. When it does happen, it’s also usually four batters in one inning. It’s rare, but it happens. Using the Baseball-Reference Play Index, I ran a search spanning the expansion era, looking for relief outings of exactly one inning with at least four strikeouts.
The results of that search:
Dating back to at least 1985, there are 19 instances of a pitcher whose entire outing consisted of one inning, and four strikeouts. There are plenty more instances of four-strikeout innings, of course, mixed in with the rest of a relief outing, but these are the only guys with one, clean, four-strikeout inning. Nineteen different guys, although two of them are named Mike Stanton.
I ran another search, looking for five strikeouts over 1.1 innings. Nada. Then again, for six strikeouts over 1.2. Results!
There’s our guy. Ken Giles got five outs against the Texas Rangers the other night. Six of them were strikeouts. That line — six strikeouts in 1.2 innings — hadn’t happened in almost 17 years. Before that, it hadn’t happened in a week. Weird.
Funny enough, Giles’ outing couldn’t have began much more inauspiciously. The first batter he faced, Jurickson Profar, lined a double into the right-field corner on the second pitch, scoring two runs and putting the Astros in a three-run hole.
The pitch was a fastball:
The fastball led to an unfavorable result. So Giles went to the slider. His first strikeout victim was Rougned Odor. The entirety of that at-bat looked like this:
Slider, buried, for a swinging strike one. Slider, buried, for a swinging strike two. Slider, buried, for a swinging strike three. Giles didn’t even let Odor see the pitch that just burned him. Odor didn’t even let Odor get a chance to see it.
The next batter, Jonathan Lucroy, struck out on this pitch:
You should be starting to notice a pattern here. The pattern isn’t just “Ken Giles throws a bunch of sliders.” The pattern isn’t even “Ken Giles throws a bunch of sliders and gets a bunch of swings and misses.” The pattern is “Ken Giles throws a bunch of perfect sliders.” A perfect slider, in this case, winds up in the dirt or inches above the dirt. A perfect slider can’t be touched. Every pitch you’ve seen in this post so far has been just about a perfect slider. No swing is ever making contact with these pitches.
The catch-22 is that, when a slider gets spotted in the dirt, it becomes harder for the catcher to corral. Jason Castro couldn’t even hold onto that last one against Lucroy after he caught it.
To further complicate things, Giles came out for the next inning, and Castro didn’t. Castro was pinch-hit for in the bottom of the eighth, so the Astros in the ninth gave up the designated hitter by putting Evan Gattis at catcher. Gattis, to begin with, isn’t a great defensive catcher. More specifically, Gattis isn’t a great blocking catcher. Over at Baseball Prospectus, they keep track of all kinds of catcher defense stats, including blocking runs above and below average as well as blocking chances. A full-time catcher can receive up to 5,000 blocking chances in a season. Take every catcher this year and prorate their runs to 5,000 chances, and Brian McCann is your top blocker, at +1.1 runs saved. Castro is tied for fifth, at +0.6 blocking runs saved. Giles had been throwing to one of baseball’s best blockers. You just saw him smother four sliders. Then Gattis came in. This is where Gattis ranks:
Blocking runs per 5,000 chances, all 2016 catchers, bottom five
In swapping Castro for Gattis, the Astros went from a top-five blocking catcher to baseball’s worst. Here’s the first Giles-to-Gattis strikeout of the night:
So that’s how we get our extra out. Giles’ slider: too good. Gattis’ blocking ability: too bad. A lethal combination, for both batter and battery.
Giles hits the next batter, with a fastball. Back to the slider he goes. Of Giles’ last 15 pitches, 11 are sliders. Shin-Soo Choo, Ian Desmond, and Profar all go down swinging. Giles doesn’t have the cleanest outing, but it’s utterly dominant. About that slider. Giles was in complete control of it:
When our own Corinne Landrey looked at the resurgence of Giles last month, she found that early on in the season, Giles had been hanging too many of his sliders, and not burying enough. He’d lost the feel for his out pitch. That image above? That’s what feel for your out pitch looks like. Giles’ slider was unhittable, and he went to it more than he had all year. And that’s just an extension of a recent trend:
More than ever before in his career, Giles has lately been leaning on his slider. Perhaps that goes hand-in-hand with this:
Coinciding with a 10-game career high in slider usage is a 10-game career high in strikeout rate. The feel for Giles’ out pitch is back. His velocity is back. Over the last three months, a stretch spanning 32.2 innings and 136 batters faced, Giles has a 1.65 ERA, a 1.29 FIP, a 39% strikeout rate and exactly one home run allowed. At first glance, those numbers might look unsustainable, until you realize they’re not far off from what he did for consecutive seasons in Philadelphia. For three months, Giles has been the guy the Astros gave up Vincent Velasquez for. Giles is back to looking like one of baseball’s very most dominant relievers, and he’s back to pitching the ninth.
On Sunday, Ken Giles was so good, he actually made things harder on himself. Given where he was in April, it’s not the worst problem to have.MINNEAPOLIS -- Carolina Panthers offensive lineman Matt Kalil is facing criminal charges of selling alcohol to a minor at his Minnesota pizza restaurant, even though he wasn't present when the transaction occurred.
A charging document says a 17-year-old server at Kalil's Pieology Pizza in a Twin Cities suburb sold a beer to a 19-year-old woman Oct. 26. A police officer intervened and contacted the general manager. The former Minnesota Vikings lineman owns Pieology Pizza franchising rights in Minnesota.
The charges say Kalil is responsible for the illegal sale because he's the owner. No one else was charged in the case.
Kalil has been summoned to appear in court Dec. 15. Kalil's agent did not immediately return a call for comment. Kalil could not immediately be reached through the Panthers organization.There is nowhere that you can go to in the continental United States and find someone… anyone who has never heard of Vin Scully – the man who is not only ‘The Voice of the Dodgers’ but who has also been proclaimed ‘The Voice of Baseball.’
On Thursday morning, Scully, who will celebrate his 86th birthday on November 29, was named as the Grand Marshal of the 2014 Tournament of Roses Parade which, of course, will be held on January 1, 2014 in Pasadena, California. And while this is fantastic news and a well-deserved honor for the best there ever was, it bares the burning question…
What took so long?
When you consider that the 2014 Rose Parade with be the 125th such parade (which began on January 1, 1890), Vin Scully has been around for all but 38 of them – and they’re just getting to him now?
Nonsense!
There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Scully, arguably the most humble human being who ever lived, would ever say one word to anyone about being snubbed as the grand marshal of the oldest and most famous parade in the entire country (sorry Macy’s). And knowing Vin Scully as we all do, it is entirely possible that he may have been invited to be the grand marshal but may have turned it down. (If anyone has any personal knowledge of this, please comment below). But I sincerely believe that he was never even asked, or voted upon, or however they decide who the grand marshal will be.
In true Vin Scully-style, the 85-year-old Hall of Fame broadcaster expressed his gratitude for his selection.
“I am deeply humbled and greatly honored to be the Grand Marshal of the 125th Rose Parade,” Scully said on Thursday morning in front of Tournament House in Pasadena. “I look forward to sharing this wonderful moment with my wife Sandi and the millions who will be watching.”
One of the more prestigious honors of being the Rose Parade Grand Marshal is that Scully will flip the ceremonial coin at the 100th Rose Bowl Game.
When you look at the long list of the former Rose Parade Grand Marshals it is a very formidable list that includes former Presidents of the United States, motion picture and television celebrities, astronauts, humanitarians, professional athletes (including Jackie Robinson posthumously in 1999), heroes (such as Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III – the Hudson River hero pilot), and a wide variety of other national heroes and notable people. But it also includes Kermit the Frog and Mickey Mouse.
Are you kidding me? Kermit the Frog comes in ahead of Vin Scully? Again, I say nonsense.
But alas, it is done – the Tournament of Roses Association got it right and has named the most beloved man in Southern California as the Grand Marshal of the most beloved parade in the country, and all is well – finally.
Happy New Year!I wrote in my description that I like sci-fi and fantasy books and I like obscure things, the more obscure the better. And boy, did my abitrary Santa deliver.
I got Philip K. Dick Ressurected, a collection of his early works. And honestly, you can't go much more obscure than Philip K. Dick, when you are talking about science fiction. The man was a absolute madman.
I mean, just look at the cover. We have there some kind of space cow/frog/pig/dog thingy, and apparently it is just about to barf out its milk all over the floor. No wonder the space guys are so shocked. Obviously they'll have to get old "scratch" (i imagine thats what they call it) real fast to the space vet to have him put down, before he vomits on everything in sight.
I'm real excited for this book, and I'm gonna enjoy every single minute of bizarre space story I can get from it. Thanks a lot!MLB Advanced Media, the company that streams video for Major League Baseball and many other clients, is getting ready to spin out its tech operations in a deal that would give the new company a value of at least $3 billion.
And as part of the spinout prep, MLBAM is bulking up: It has signed a long-term deal with pro hockey’s NHL, which will give MLBAM the rights to pro hockey’s digital subscription products, as well as its cable TV property.
In return, MLBAM will pay the NHL $100 million a year for six years, and will also give the hockey league up to 10 percent of the new company.
MLBAM, which is owned by pro baseball’s 30 teams, was originally built to handle digital streaming for pro baseball alone. But over the years it has become a service provider for a wide variety of media companies, including ESPN, HBO and pro wrestling’s WWE.
Pro baseball has flirted for some time with the idea of capturing some of that value by spinning out the company’s tech operations, but now it looks as though it’s going to happen. MLBAM head Bob Bowman says that pending board approval next week, bankers at Evercore and Goldman Sachs will start marketing the new company, BAM Tech, to investors, with an eye toward completing the spinout before the end of the year.
Some of BAM Tech’s new investors will likely be strategic partners that may also want to add some of their assets into the company, Bowman says. While MLBAM will sell rights to individual sports packages through BAM Tech separately, it’s also easy to imagine the newco creating a sports/entertainment bundle of its own.
The NHL deal is the first time MLBAM has paid an entertainment entity for the rights to operate and sell their digital properties. Usually, MLBAM provides basic streaming services for companies with their own front ends, like ESPN; in some cases, like HBO’s HBO Now product, it has been building and operating the system and apps as well.
The NHL deal could allow MLBAM to make more money over time, says Bowman, since MLBAM will be selling advertising against the games. “The upside is principally ours, but there is more risk there,” he said.
The NHL had previously used publicly traded NeuLion to stream its games, and has around 200,000 subscribers paying $169 a year to watch “out of market” games, says NHL Chief Operating Officer John Collins. He says that in addition to the financial component of the MLBAM deal, he likes the idea of aligning his league with at least one other sports league as the media landscape looks like it’s set for significant change.
“When you’ve got [Disney CEO] Bob Iger talking about going over the top with ESPN, and HBO going over the top, and Viacom getting thrown off some cable providers, you start to say, ‘where are we going to be down the road with a single-sport linear network?'” he said.
A Wall Street Journal report in February floated a $5 billion valuation for the property.Qur’an Burning Pastor Is Not Responsible For Afghanistan Murders
On March 20, 2011, Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach in Gainesville, Florida, presided over a mock trial of the Muslim holy book, the Qur’an. Twelve members of his congregation, serving as jurors, found the Qur’an guilty of inciting rape, murder and terrorism. Pastor Jones then switched roles from Judge to executioner, of sorts, and carried out what he and his congregation deemed appropriate justice. Terry Jones and his small group of followers burned a Qur’an.
On March 21, 2011, Der Spiegel, a German magazine, published 3 of the reported thousands of horrific photos, and videos, taken by members of the US military ‘kill teams’ in Afghanistan posing with their murdered victims. Neither incident provoked immediate large scale reaction or demonstration in Afghanistan or any other Arab nation.
On Friday, April 1, 2011, the prominent Afghan cleric, Mullah Mohammed Shah Adeli, told his congregates in the norther Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif that Pastor Jones burning of the Qur’an is proof of Americas hatred for Islam. There is no report that the photos taken by the kill team, posing with murdered Afghani civilians, was ever mentioned. Mullah Mohammed Shah Adeli then entreated his followers to take to the streets and agitate for the arrest of Pastor Jones. He declared to his followers that “Burning the Koran is an insult to Islam, and those who committed it should be punished.”
His faithful followers left the Blue Mosque, recognized as one of Afghanistan’s holiest places, intent on carrying out that punishment. Apparently unable to find any Americans, the mob, estimated at as many as 20,000, descended on the United Nations compound where they killed twelve people, two of whom were reportedly beheaded. Although the crowd was carrying signs that read “Down With America” and “Death to Obama,” four Nepalese guards and three European UN staffers were killed as apparent proxy Americans.
The murderous rampage continued through Saturday bringing the current death toll to over 20 with as many as 70 being reported as injured.
Pastor Jones’ actions have been compared to ‘yelling fire in a crowded theater.’ This is not true. Crying fire in a crowded theater puts people in a situation where they are forced to act out of self defense. Being convinced that they are trapped in a burning room they are forced to choose between escape or burn. Their very survival has been threatened. This was not the case with the Afghanistan mob.
To compare the Afghanistan mob with the crowd in the theater is both erroneous and cowardly. Erroneous for the reason stated above, and cowardly because the Afghan mob is more appropriately compared to a bully. A bully will threaten to react violently if something is said that they don’t want to hear. Having the courage to say such a thing does not make one guilty of the bullies actions. Abdicating ones freedom of speech in the face of such bullying is nothing but cowardice.
Aside from the offensive nature of Pastor Jones’ actions, unless the Qur’an that he burned belonged to another, or unless the fire that he used violated any statutes or bi-laws, he committed no punishable act. Certainly nothing worthy of placing the value of ink and paper over that of 20+ lives.
The Muslim clerics could just have easily placed the Christian holy book on trial and found it guilty of the same offensives, and perhaps more, that the Qur’an was charged with. Furthermore, they could have foregone the burning of the Christian Bible and proven themselves superior to Pastor Jones and his hate filled ignorance. This was not their choice, and, unlike the people in the crowded theater, they had a choice. They chose violence. They chose to place a book, a stack of ink on paper, above human lives.
Fanatical fundamentalism from any religion is repulsive. Using violence to try and bully the entire world into submitting to ones religious doctrines and dogma is unacceptable. The Christians have done it throughout the centuries and still attempt it through either violence, as in Uganda, or through the legal and political system, as in America. Islam is a younger religion. Perhaps it is simply following the same path as Christianity minus the few hundred years difference since their respective inceptions. Regardless, the bullying must not be tolerated.
Pastor Jones, whether you agree with him or not, and I certainly don’t, was simply exercising his freedom of speech. No one was harmed, and no laws were broken. If you consider him wrong, and responsible for the murders in Afghanistan, because of the insult, or offensiveness, you must also condone the beating of an individual, by a bully, for saying something that the bully didn’t like.
The Afghan people that committed these atrocities, and the clerics that incited them to violence, are responsible for their own actions. Pastor Terry Jones is guilty of being an ignorant, hate-filled, fundamentalist. Mullah Mohammed Shah Adeli is guilty of inciting a crowd to violence and the members of the mob, that committed these horrible acts, are guilty of murder. And, anyone that wants to place the blame on a small town pastor in Florida, for the actions of violent religious fanatics in Afghanistan, is guilty of cowardice. The right to free speech is too important to surrender to bullies.
“Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense. True irreverence is disrespect for another man’s god.”
-Samuel Langhorne ClemensAttorney General Jeff Sessions created a new “senior position” at the Department of Justice Wednesday, director of opioid enforcement and prevention efforts, to help combat what is now far and away the deadliest drug epidemic in American history.
“With one American dying of a drug overdose every nine minutes, we need all hands on deck,” Attorney General Sessions said of the decision. He continued:
That’s why President Trump has made ending the drug epidemic a top priority. This Department of Justice embraces that goal, and we have taken a number of steps this year to do our part. We have indicted hundreds of defendants for drug related healthcare fraud, sent more prosecutors to where they’re needed most, and we’ve taken on the gangs and cartels. Today we take the next step: creating a senior level official position at the Department to focus entirely on this issue. This Department will continue to follow the President’s lead, and I am confident that we can and will turn the tide of the drug crisis.
The decision was announced the same day Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new numbers putting total estimated drug overdose deaths at 63,600 for 2016. This figure is more than triple that of 1999 and up sharply even from the beginning of this record-setting decade. The number outpaces earlier 2016 estimates of 59,000 and outstrips deaths from influenza and pneumonia.
The biggest driver of this tragedy is the rising of opioids, both traditional semi-synthetic or natural opioids like heroin and oxycodone and the newer fully-synthetic and extraordinarily potent opioids like fentanyl and carfentanyl that drug dealers have rapidly pushed into the supply stream. The latter category of deaths has increased especially rapidly, doubling just from 2015 to 2016, according to the CDC.
CNN’s interpretation of the numbers puts opioid overdoses at roughly two-thirds of drug deaths, 42,249, more than all deaths from breast cancer.
Sessions has made containing the opioid crisis a major focus of his tenure at DOJ. Last month, for example, he announced the first new Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) field office since the late 1990s. Located in Louisville, Kentucky, this office will cover West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The CDC’s new report indicates West Virginia is the state hardest hit by overdoses, with a shocking age-adjusted 52 deaths per 100,000 people.
“I know that this crisis is daunting- the death rates are stunning- and it can be discouraging,” Sessions said at that time. “But we will turn the tide. When the men and women of law enforcement work effectively in a focused way, we can stop the growth of destructive addiction, keep the American people safe, and save lives.”Patrick Stewart seems to be everywhere. That's the takeaway to be made if you're following Star Trek's Captain Picard in the news or on Twitter. Stewart got married on September 7 to longtime girlfriend Sunny Ozell, in a ceremony officiated by Stewart's pal Ian McKellen. The entire TNG cast was on hand in Lake Tahoe to share in the celebration.
Stewart and McKellen, meanwhile, have been carrying on their bromance of late, posing together for pictures in New York City, which were subsequently tweeted. The shots of them with Elmo, at the Empire State Building and rehearsing for an upcoming stage show are priceless. Actually, make that stage shows, plural: they'll be doing repertory productions of Waiting for Godot and No Man's Land, opening on October 26 at the Cort Theatre (on Broadway). And as if that's not enough, they'll both be in the next X-Men big-screen adventures, Days of Future Past.If what happened Saturday to the Dallas Mavericks happens one more time this season, they will move into uncharted territory.
The Toronto Raptors led wire-to-wire and used their physicality to upend the Mavs 94-86 before a sellout crowd of 19,934 at American Airlines Center. The loss dropped the Mavs to 31-41 and four games behind Denver for the eighth and last playoff spot in the Western Conference.
More important, the loss prevented the Mavs from having a winning season for the 16th time in the last 17 seasons. Also, one more loss in their final 10 games and the Mavs will have their first losing (full) season since Mark |
on how Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama — who was in the process of being confirmed as President Donald Trump's attorney general — had engaged in racial discrimination against black voters. Yet oddly enough, when Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona made a charge as serious (if not more so) against Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky earlier this week, Rule 19 wasn't invoked.
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McCain's comments came after Paul voted to block a treaty that would have helped the Balkan nation of Montenegro join NATO, a move that would hinder Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's foreign policy ambitions but also gone against Paul's well-known quasi-isolationist ideals. After warning prior to the vote that "if there’s objection, you are achieving the objectives of Vladimir Putin... and I do not say that lightly," McCain and the rest of the Senate watched as Paul objected and quickly left the room.
"I note the Senator from Kentucky leaving the floor without justification or any rationale for the action that he has just taken," McCain said. "That is really remarkable. That a senator blocking a treaty that is supported by the overwhelming number — perhaps 98, at least, of his colleagues — would come to the floor, and object, and walk away. And walk away! The only conclusion you can draw when he walks away is he has no argument to be made. He has no justification for his objection to having a small nation be part of NATO, that is under assault from the Russians."
McCain concluded, "So I repeat again: The Senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin."
It is difficult to see a logically consistent interpretation of Rule 19 that construes Warren's accusation of racism against Sessions as impugning a "conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a senator" but does not view McCain's claim that Paul is "now working for Vladimir Putin" in the exact same light.
We reached out to both McCain's and Paul's offices for comment. Indeed, we persisted. They did not reply.For creatives, the definition of the word “inspiration” has lost its meaning. It’s no longer a spark of intuition to solve the uniqueness in a problem, but a search for the current and complacent solutions created by others.
As a creative collective the term “inspiration” has driven us to become lethargic to the realities, foundations, and intentions of our chosen craft. The misinterpretation of inspiration is bred into our culture. In school we are taught by the examples of others, given information to digest and remember, instead of being handed problems to analyze and interpret on our own.
As children we are taught to fear failure and to learn from the mistakes of others instead of experiencing them first hand. Many times curriculums centered around creativity and exploration are pushed out of the way to make room for ones rooted in practical application and applied theory.
An example of this logic is painfully evident in design schools that focus more time on learning design applications than nurturing creative exploration and development.
The reality is that it's easier to be inspired than it is to create an original idea and we are hardwired to take the path of least resistance.
It's easier to jump onto a design inspiration gallery site than it is to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and a pencil. It's easier to follow a pattern than it is to test-drive new options. It's easier to copy a style or idea that works than try something that might miss the mark or outright fail.
Above all, it's cheaper mentally for us to rally around what's already been done and emulate it. When we over-saturate ourselves in other people's work it shortchanges our own creative development. For example, so many of the design inspiration sites on the web today serve up content in bite-sized chunks, resulting in a form of visual junk food.While the work featured on these sites can be some of the best our industry has to offer, the way that they are displayed usually throws concept and story out the window in place or pure visual sugar.
The story of a design (the problem and solution) are stripped away so only the visual execution is left to absorb. This view of design rots away the core foundations of our profession. Design applications act in a similar capacity if you let them. The ability to jump right into Photoshop has cut down concept time purely because it's so easy to tinker and play in the app. This can lead very quickly to creating recycled and tired executions. Thought process and trial and error have been traded in for ease of use and familiarity.
There seem to be so many designers that fear a pencil and paper these days. The worry of having to fill a blank space with ideas is only trumped by the want to arrive at a decision in the least amount of time, with the least amount of effort.
This search for convenience often leads to ‘searching for inspiration’ instead of fueling creative solutions through exploration and trial and error. The mentality that says "answers and solutions are just a few clicks away" cheapens the creative process as a whole and creates a vicious cycle of tired ideas. This new form of inspiration is consuming creativity, but only if we continue to feed it. If we as designers can learn to fight the urge for quick answers and focus more on unique, lasting solutions that revolve around defining problems, there's a chance to turn it all around.
Finding new appreciation for both concept and execution (and their relationship to each other) will spark greater conversation within our community about how and why design is important in the first place.
This article was first published on Viget Inspire.
Written by Owen ShifflettImperial Oil and BP have delayed plans to drill for oil in the Beaufort Sea off the Northwest Territories.
In a letter sent to the Inuvialuit Settlement Region's Environmental Impact Review Board on Friday morning, Lee Willis, Imperial Oil's exploration operations manager, says the companies have suspended all regulatory work for the project.
They had hoped to begin drilling by the summer of 2020, the same year one of their two exploration licences expires.
"However, under the current licence term, there is insufficient time to conduct the necessary technical work and complete the regulatory process," Willis wrote.
Pius Rolheiser, spokesperson for Imperial Oil, said economic considerations such as the price of oil did not play a hand in the decision, which sounds about right to Doug Matthews, an analyst and former oil and gas director for the N.W.T. government.
"Production from the Beaufort, if and when it happens, is so far in the future, even on their current timeline, that today's price of oil is not really relevant," said Matthews. "They're obviously thinking much further down the road."
Rolheiser said the companies simply need more time to plan their ambitious program.
"In a nutshell, this is all about allowing the joint venture partners the time that we believe is necessary to deliver the most technically sound and environmentally responsible exploration program that is possible," he said.
"And we believe that's what the people of the Inuvialuit Settlement Region expect of us."
Timeline was 'challenging' from the start
Imperial Oil and BP are in early discussions with Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada — which sold the exploration rights to the companies for a combined $1.8 billion — about extending the terms of their licences by several years to 2028.
"From the outset there was a recognition that, even with 2020 as the lease expiry date, it was a very challenging schedule," said Rolheiser.
Before Friday's announcement, Imperial Oil had been expected to share its plan for how it would respond to an oil spill in the offshore with the National Energy Board and the Environmental Impact Review Board. The plan was expected in the third quarter of this year.
A post-petroleum world?
The companies plan to keep open their Inuvik, N.W.T. office, collect data on sea ice, and continue to prepare N.W.T. communities for the employment and business opportunities the project may one day bring.
Chevron Canada made a similar announcement last December, putting its plans to drill in the Beaufort Sea on hold and citing "economic uncertainty."
Matthews said Imperial Oil and BP's decision may have been partly influenced by a growing concern among energy companies with climate change, calling it a potential indication of a step toward "a post-petroleum world."
"We seem to be seeing a more serious approach towards climate change," he said. "This is part of a storyline that is starting to develop."Associated Press
Monsoon rains lashed parts of northern India this week, releasing the capital, New Delhi, from the grips of a heat wave. The country waits for the June-through-September rains to spread across the country every year.
In the picture above, a boy skipped through a waterlogged street in Allahabad, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on Friday.
Reuters
The rains have come late this year, triggering concerns that crop yields will be lower, pushing up inflation and hurting the economy. Farmers in India rely on the annual showers.
Above, three men stop at a roadside stall in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad to buy fruit on Friday.
European Pressphoto Agency
Some analysts argue that all the hand-wringing over a delayed monsoon is overblown.
In the picture above, a woman used a plastic sheet to protect herself from the rains in Faridabad, about 25 kilometers from the capital on Friday.
Associated Press
While droughts do not always lead to lower food production in India, how the government prepares for and reacts to a shortfall in rain can trigger big swings in food supplies. The government is already distributing fast-growing, drought-resistant varieties of rice and is expected to limit exports of rice and wheat in an effort to ensure adequate domestic supplies.
Above, a girl rode a horse cart as monsoon clouds hovered in the background in the northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir on Thursday.
European Pressphoto Agency
In the picture above, children played on a waterlogged road in Faridabad on Thursday.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Shown above, a fisherman in the eastern Indian state of Orissa waited to cast his net in the Daya River.
Reuters
In the picture above, a milkman rode a motorcycle through the rains in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh.
Associated Press
In the picture above, dark clouds hovered over the central part of New Delhi in early July.
European Pressphoto Agency
The rains reached parts of southern and western India first before making their way north. Shown above, two men struggled to make it through a traffic jam with rising waters during rain showers in the western Indian city of Mumbai.
Associated Press
In the picture above, a woman made her way through a flooded street in the northeastern city of Guwahati on June 27.Daniel Cormier stepped on the scale at 206.2 pounds at the UFC 210 early weigh-ins Friday morning.
At that point, everyone assumed the title fight in Buffalo was off. Cormier, the UFC light heavyweight champion, needed to hit the limit of 205 in order for the belt to be on the line and he did not. Cormier came in with less than five minutes to go in the two-hour weigh-in window.
Somehow, though, Cormier came back just 2:24 later and weighed in at 205, losing 1.2 pounds in that short amount of time. Cormier put his hands on the towel while on the scale and appeared to put some of his weight on it, though it’s unclear if it affected the reading. He needed the towel because he stripped down to attempt to make the weight.
The New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC) considered the weight valid. Typically, in the early weigh-in format the UFC started last year, fighters are not given a second attempt to weigh-in.
Anthony Johnson, the light heavyweight, weighed in shortly afterward, before the two-hour window was up, and he was 203.8.
The light heavyweight title fight is now official for UFC 210 on Saturday night at KeyBank Arena in Buffalo, but not without some controversy.Democrats 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 and Tim Kaine Timothy (Tim) Michael KaineTrump claims Democrats ‘don’t mind executing babies after birth’ after blocked abortion bill Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Trump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 MORE are planning a thank-you party next week for those who donated millions to their presidential campaign.
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The party at the Plaza Hotel's Grand Ballroom on Dec. 15 is expected to feature fashion icon Anna Wintour, investor Alan Patricof, hedge fund manager Marc Lasry and more, according to the New York Post's Page Six.
"Hopefully there’s no balconies so nobody can jump," an insider told Page Six.
Clinton raised far more money than President-elect 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 — as much as $1.3 billion, according to the The Washington Post, compared to Trump's $795 million. But despite her edge in fundraising and in the popular vote, Trump won last month's election via the Electoral College.Disney’s live-action “Beauty and the Beast” earned $16.3 million at the Thursday box office, ahead of what analysts are predicting will be a monster opening weekend for the remake.
This is the biggest preview gross of the year and the biggest ever for a Disney live-action title, the second biggest ever for a PG film and the third biggest ever for a March opener.
Comparatively, Disney’s “Cinderella” made $2.3 million at the Thursday box office in 2015, and both “Maleficent” and “The Jungle Book” earned $4.2 million in previews, which was previously the biggest for a Disney-live action title. “Logan” had previously held the top preview gross number of 2017 with $9.5 million.
Also Read: 'Beauty and the Beast' Review: Dan Stevens Stands Out in Overstuffed Remake
“Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” earned $27.7 million at the previews last year and topped off the weekend with a whopping $166 million domestically.
The live-action musical opens in 4,210 theaters in the United States and Canada this Friday, including Premium Large Format and 3D locations. Disney anticipates an opening weekend of $120 million for the film, and interest has only gone up in recent weeks given clever marketing and generally solid reviews which now stand at 68 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
Some analysts said they could even see the film opening in the $150 million to $160 million range.
The film stars Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Josh Gad, Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen and Emma Thompson and was directed by Bill Condon. It was produced for $160 million.
The movie opened day-and-date in about 67 percent of the international market, including Germany, Italy, Russia, Portugal, Greece, United Kingdom, China, Sweden, India and Thailand.
Also Read: Disney Pulls 'Beauty and the Beast' From Malaysia, Refuses to Cut 'Gay Moment'
The film opened at No. 1 in Italy, Germany, Korea and Brazil. It took in a strong $11.5 million.
Leading up to the film’s release, the movie faced a little bit of controversy when Condon said the film would feature an “exclusively gay moment.” In response, an Alabama theater decided to pull the film, and it received an age restriction in Russia, which passed a law in 2013 banning so-called gay “propaganda.” In Malaysia, where censors sought to cut the gay scene, Disney decided to pull the film altogether.
This weekend also sees the opening of Blumhouse Productions’ “The Belko Experiment,” starring John Gallagher, Jr., Tony Goldwyn and Adria Arjona. The BH Tilt release grossed $305,000 in previews on Thursday.
The production house anticipates an opening in the $4 million range. Greg McLean directed on a script by James Gunn. Peter Safran (“The Conjuring”) produced with Gunn.Any former Capitol Hill intern is familiar with the concept of a clip book, which young staffers compile, every day, to give their bosses a sense of how news outlets are covering them. This is a standard practice for Democrats and Republicans alike. Indeed, once upon a time when I was an intern in Chuck Schumer’s office, my responsibilities included assembling a daily package of news articles that contained any mention of him.
But the purpose of that document — and of nearly all clip books — was for the senator and his senior aides to get an accurate portrait of how he was being covered in the press. Like any normal human being, Schumer preferred to read positive coverage of himself to negative, but the goal of the exercise was to help ascertain what was actually going on in order to inform future decision-making.
That is not Donald Trump’s goal. He, by contrast, seems to just want to hear that people think he’s doing a great job even though the best evidence we have is that people do not, in fact, think he’s doing a great job.
As Alex Thompson of Vice News, citing “three current and former White House officials,” reports: In the morning at 9:30 and then around 4:30 in the afternoon, Trump is presented with a briefing document full of people praising him.
The folders, according to Thompson, “are filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.”
The point of this is to improve the notoriously media-obsessed president’s mood by reminding him he has a lot of fans and admirers out there, and in a hilarious detail, reportedly some in the White House even refer to this clip package as “the Propaganda Document.” And, in a very bad way, it is.
Clip books are common, but cocooning is dangerous
Obviously, nobody who is in the news as much as the president is in a position to read all coverage of himself. But it’s dangerous for a president to be cocooned in a world where he doesn’t know what kind of criticisms he’s facing.
Indeed, even from the standpoint of the president’s own self-interest, it’s probably counterproductive to be isolated from accurate information. Trump, for example, seems very taken with news coverage that emphasizes the number of jobs that have been added to the economy so far in 2017.
This is perfectly fine spin as far as spin goes. The reality, however, is that thus far in 2017, job growth has been somewhat slower than it was in 2016. If Trump believes that economic growth is booming when it is in fact slowing, he is unlikely to take action to reverse the slowing trend, even though both Trump and the American people more broadly would be better off with faster rather than slower job growth.
This problem will, of course, only be exacerbated if objective conditions at some point take a southward turn. If nobody wants to deliver bad news to the Oval Office, then there will be no way for problems to be addressed before they spiral out of control.
All administrations face some version of this problem, but part of good staffing is to push against it. Yet so far there’s little indication that anyone is really trying to break through with Trump, as opposed to letting him rely on Fox & Friends as his go-to news source. There’s a reason they say, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” Trump doesn’t appear to know what it is.When Antonius Hart, Sr. and his son, Antonius Hart Jr., didn't get the chicken wings they ordered at a Memphis fast food chain, they weren't chicken about expressing their displeasure -- or about brandishing an AK-47 rifle at the employees who forgot the order, cops said.
Last Thursday, the Harts placed an order at Pirtle’s Chicken in Memphis but drove off before realizing they didn't get all the chicken they ordered, the Associated Press reported.
When they returned, the cashier offered to replace the missing pieces, but investigators said the men demanded more chicken because they had to drive back to the restaurant. At that point, Hart Sr., 45, allegedly showed the cashier an AK-47 he brought for the occasion, the Commercial Appeal reported.
When the co-worker saw the gun, she called the police who arrested both men, charging the elder Hart with aggravated assault while his 19-year-old son was charged with facilitation of a felony, WMC-TV reported.
The police recovered the weapon and 24 live rounds of ammo, the Commercial Appeal reported.
The restaurant isn't talking about the incident, but customers had some opinions about the incident according to WREG-TV.
“I guess in this area, people don`t play about their food,” Courtney Marable told the station, while Tonya McGraw admitted the alleged incident was "crazy," but suggested the event might improve customer service.
“Next time they better get them wings right!” she said.
Not all chicken restaurants are skittish about guns.
On Saturday, Chicken Express, a restaurant in Bossier City, La., actually gave away combo meals to all concealed handgun permit holders.John Vachon Slop Sink June 1941 Erie County, Pennsylvania. “Each group of ten trailers in the FSA camp at Erie has a trailer service unit, water faucet, slop sink, and garbage pail”
There have been many forms of “debt slavery” throughout history, and almost everyone is chained to the oppressive financial, corporatist system now in one way or another. Although, this fact has not even remotely sunk in for millions of people who, unfortunately, have absolutely no clue how bad it can get. The real issue here, however, is not necessarily what people will have to do to survive the upcoming storms. Rather, it is what they will be forced to do to remain a functioning part of the system under threat of excessive monetary punishment, physical confinement or violence to them and/or those close to them. So, one must be financially/coercively attached to the system to be a “debt slave”.
If you are allowed to voluntarily downsize your living standards and retain some freedom of movement/action, then you are not really a slave. And that’s not meant to demean the existential struggle of the chronically unemployed and/or homeless people living on the streets or in the subway, whose numbers are bound to increase and many of whom will die of sickness, cold and hunger, but it’s hard to say that they are “attached” to our economic system of complicity and coerced participation. The most obvious way this slavish attachment forms is through personal debts/obligations.
That’s why it’s very important to pay off your mortgage(s), car loans, student loans, outstanding balances on past bills, etc., throw away your credit cards and generally avoid taking on debt at all costs. However, that is not a panacea for avoiding debt slavery by any means. One reason is that, as mentioned in Part I, creditors and third party debt collectors may literally conjure up debts for people who never agreed to take on those debts, by failing to account for payments, illegally jacking up interest rates, retro-actively inserting penalty clauses and other similar tactics. Or, they may simply doctor up brand new “contracts” that never existed.
The U.S. financial industry and government “regulators”, at both the federal and state level, have already taken the first steps towards such practices through the illegal transfer of mortgage titles in the MERS system and the “robosigning” of fraudulent loan documents by law firms employed by the major banks, which sought to “prove” ownership of such titles and therefore the right to foreclose. Once these illegal foreclosures came to the mainstream public’s attention, the federal government launched a sham investigation and effectively forced state attorney generals and prosecutors to go along with a tiny and symbolic settlement, which will primarily be funded by taxpayer money.
Jose Suarez explores this issue for the Huffington Post and brings up some key points:
Banks Take It Easy, While Miami Struggles Against Foreclosures However, the settlement will only help a small percentage of the millions of Americans who still are deeply underwater on their mortgages. Victims of fraudulent foreclosure robo-signings look to receive only about $2,000 in compensation. That amount is paltry compared to the amount of pain, desperation, and despair of millions of Americans, and so many Floridians, dangling precariously at the unlikely mercy of banks and their improper, illegal foreclosure processes. $2,000 wouldn’t even come close to covering moving expenses or the “first, last and security deposits” for folks forced to downsize from their own homes to rentals. Another highly troubling aspect of the settlement is the potential spike in new foreclosures predicted by various real estate and financial industry analysts. The banks were delaying foreclosing on great numbers of homes until details of the settlement were finalized. They may not power up the illegal “robo-signing” machines again, but they are now clear to fire out the foreclose notices. This is the buzz I hear from real estate professionals in South Florida these days. While it certainly has a big impact on their day-to-day business, a bigger question is: How will these trends affect the momentum of the overall economy? The tentative recovery has yet to reach a large portion of the individuals hit first and hardest by the recession; these residents, in particular, are still struggling mightily — and yet another downturn could be exponentially catastrophic for many of these families. The settlement frees the banks from any potential civil charges from the 49 states, though individuals can try to sue (in the chance you had the time and resources), and federal and state officials may wish to pursue criminal charges against the banks. But don’t bet on the latter, unless you’re interested in “wrist slaps.” Snug relationships between so many politicians and big businesses, especially the banks, are telling.
This settlement essentially gives the banks free license to go on a rampage of financial harassment and foreclosure without any interference from state governments. That’s why it was noted in Part II that traditional protections found in contract law have been rendered completely worthless for the vast majority of people on this planet, including all but the wealthiest individuals in the West. These protections were rooted in decades of British common law that developed through judicial precedents during the so-called “Enlightenment” era. They offered the average white male citizen a way to protect himself from having to make payments or perform under a contract if it was generally secured in one of the following ways:
1) Duress (economic or physical) – i.e. You are put in a position, physically or monetarily, in which you have no other choice but to agree to the terms of a contract. 2) Fraud/misrepresentation – i.e. You agree to the terms of a contract based on a material misrepresentation or omission of facts. 3) Unconscionability – i.e. You are a disadvantaged party (very asymmetrical knowledge of the business) to a contract which contains extremely unfair terms on its face.
If a court established one of these situations to exist in any given case, then the complaining party had a right to void the contract. The problem for victimized debtors now is that the legal system only performs this protective function well when the economy is growing and wealthy private interests can claim an increasingly large share of the pie despite these common law hurdles-turned-artifacts. In an era of widespread economic contraction and deleveraging by consumers and businesses, the large private interests will instead seek to extract value through the seizing of assets (“foreclosure” implies a legitimate process) and the subjugation of distressed debtors.
Human labor, after all, is simply a form of energy that can be applied to various inputs and productive processes, including the harvesting of other energy sources and the development of infrastructure necessary for large-scale societies. Most middle to upper-middle class Americans have forgotten all about the labor expended and the lives lost by their not-so-distant ancestors in the course of such work. Yet, they may very well be forced into laying railway tracks and mining coal or constructing/repairing roads, highways, bridges and canals in the near future. College and graduate students steeped in debt who are expecting cushy office jobs that no longer exist will find out they have effectively been sold into slavery by their system of “education”.
At a time when the net energy returns afforded by the extraction of fossil fuels is quickly disappearing, the industrial corporate elites will once again rely on what can only be called “slave labor” to perpetuate a system of large-scale exploitation and wealth extraction. This time these pools of labor will not only be confined to minority groups or third world countries, and we will all find out just how little control we have over our own lives and our own bodies. When faced with the threat of arbitrary imprisonment and/or being stripped of all your earthly possessions, it will be very difficult to resist making a deal of debt servitude with the Devil.
Where can any of these people turn to for relief or protection? Can they seek help from their local police departments or court systems? Traditionally, those have been potential avenues for at least a modicum of justice. Soon, however, even these institutions will be well into the process of being privatized in the name of “fiscal responsibility” and “market efficiency”, which is really code for corporate control over all facets of the modern state. Wealthy corporate conglomerates will not only have seized the “power of the purse”, but also the state’s dispute resolution mechanisms and its monopoly to use coercion and violence in pursuit of vaguely-defined goals.
When a sizeable portion of the police force in any major city is trained, armed and managed by private security firms such as Erik Prince’s Blackwater (now known as… Academi), we may find it rather difficult to defend our homes, assets, friends and families from the wrath of our financial oppressors. They will be our creditors and debt collectors, as well as our judges, juries and executioners. One does not only become a debt slave by being underwater on private debts, though.
As we are clearly seeing in the Eurozone periphery, external public debts that are in the process of being redeemed through austerity and “structural reform” can be a force equally capable of enslavement. If you are any worker, taxpayer and/or retiree living in the shadows of the wealthiest members of society, then you are rapidly losing your freedom as I write these words. Your savings and disposable incomes are being run down to pay the salaries and bonuses of corporate executives and directors, while your democratic elections have taken an indefinite leave of absence and your government will be confronting your resistance with steel cages and the barrel of a gun.
At the same time, the Eurozone crisis perhaps offers us some signs of hope, albeit ones that are few and far between. First and foremost is the fact that the process of systemic credit collapse in our highly inter-connected environment can occur at a pace that is not necessarily capable of being out-paced by those who seek to take full advantage of it, or in ways that are completely unexpected by them. We see this revealed in the repeated inability of the IMF, EU and ECB (and their corporate masters) to come up with policies that will keep Greece in the monetary union and prevent contagion from spreading to other peripheral markets.
It is also true that extensive systems of slavery can only sustain themselves with a certain amount of complicity and passive acceptance within the population. When it is a clear majority of people in a given location, rather than a minority, who are being pushed into slavery, there will most certainly be forceful pockets of resistance and the slave masters will require the slaves’ help to squash these movements. Indeed, that is exactly what we saw in European countries occupied by Nazi Germany, and even then many of the resistance movements made significant headway towards unlocking their peoples’ chains.
The slave masters will especially require the unwavering support of civil servants tasked with carrying out orders of oppression from above. In Greece, we recently witnessed the country’s largest police union issue a statement of its intention to refuse to continue aiding the elites in the enslavement of the Greek people, and even threatened to issue symbolic arrest warrants for Troika officials stationed in the country. It is not hard to imagine similar occurrences in Portugal, Spain, Italy and even Ireland, as their policemen and women are squeezed of pensions and salaries, and forced to face the reality of their role as slaves to the system.
Closer to the “core”, there were also acts of defiance in Brussels, Belgium by firefighters who sprayed foam from their hoses onto central streets and government buildings. In a separate display, these protesting firefighters also hosed down the Prime Minister’s office and the police units protecting it. Perhaps we can expect these pockets of official resistance to grow larger over time and act as a barrier between the corporatist slave masters and the populations they seek to enslave. Which then begs the question – what will the military forces of Westerns countries do? Will they remain a cohesive, unified force that carries out orders as they have been for many years now, or will pockets of resistance materialize within their ranks as well?
It is a mistake to assume that the men and women in the U.S. military, for example, are guaranteed to bring slavery and death to their own people when they are commanded to. As USA Today reported, people who actively work for the military donate more to Ron Paul’s campaign more than any other candidate, and he is certainly not someone known for advocating imperialism and oppressive government authority. That reflects an attitude that is anything but closed-minded and uncritical of current policy trends. So, while the global population’s future of debt slavery is a very real and ongoing threat, there are also reasons to believe it may not sustain itself for very long.
Then again, the number of slaves is growing by the day and the time may come when many of us are forced to either fight for our freedom or learn to live with our chains. These are obviously very serious issues and very serious possibilities. It is no longer acceptable for anyone to pretend that the concept of systemic slavery in the developed, “civilized” world has been relegated to the history books. It took the upheaval of the Great Depression and the Second World War to truly rid the U.S. of its enslavement of African Americans only 60-70 years ago. What will it take for the indebted masses now? And is anyone really willing to find out?This movie really holds up over time. It's almost 2 decades old (can you believe that?) but it still holds up. The tech stuff that Mr. Anderson does in the fake Matrix world doesn't get outdated because the writers were smart enough to keep it simple and non descript. (He gives a disc of unknown contents to someone after writing a script that does who knows what. They didn't have him using Quick Basic to code a virus for Lotus 1-2-3 or something that would have been quickly outdated and looked dumb 20 years later)
Then in the'real world' all the ninja stuff Neo and Trinity do is still awesome action. Bullettime filming isn't innovative anymore but it still looks cool in an action movie.
The story holds up well. (On this one. The sequels didn't hold up long enough to get through the first screening the day they came out) As it's core this is still a story about the duality of consciousness and its just incredibly well put together. When Morpheus offers the red/blue pill choice...that scene still has a lot of depth to it on a psychological level.
Oh, and in HD the visuals in The Matrix just crush it. It is a whole different experience in HD. I remember getting this on DVD when it first came out and DVD players were all the rage. I couldn't believe how amazing this looked back then in 480i on a 30 inch screen with the digital DVD presentation. Not on a 60 inch 1080p screen this is visually jaw dropping.
I was nervous about rewatching this movie as it's one of my all time favorites and I haven't seen it in about 10 years. I was worried that it would seem totally cheesy now and it would ruin the memory of it. But that doesn't happen at all. It holds up very well."A bed of branches and tree trunks was made, on which the bodies of the victims were laid and a flammable substance was used," Inaky Blanco, the chief prosecutor of violence-plagued Guerrero state, said.
Now, authorities in Mexico have declared the 43 students to be dead, according to local media outlets. Jesús Murillo Karam, from the Attorney General's Office, told the media that the three suspects — Patricia Reyes, El Pato and Agustín García Reyes — have admitted to killing the students upon the orders of their leader.
The exact series of events reflects a gross abuse of power and a devastating loss for many families in Mexico. According to CNN, the students were mostly young men studying to become teachers at Escuela Normal Rural de Ayotzinapa who were protesting unfair hiring practices of teachers on Sept. 26 when they were rounded up by local police, upon the direction of the mayor of Iguala. The students were turned over to gang members to be killed — they were shot, cremated, and some of the remains were dumped in the local San Juan River.
"They didn't just burn the bodies with their clothes, they also burned the clothes of those who participated," said Murillo. "They tried to erase every possible trace."
It should be noted that the exact identities of the bodies are not known and cannot be known until DNA tests confirm they belong to the students. Identifying the bodies will be a struggle since the burned body parts will make extracting DNA difficult. Since DNA evidence has not been provided, many parents of the students are holding out hope and calling the declaration inconclusive.
"I have to identify, to do everything in my power, to identify, to know if these were the students," Murillo said to reporters.
Authorities have arrested Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, who allegedly told then-Iguala police Chief Felipe Flores Velasquez to arrest the students because their demonstrations would interfere with an event. Investigators are still looking for Flores and have arrested over 70 people, many of whom are police officers.
"With firm determination, the government will continue the efforts for a full accounting of the incident," said Mexican President Peña Nieto about the missing students. "The capture of those who ordered it isn't enough; we will arrest everyone who participated in these abominable crimes."55User Rating: 5 out of 5
Review title of CubertPluck THE BEST SOCCER GAME
After months of playing, this is the best PES game so far in this generation and despite having the same issues online from previous pes games, the game is still fun to play offline either playing master league, become a legend, or playing in the CL you truly wont get bored. The gameplay is a lot better than last year and i feel that the defending and goalkeeping was slightly improved from last year and the A.I. is a lot better especially playing on superstar where you really need to out smart them or the ai |
a visually-impaired person who wants to use a computer at home or at the office to print documents for offline reading,” he told the Windows blogger.
“Also, think about the banks, the government institutions or even the libraries where Windows-based computers are widely used. They will all benefit from having a Braigo to provide accessibility services to their visually impaired customers,” he added.
He is targeting a price point of $500 dollars or less for the printer to ensure affordability, as per reports.
First Published: May 15, 2015 23:16 ISTBuilding Success
Beginning his career in Nigeria in the infrastructure and construction sectors by holding a variety of executive positions in leading Nigerian based companies. After gaining experience in many areas including administration, logistics and procurement, he set out on his independent professional journey – founding his own security company.
In 1994, armed with proven management skills, a keen business sense, extensive professional knowledge and specialised IDF experience in combat and defence, Eyal Mesika founded EMI Systems Limited – a leading security company that operates both in Nigeria and in Ghana.
With diligent work and endless determination, Mesika built and developed the company, tirelessly expanding and perfecting the services and solutions it provides. He continues to efficiently lead EMI Systems to this very day as founder, owner and CEO.Sayer Ji, Contributor
Activist Post
In the three days that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when all commercial flights above the continental US were suddenly suspended, a veil was lifted on the profound – though until that point unconfirmed – effects that aviation-associated artificial clouds are having on our planetary environment.
In the August 2002 edition of Nature, which is ranked the world’s most cited interdisciplinary journal, a report was published titled “Contrails reduce daily temperature range,” where scientists discuss how “a brief interval when the skies were clear of jets unmasked an effect on climate.”
Three Days Without Contrails
The post-9/11 grounding of all commercial aircraft resulted in the sudden disappearance of condensation trails (contrails) from jet aircraft across the entire United States. According to the Nature study, the potential of contrails “…from jet aircraft to affect regional-scale surface temperatures has been debated for years…,” but it was not until the three-day grounding period that doubts concerning the existence of the phenomenon could be put to rest.
The Phenomenon: A 1.8 Degree Celsius Increase In Temperature in North America
The study found “…an anomalous increase in the average diurnal temperature range (that is, the difference between the daytime maximum and night-time minimum temperatures) for the period 11-14 September 2001.”
They go on to explain: “Because persisting contrails can reduce the transfer of both incoming solar and outgoing infrared radiation and so reduce the daily temperature range, we attribute at least a portion of this anomaly to the absence of contrails over this period.”
They arrived at their measurements by analyzing maximum and minimum temperature data from approximately 4,000 weather stations through the conterminous United States (excluding Hawaii and Alaska) for the period 1971-2000, and compared them to the three-day post-9/11 grounding period.
They found an increase in the diurnal temperature range (DTR) of approximately 1.1 degree Celsius over normal 1971-2000 values, and an increase of 1.8 degrees during the grounding period in contrast to the adjacent three-day periods analyzed when DTR values were near or below the mean.
This is a highly significant finding as “The increase in DTR is larger than any during the 11-14 September period for the previous 30 years…,” and since “…the 11-14 September increasing DTR was more than twice the national average for regions of the United States where contrail coverage has previously been reported to be most abundant (such as the Midwest, northeast and northwest regions).”
The study authors concluded
“Our findings indicate that the diurnal temperature range averaged across the United States was increased during the aircraft-grounded period, despite large variations in the amount of cloud associated with mobile weather systems. We argue that the absence of contrails was responsible for the difference between a period of above-normal but unremarkable DTR and the anomalous conditions that were recorded.”
Discussion
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First, it is important to point out that the observed post-9/11 elevation in temperature is not one-dimensional.
While clouds, including aviation-associated contrails may lower temperature by reflecting solar radiation off the planet in what is known as the “albedo” effect, they may also raise temperature by blanketing trapped heat preventing its nighttime radiative dissipation.
In fact, NASA’s Earth Observatory states that “NASA scientists have found that cirrus clouds, formed by contrails from aircraft engine exhaust, are capable of increasing average surface temperatures enough to account for a warming trend in the United States that occurred between 1975 and 1994.”
The point, however, is that aviation-associated weather does profoundly affect temperature.
It is not necessary to believe in clandestine geoengineering programs, or malevolently dispensed chemical trails, in order to see the effect that modern day aviation is having – visibly — on our skies. Billions of pounds of jet fuel are burned each year, adding a vast amount (albeit mostly invisible) of chemical pollution to our environment.
While the mainstream still considers the persistent condensation trails formed by jets to be a harmless and ephemeral, a growing sector of the public is increasingly concerned about the “chemtrails” they are seeing blanketing the sky – a term, in fact, which generates millions of searches and web page results through Google, but is equated with “conspiracy theory” via automatic redirection on sites like Wikipedia or Dictionary.com.
Considering the results of the Nature article, there can be little doubt that these trails are having a profound effect on weather right now, and such a profound one, that within just three days of their cessation, a massive temperature anomaly occurred over a surface area of 9,326,410 sq km, the land mass of the United States.
If, and that’s a big IF, these temperature anomalies are a result of the absence of only jet exhaust, which we are told are “mostly water vapor,” the unintended cloud-producing effects of commercial aviation taken in its totality is already (unintentionally) a global form of geoengineering qua effects. Simply viewing a satellite image (example above) of commercial jet paths reveals how artificial clouds are now overtaking natural ones.
Since the 1990s, climatologists like Jane Long and Julio Friedman have advocated cooling the Earth through solar radiation management (SRM), which proposes injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The sulfur clouds would block sunlight, imitating the cooling effects of volcanos. Advocates suggest that geo-engineering is not only cost-effective, but also the only realistic solution to the problem of global warming.
The idea that solar radiation management is our only option is based on two premises: First, SRM assumes that the climate is warming due to greenhouse gases building up, especially CO2. Second, that we cannot (will not) stop greenhouse gas emission, and the CO2 stays trapped in the upper atmosphere indefinitely.
However, other researchers are skeptical. A new documentary called Skywatcher: Contrails, Chemtrails and Artificial Clouds (public release 9-11-2012) offers a completely different perspective. The producer, Dave Dahl, asserts that we have missed the most important factor in climate change models: aircraft.
American Natural Superfood - Free Sample Climate modeling has started to include detailed studies of the effects of artificial clouds, which cool the ground during the daytime. Because of this, many people believe that covert SRM programs are already in full force. But clouds have a warming effect when they blanket the Earth at night, blocking the heat from escaping back into space. For this reason, clouds can cause overall warming, even though they bock sunlight during the daytime. But according to Dahl, the immediate problem we face from climate change is global drying, not global warming, and our efforts to modify the weather with aircraft are toward the purpose of precipitation enhancement, not SRM. Furthermore, he asserts that artificial clouds created by aircraft are the cause of climate change, and our efforts to modify the weather are an aggravation, not a solution. Governments worldwide are concerned about drought as the arid regions of the planet become even drier. But Dahl says today’s precipitation enhancement programs are worsening the problem of climate change, and even in the best-case scenarios, we will not be able to meet our growing water needs through weather modification. “I think it’s this simple,” said Dahl in an interview. “Clouds affect the weather and the climate. We are making artificial clouds. So yes, we are changing the climate, and this movie shows that clouds made by jets are accelerating these changes far more than the buildup of CO2 or methane, and are in fact the primary factor in anthropogenic climate change.” You can watch the preview trailer for Skywatcher at artificialclouds.com and view a free report on contrails, chemtrails and artificial clouds by David Dahl. You can support this information by voting on Reddit HERE This article first appeared at GreenMedInfo. Please visit to access their vast database of articles and the latest information in natural health. var linkwithin_site_id = 557381; linkwithin_text=’Related Articles:’BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Syrian presidency said on Tuesday political initiatives could not work in Syria before terrorism had been wiped out, sticking by its long-held position on how to end its war with insurgents after its Russian allies called for new elections.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad speaks during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, October 20, 2015. REUTERS/Alexei Druzhinin/RIA Novosti/Kremlin
In a statement, the presidency said it was clarifying reports that President Bashar al-Assad had told a Russian delegation on Sunday he would be ready to hold early parliamentary and presidential elections called for by Moscow.
The Russian foreign minister, in an interview broadcast on Saturday, said Syrians needed to prepare for both parliamentary and presidential elections, part of an effort by Moscow to advance a political track towards ending the conflict.
The Syrian parliament’s four-year term is due to expire in May 2016 while Assad’s current seven-year presidential term runs until 2021.
Assad’s main allies Russia and Iran say he must be part of any transition and that the Syrian people will decide who governs them. The United States has said it could tolerate Assad during a short transition period, but that he would then have to exit the political stage.
Syria’s conflict began as a street uprising against four decades of Assad family rule and has descended into a civil war that has killed a quarter of a million people, convulsed the Middle East and drawn in world powers.
The Syrian presidency statement said the state would welcome any political solution approved by the Syrian people that preserves national unity.
But it added that Assad had repeatedly said the defeat of what he called terrorism, his term for various insurgent groups fighting him, must come before any initiative.
“No initiative or ideas can be implemented, and their success guaranteed, before the elimination of terrorism and the restoration of security and stability to the whole country,” the statement said.
The statement did not state Assad’s position on the idea of holding elections.
ELECTIONS
Syria describes all the insurgents as terrorists, including jihadist groups such as the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and Islamic State, and other factions including Islamist groups and those fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army.
Russia has been mounting air strikes in Syria in support of the Syrian military since Sept. 30.
A Russian lawmaker who met Assad on Sunday as part of a delegation told Reuters the Syrian leader’s priority was to defeat terrorists before holding elections.
That lawmaker and another also said Assad told them he would be willing to hold parliamentary and presidential elections if necessary.
A French lawmaker visiting Damascus told reporters on Tuesday that the Syrian parliament was ready to hold elections as planned. “There will be elections next year, that is what the president of the parliament confirmed to us,” Jean-Frédéric Poisson said after meeting Syrian parliamentarians, adding that the French group was also due to meet Assad.
Poisson and two other French lawmakers were not representing the French government, which opposes rapprochement with Assad. Groups of French and other European MPs have made similar trips this year.
Syria’s last presidential election was in June 2014. The vote was won overwhelmingly by Assad for a new seven-year term but dismissed as a sham by opponents with much of the country at war and millions forced from their homes.
Britain’s Special Representative for Syria on Tuesday dismissed the idea that Syria would hold fair elections. When asked in a Twitter discussion why foreign countries should not just let the Syrian people decide, Gareth Bayley said:
“Because Assad won’t let the Syrian people choose. Last election was ridiculously rigged.”
Assad is believed to control a quarter or less of Syrian territory, but the bulk of people still in the country are in the main cities of western Syria that he holds.
The United Arab Emirates and Egypt discussed Syria in a bilateral meeting on Tuesday. Egypt hosts some Syrian opposition figures and the UAE is one of the strongest regional opponents of Assad.
The UAE’s state news agency WAM said Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan met Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and the two discussed the Syrian crisis and the importance of finding political solutions that “guaranteed the security and protection of a unified Syria and preserving its national institutions”.Project Veritas has released more undercover video as part of their American Pravda investigation showing an IT Consultant for the New York Times confessing to the anti-Trump bias pervading their company culture.
The IT contractor, Todd Gordon, who has worked for The New York Times for twenty years, explains that hatred for Trump is a sentiment shared by virtually every employee at the newspaper.
PV Journalist: “Have you ever had anybody in New York Times’ office come up to you and say, I actually enjoy Trump?”
Todd Gordon: “No, no, no.”
PV Journalist: “Really?”
Todd Gordon: “Not one person.”
PV Journalist: “Not one person?”
Todd Gordon: “Not one, not one. Everyone hates him. They hate him like the plague dude.”
The video continues with Gordon explaining that the NYT is aware that the Russia ‘scandal’ was “all hearsay” but intentionally put out the dubious information anyway.
Todd Gordon: “Right, it’s all been here-say. Maybe he did this, maybe he did that. You’re right, 100%. They haven’t been able to prove it.” PV Journalist: “But 100%, that’s how I feel like Times…” Todd Gordon: “You’re right.” PV Journalist: “…has covered this, right?” Todd Gordon: “Yeah, 100% you’re right. It’s all heresay.” PV Journalist: “You’re in the office all the time, so you get to see it firsthand.” Todd Gordon: “Yeah, heresay, it’s all heresay. And they’re like grab that heresay and let’s put it out there.”
Gordon added that it’s impossible for the NYT to be unbiased with Trump due to their almost obsessive dislike for him.
“I’m like, ‘Beautiful day, today.’ And they’re like, ‘As good as it could be, fuck Trump,'” Gordon said.
“Everywhere I go, everywhere I go they’re like ‘as good as it could be, but we’re fucked.’”
This is Part IV of Project Veritas’ American Pravda investigation exposing The New York Times’ blatant anti-Trump bias.For this study, a 4D hand shape basis set was chosen a priori as a compromise between increasing functional utility of the hand and maintaining a relatively low-dimensional control space to reduce calibration time. We investigated 10D control by adding four hand shapes to our previous six dimensions of endpoint translation and orientation. Since 10D control had never been investigated, it was unclear whether neural units would respond primarily to a single control domain (translation, orientation, hand shape), or simultaneously to all domains with true 10D preferred directions. In addition to quantifying high-dimensional neural tuning, we evaluated the participant's ability to control the robotic arm in ten dimensions and to perform functional tasks. The participant demonstrated the ability to control all ten dimensions in order to achieve targeted endpoint positions, orientations, and hand postures. However, her ability to manipulate objects was inconsistent. While the addition of hand shaping allowed for additional dexterity compared to a single grasp dimension, the effect of object manipulation on neural activity also became more pronounced, which motivated changes to our calibration paradigm. Specifically, we switched to a virtual reality environment for calibration, which allowed us to incorporate objects into the grasp and transport phases of movement. The subject's subsequent ability to interact with objects significantly improved and we were able to quantify her performance on clinical tests of upper limb function across multiple days. A follow-up experiment was conducted in order to formally compare the effect of using a virtual environment and virtual objects during calibration. In order to allow for within-day comparisons, a 7D BMI, which required less training time than the full 10D model, was determined using multiple calibration paradigms. Specifically, we compared BMI performance and function using (1) our traditional calibration paradigm based on observing the movement of a robotic arm in space, (2) a virtual training paradigm that allowed us to present virtual objects to the subject during training, and (3) a virtual training paradigm that did not use virtual objects.
Our previous work using intracortical microelectrodes demonstrated that a BMI could provide seven-dimensional (7D) control (3D translation, 3D orientation and 1D grasp) of an anthropomorphic robotic arm and hand (Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory) [ 7 ] to a woman with tetraplegia [ 3 ]. While a single continuous grasp dimension allowed the participant to grasp and transport objects, adding the capacity for hand shaping in such a device would allow for a wider range of interactions, from gestures for communication, to more dexterous manipulation of objects, expanding the range of possible independently performed activities of daily living (ADLs). Dexterity, defined as the ability to coordinate finger movement to shape the hand and to move the fingers independently, is a prime feature of human behavior. Several groups working with both non-human primates and humans have investigated motor cortical tuning properties during imagined and overt movements of individual fingers [ 8 – 11 ] or muscles [ 12 ]. Others have investigated encoding schemes where hand shape is described with reduced dimensionality [ 13, 14 ].
Spinal cord injury or disease prevents the brain's command signals from reaching muscles below the level of the injury. Brain−machine interfaces (BMIs) offer the possibility of bypassing the damaged tissue by decoding movement intention and controlling assistive devices such as computer cursors [ 1 ], and, more recently, robotic arms [ 2 – 4 ]. To accurately extract a subject's intention, it is important to calibrate the BMI properly [ 5 ], which may be difficult if the intention is covert. This issue becomes very important for object manipulation, during which the intended action on the object may not be explicit on an instant-by-instant timescale. The actor can choose a range of solutions, namely reach trajectories and hand configurations, to achieve an acceptable result. Similarly, the actor adapts to dynamics as an object is grasped or transported [ 6 ]. Real-world BMIs must account for these changes to maintain performance.
Two of the three calibration paradigms were determined each day, over six total testing days for a total of four sessions with each. The order of training was pseudo-randomized, and all combinations were tested. BMI performance was assessed for the two neural decoders each day using success rate on the 7D Sequence Task. Functional performance testing for two decoders in the same day required a faster task than the ARAT. A simplified 'Box and Blocks' [ 27 ]-like task was used during these 7D decoder comparison experiments (video 6). During this task, the subject was instructed to pick up a 7.5 cm cube from the left half of a 90 × 60 cm table top, move it over a 12 cm high barrier, and set it down on the right half of the table. This task was performed on a table located about 40 cm below the shoulder. The initial position of the cube was 20 cm left of the barrier. After each successful release, the experimenter replaced the block at the starting position. Each trial lasted 2 min during which the number of successful transfers was recorded. The average number of transfers per minute and the 7D Sequence Task success rate achieved with each decoder were each compared using an ANOVA with post-hoc pairwise comparisons where appropriate.
As a follow-up study conducted on days 266–280 post-implant, we attempted to quantify the effect of using VR and incorporating objects into the training paradigm. BMI performance was assessed for three distinct calibration paradigms described below: (1) calibration with the MPL without objects (7D Sequence Task), (2) VR calibration without objects (7D VR Sequence Task), and (3) VR calibration with virtual objects (7D VR Object Task). These comparisons were made using 7D control (3D translation, 3D orientation, 1D grasp) since it required less training time than 10D allowing multiple calibration paradigms to be investigated and compared in each experimental session. Calibration was performed with two steps (observation and ortho-impedance) as described in section 2.5.
It was observed that the subject often had difficulty interacting with physical objects, regardless of the performance on non-object tasks such as the 10D Sequence Task. In fact, when the neural decoder was trained during the 10D Sequence Task, performance on object-based tasks was inconsistent enough that we did not formally attempt the functional evaluation with the ARAT. We hypothesized that altering the training paradigm to include objects might improve her ability to interact with objects. This motivated the switch to the 10D VR Object Task on day 189 post-implant, which allowed us to easily present virtual objects in various positions and orientations. During this second phase of 10D control, both calibration and BMI performance testing were done in the virtual environment using the 10D VR Object Task, however the primary focus was on the functional evaluation using the ARAT with the physical MPL since her ability to interact with objects was significantly improved. We attributed this improvement in performance to the change in calibration paradigm, although we could not rule out the possibility that she simply became more proficient with the BMI over time.
To test functional performance, the subject used the BMI-controlled MPL to complete nine subtasks from the Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) [ 26 ]. For 10D control, ARAT testing was only completed while calibration was performed with the 10D VR Object Task. Table 1 denotes the study periods during which the ARAT was completed and the subtasks are listed in figure 5 and table 3. The ARAT subtasks chosen were the same as in [ 3 ] since the other standard ARAT subtasks require some degree of compliance in the fingertips which was not possible with the robotic arm at the time. The ARAT has been used to quantitatively assess upper limb function and is indicative of the ability to perform ADLs [ 26 ]. The task was executed and scored as in [ 3 ]. Briefly, three attempts were permitted for each object during each session and the subject was informed that only the best trial would be included which allowed her to explore different strategies. Each attempt generated both a score on a 0–3 scale, and a completion time. The completion time was measured on a stopwatch by an experimenter. The best score of the three attempts is reported. The definition of each score is as follows:
Normalized performance metrics were computed in order to allow for comparisons between different test paradigms and to be able to include trials that incorporated some amount of computer assistance. In order to determine task difficulty, the chance level of successful completion was calculated for each task. This was done by creating a random walk command signal (velocity controlled by a normally distributed random variable in each dimension) that matched the actual command signal's average speed in each domain. For example, if the subject moved with a RMS orientation velocity of 0.2 rad/s on a given trial, the random walk over the three orientation dimensions would be scaled to have an RMS velocity of 0.2 rad/s as well. For trials that used computer assistance, the same assistance was added to the randomly generated command signal used in the actual trials. Each trial was simulated 200 times using this method to generate the chance level of success and the 95% confidence interval. The effective success thresholds in translation, orientation and hand shape used for the chance level estimation were based on the subject's distance from the target location in each domain at the time the trial was marked as a success (either by the computer or the experimenter). A performance metric was then generated by dividing the subject's success rate by the chance level (equation ( 3 )). Path efficiency and completion rate were normalized by calculating the median path efficiency and completion rate using the computer-controlled MPL for each paradigm and then dividing the actual results by this value (equation ( 4 )). Path efficiency for the computer-controlled MPL was less than one due to anatomic constraints and limitations of the inverse-kinematics model.
where Δd x is the change in dimension x over the course of a trial, v x is the instantaneous velocity in dimension x during the trial, t is time where t = 0 at the beginning of each trial, and N is the number of trials per set. Thus if the hand moved directly to the target with no deviations in any dimension, the path efficiency was one. In all other cases, the path efficiency was less than one.
Success rate, completion rate, and path efficiency were computed as measures of BMI performance. Success rate was the percentage of trials with all phases completed successfully for a given block of trials (10–20 repetitions). Completion rate was computed as the number of trials completed per minute. Target presentation phases, during which the MPL was not allowed to move, were not included in this calculation. Path efficiency was calculated as the distance the hand traveled during the trial divided by the distance from starting point to end-point (equation ( 2 )) [ 3 ]. Each domain was treated individually and then averaged. This value was then averaged over each set of trials and inverted to produce a metric between 0 (an infinitely inefficient path) and 1 (ideal path). Note that this metric was insensitive to speed or pauses, responding only to the efficiency of the path itself.
In order to aid learning and to keep the subject engaged, two types of computer assistance, stabilization and ortho-impedance, were used as previously described [ 3 ]. When stabilization was set to 100% the non-targeted dimensions during the current phase were controlled by the computer. For example, during the 10D Sequence Task the computer would hold orientation constant during the translation phase and vice versa. A smaller percentage of stabilization resulted in a blending of the brain control command signal and the computer generated command signal for the non-targeted dimensions. In this case, the subject could still control all dimensions but in a subset of these dimensions a centering velocity returning the MPL to the target would be blended with the brain-control signal [ 3, 18 ]. Ortho-impedance restricted movements to the correct 10D trajectory, either directly toward or directly away from the target, but did not automatically move the MPL. The components of the command trajectory that were orthogonal to the ideal trajectory were reduced by a specified percentage that was varied by the experimenter. Note that these assistance values were calculated based on the 10D position and velocity vectors, not individually for each domain (translation, orientation, or hand shape). Ideal trajectories were defined as the 10D vector difference between the current position and the target position. Test sessions completed using computer assistance are identified in the results. No assistance of any kind was used during 'full brain control' trials. Table 1 specifies for each study phase whether testing was completed with some form of computer assistance, under full brain control, or both.
BMI testing consisted of evaluations designed to test the subject's ability to control all ten degrees of freedom. The 10D Sequence and 10D VR Object Tasks used for calibration were also used to evaluate the subject's performance over time. As listed in table 1, during the first phase of 10D (control), BMI calibration and testing were completed with the 10D Sequence Task, while during the second phase of 10D control, the 10D VR Object Task was used for calibration and testing. During testing, the subject controlled all available dimensions simultaneously but was instructed to only modulate the appropriate dimensions for each phase, moving to the target while keeping unneeded dimensions constant. In order to pass each phase, the subject was required to achieve the instructed 10D target (specified endpoint position, orientation, and hand shape) within given error bounds in 10 s. Error bounds were set prior to the experiment at a level that we felt was reasonable given the abstract cues (LEDs and sound) used in the 10D Sequence Task, though minor adjustments were made over the course of the experiment. Investigators could also manually mark a phase as a success, for example if the subject over-rotated the hand in the desired direction. This same procedure was used previously [ 3 ] to minimize frustration. A trial was considered successful if all movement phases were achieved successfully. Generally, the subject had the most difficulty controlling finger ab/adduction that had a small range of motion (ROM) or she tended to over-rotate in the roll dimension which had a large range of motion. The final MPL position for each dimension fell within the following criteria for >90% of all successful trial phases (manually marked or auto-judged by the computer): <9 cm from the translation target, <28° from the orientation target, and <34% of the full ROM for hand shape. For hand shape, the ROM for each dimension was scaled from 0 to 100% with targets at both ends of this range.
Neural and kinematic data collected during the observation phase of calibration over the 10D portion of the study were used to determine the domain-specificity of the encoding model (equation ( 1 )). Observation data was used to get an initial daily estimate of neural tuning independent of the influence of closed-loop training with the neural decoder. Neural tuning was estimated daily using data from the entire observation training session, not single phases. Three control domains were considered: translation, orientation, and hand shape. The translation and orientation models included three independent variables (3D velocity), while the hand shape model included four independent variables (four hand shape dimensions). For this analysis, the p-value of the fit was used to determine significance, rather than use the R 2 thresholds used during online experiments. Tuning was considered significant when the p-value of the regression model fit was less than 0.05.
Reach phase: at the start of the Reach phase, the position, orientation, and hand pre-shaping (finger ab/adduction or thumb opposition/extension) targets are cued simultaneously by the shape and location of a red object in the VR workspace. The shape of the object (capsular, cylindrical, ellipsoid) provided the cue for hand pre-shaping (thumb-extension/finger-adduction, thumb-opposition/finger-adduction, thumb-opposition/finger-adduction, respectively). Translation and orientation targets for the Reach and Carry phases were pseudo-randomly chosen from the same set of positions and orientations as in the 10D Sequence Task.
Hand phase: computerized verbal prompts instructed the subject to reach targets in one of the hand shape dimensions: pinch, scoop, finger abduction, and thumb opposition. The MPL had to move to a new target in one of these dimensions while holding the others constant. For example, in figure 1 (D), the target specified thumb extension, while maintaining the pinch posture. Note that the subject had continuous velocity-based control over the hand shape basis functions. No classification or discretization of the space was performed.
Two different 10D calibration paradigms, the 10D Sequence Task and 10D VR Object Task, were used in this study (videos 1, 2), as shown in the 10D section of table 1. The 10D Sequence Task used the physical MPL (figure 1 (B)) and involved achieving specified endpoint positions, orientations, and hand shape configurations based on LED patterns or verbal commands. No physical targets were presented. The 10D VR Object Task used the virtual MPL and environment (figures 1 (C) and (E)) and involved grasping and manipulating virtual objects. The virtual MPL was created using Unity 3D (Unity Technologies, San Francisco, CA) and viewed via a shutter-based 3D television. The virtual MPL used the same control system, inverse kinematics model, and dynamics as the physical MPL [ 25 ]. For a given input signal the motion of the virtual and physical MPL was nearly identical, making the virtual MPL a valuable tool for calibration. The same custom software was used to specify target locations, success criteria, and control settings for both the virtual and physical MPLs that were commanded in velocity-space and provided position and velocity feedback to our system. For both paradigms, a trial consisted of multiple phases during which the target for a subset of commanded dimensions was specified as described below. The subject had access to all ten dimensions at all times, however phases were used to segment each trial and within each of these segments the non-specified degrees of freedom had to be kept constant. Successful completion of the current phase was required before the target for the next phase was presented. If the subject exceeded the 10 s timeout on any phase the trial failed and the MPL returned to its starting position. In both paradigms, for all domains, the target for each phase was pseudo-randomized on a set-by-set basis. The possible targets for each control domain (translation, orientation, and hand shape) are described below. At the beginning of each set, a random permutation of numbers was generated by the computer and used to select the targets from a list for each movement phase independently.
The decoder trained during observation was then used to complete the second step of calibration during which the participant performed the tasks under brain-control with assistance (ortho-impedance) which attenuated the brain-command component perpendicular to the ideal trajectory by 100%, essentially restricting the MPL to a movement path directly towards or away from the target [ 18 ]. Ortho-impedance was applied to the 10D control signal generated by the subject before being sent to the MPL. After 10–15 min of data collection for the ortho-impedance assisted calibration, a second decoder was trained using neural activity and the user-generated kinematics recorded during constrained brain control. This decoder was then used to complete all testing trials for a given session.
where f is the square root transformed firing rate for a given unit, v is the velocity in the indicated dimension and b is the coefficient relating that velocity to the firing rate. The dimensions, in order, were translation (x,y,z), orientation (about each translational axis centered at a point 4 cm normal to the surface of the palm, θ x, θ y, θ z ), pinch (p), scoop (s), finger ab/adduction (f), and thumb opposition/extension (t). The four hand shape dimensions were chosen to maximize the usability of the robot while being easily explained to the subject and were not intended to mimic natural hand synergies [ 22 ]. The hand shape dimensions were continuous. No classification or discretization of these dimensions was performed. The B coefficient matrix was solved using indirect optimal linear estimation (OLE) [ 23 ] with variance correction [ 3 ] and ridge regression [ 24 ]. Only neural units with firing rates higher than one event/minute and that fit the encoding model with an R 2 greater than a predefined threshold (0.001–0.005) were included in the decoder and subsequent analysis. The B matrix is then pseudo-inverted as described in [ 3, 23, 24 ] to find the decoding weights W. Decoding is then performed by multiplying the observed neural firing rates vector F by the weights matrix W resulting in a vector estimating the intended kinematics. The calibration and decoding procedure is further described in the appendix.
Throughout the study, a two step calibration method was used as previously described [ 3 ]. Briefly, in the first step, the computer controlled the MPL to automatically complete each trial while the subject observed and imagined performing it herself. This method elicited observation-driven neural activity [ 18 – 20 ] that was used to calculate the initial neural tuning functions (equation ( 1 )). After approximately 10 min of data collection, a decoder was trained based on the smoothed (450 ms window) neural activity and computer-generated kinematics. An exponential window with 3 dB cutoff at approximately 1 Hz was used for smoothing to bias the neural activity towards the most recent samples. The 10D linear encoding model relating observed firing rates [ 21 ] to training-set kinematics is shown in equation ( 1 ).
Figure 1. Experiment setup and equipment. (A) Four hand shape postures, clockwise from top left: finger abduction, scoop, thumb extension, and pinch (B) MPL experiment setup. The MPL is shown with a vertical board and nine LEDs that are used to indicate the translation target during testing. (C) A screenshot of the virtual testing environment used for the 10D VR Sequence Task. (D) Each movement phase for a sample 10D Sequence Task trial is shown. (See section 2.5 for a full description of movement phases). (E) Each movement phase for a sample 10D VR Object Task trial is shown. (F) Objects used in the Action Research Arm Test (ARAT).
The MPL (Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory) [ 7 ] replicates many of the movements performed by the human arm and hand. When operated in endpoint-control mode, 16 degrees of freedom can be operated independently: 3D translation and 3D orientation of the hand, as well as 1D flexion/extension of each finger, ab/adduction of the index finger, combined ab/adduction of the little and ring fingers, and 4D control of the thumb. For this study, the robot's ten hand-based degrees of freedom were projected into a 4D 'hand shape' space. The four hand shape basis functions were: pinch, scoop, finger abduction, and thumb opposition (figure 1 (A)). Pinch involves flexion of the thumb, index finger, and middle finger. Scoop involves flexion of the ring and pinky fingers. Finger abduction allowed for abduction of the index, ring, and little finger away from a neutral (adducted) posture. Thumb opposition allowed the participant to move between thumb opposition (against the palm) and extension (lateral position). 4D hand shape was combined with 6D endpoint velocity for a total of ten simultaneously |
rent bill in Boostcoins? They are trading into fiat when the time is right. Considering the hidden double premine and the fact that this is a classic terrabad instaPoW/PoS coin, we give Boostcoin a hardly hell no.
Bytecoin
type of algorithm: CryptoNote PoW only Bytecoin is an enigma. Supposedly started on the darknet by developers inspired by bitocin, it takes advantage of a completely revolutionary kind of algorithm called CryptoNote. In a white paper by Nicolas van Saberhagen 26), you can read all about a CPU mined only algorithm that uses something called ring signatures to make transactions truly anonymous. The algorithm doesn't compare to 98% of the alts that were made before it OR after it. Bytecoin is in the same league as Monero, Quazarcoin, Fantomcoin, Boolberry, etc as they are all cryptonotes made in 2014. Now, the crazy thing is that Bytecoin flew under the radar during the entire crypto explosion of 2013. Everyone was making copies and clones of Bitcoin and Bytecoin never really jumped on the party bandawagon. We find this fact unfortunate because the mining data does not encourage new investors to jump into the coin at this stage. Bytecoin has a large amount of total possible coins at 184,460,000,000. When you look at Bytecoin today, you can see that there are over 156 billion coins minted already. From July 2012 to July 2014, a total of two years, the currency created around 85% of it's total expected amount. There aren't too many Bytecoins left to be mined now that they are on the map. 85% in 2 years is fast, especially under the cloak of darkness. Now, some may say that Bitcoin was in a similar position in early 2013 as “everyone” started to get on board with Bitcoin. However, at that point Bitcoin had only mined 50% of its currency total, not 85%. Second, Bitcoin was usable in a myriad of ways (and even more today). People weren't just holding Bitcoins for investment purposes. People were spending it as well. To this date, Bytecoin has been a purely speculative currency with a couple hundred people or less on the darkweb using it (the reality is that people “back in the day” were more likely to use Bitcoin than Bytecoin). Bytecoin has not even been on any exchanges until very recently 27). Thus, this is very different from how people jumped into Bitcoin in 2013. Bytecoin was hardly been used at all save for a tiny amount of people. Now that the mining is virtually done, it is getting more attention and finally being traded on an exchange. (It is probably garnering attention because Monero, it's younger sibling, is gaining lots of press. Monero is only 8% mined at this time.) This coin does not appear to have any significant premine. The blockchain does show that on the first block, there was some 703,600 Bytecoins created. Looking at the total coins in circulation, one sees there are some 1,407,000 coins. This could mean there is an undocumented premine of exactly one block, which at the time was around 703,000 coins. Considering the coins is measured in the hundreds of billions, this is not a premine at all. But it is a strange anomaly. There is nothing malicious about this coins intentions, at least not in our reveiw of the mining data. Considering the above facts, however, we don't see a need to jump into Bytecoin. This coin is in both the extreme caution and questionable section, not quite fitting into either one.
Cinni
type of algorithm: scrypt PoW initially (closed)/PoS Not sure where to begin with this coin. How about their completely blank website? The front page displays absolutely no information. When you click the about page, this is what you see… At least they list the wallet downloads, the currency exchanges you can sell your Cinni on, and the pools from which you can mine Cinni, because apparently that is all that matters. :crickets: Cinni resources…a lot like their “about” page. Much ado about nothing. Their blog consists of 8 “rules” in the tradition of fight club. The first rule of Cinni club is that you do not sell your Cinni coins. The second rule is…etc etc, all of which advocate holding your coins, buying more, waiting for a forever pump. What the hell are we pumping? We don't know anything about the coin! Of course, this is a miner centric coin, so you have to know to go to www.bitcointalk.org forums and search out their initial post. They apparently used PoW mining to create 15 million coins. Each block was supposedly 868 coins. You cannot verify this for yourself by going to their blockchain, as it is the first block not to report any transaction value 28). They don't seem to be lying about this, however, because the last PoW block was (supposedly)17,280. They claim it never halves, so all the PoW ming should be represented here. 868 x 17,280 = 14,999,040. Slightly off, but how can we verify anything? We can't, which should be disconcerting to people. Their blockchain doesn't even read normal time stamps and we cannot verify how fast the PoW mining took place. Taking their word for it, 15 million coins were mined in 3 days 29). Now that it is 100% PoS, the only new coins to come into the market will arrive at 3.5% interest. To an investor who understands simple math, this coin is obviously stacked in favor of the miners and the PoS minters are left out to dry. Within 3 days, 15 million coins were created. Plenty of miners received 10,000s of coins during this period. 10,000 cinni as of April 30th is worth around $500. An investor would have to purchase 100,000 cinni at a price of $5,000 and mint at 3.5% interest. At that interest rate, you can make 3500 cinni IF YOU MINT ALL OF YOUR COINS. That's about 175 bucks. But wait, there's more bad news for PoS minters. You cannot mint more than 10,000 coins on one computer 30). Most people only have one computer, maybe two if they have a spouse or a desktop. So now 20,000 coins will mint a max of 700 coins, which is roughly $35 for a minting period. We are pretty sure you can do better on your $5,000 investment then $35 bucks. So why would someone use Cinni again? This author isn't sure, but he hopes a decent answer shows up on the website soon enough. **We can clearly see why someone would mine this coin; we can't see why someone would mint this coin or use this coin**.
Clean Water Coin
type of algorithm: scrypt PoW/PoS Here is a coin that is attempting to take humanitarian causes as one of it's chief aims, not unlike Primecoin, Riecoin, Gridcoin, or Einsteinium. Rather than sit back, relax, and say “hey, its for charity! Don't worry!”, we will remain extra vigilant. And when we do, something does not add up about Clean Water coin. To begin with, they provide on their bitcointalk thread (but not the website) the information of a premine which they call “pre launch” coins, supposedly going all to investors and none to development. You can see this in the blockchain 31). The coin supposedly provides up to 1000 generated coins per block, which gets smaller as the dificulty of mining goes up. There is also proof of stake at 8%. Currently, there 32,197 blocks on the Clean Water Coin blockchain. IF we take the assumption that every single block gets the maximum possible, 1,000 coins, and we multiply 32197 x 1000 = 32,197,000 coins. Including the 10,000,000 premined coins, this should bring a overestimated total of **42,197,000 CWC**. What is the actual total today? A little less because of our estimation? NO. The total as of May 6th is roughly **488,000,000 CWC**. How can the coin total be that far off? What else can we say about this launch? They started on March 30th. On April 29th, we can see on an archived www.coinmarketcap.com that there were already 484,000,000 CWC in existence. 484 million divided by 30 days is a little more than 16 million coins per day. Now if you go to their blockchain 32), click the double right arrow to set the search at the beginning. Choose to view the blockchain by 50 transaction per page. As we click through 50 transactions at a time, we see that from the inception of March 30th, 8:30 p.m. to March 31, 8:30 p.m. has a total of only 12,924,054. Then we have to minus the 10,000,000 premine, which shows only 2,924,054 CWC were created in a day. The next day, April 1st at 8:30 pm, we see the total coinage at 13,503,054, which means only 600,000 CWC were added the next day 33). April 2nd at 8:30 p.m. shows block 4033 with a total coinage of 14,278,054, meaning that another 750,000 CWC were created. This is no where near what is necessary, ~15 million CWC/day, to reach their current total. How did they do it? The coin should be avoided until this dilemma is solved. Even still, The coin has reached half of the total maximum coins of 1,000,000,000 in almost a month. That is an incredible fastmine. Once the above is solved, we would STILL avoid this coin as something doesn't smell quite right. ETA: **Dilemma Solved** This author went through a lot of clicking to view each page of 50 transactions and noted the amount of coins created per day, starting from March 31st. We covered up to April 2nd above…here is the rest of the blockchain data up until April 7th.
Blockchain data
Legend: first column numbers are blockchain, second is date, third is # of transactions, fourth amount transacted, fifth is difficulty and sixth is total number of coins minted. 5027 2014-04-03 20:30:37 11 6640.539596 36.253 14972054 5570 2014-04-04 20:31:57 12 6503.023654 13.522 15515054 6275 2014-04-05 20:33:34 16 13619.239612 12.497 16220054 6971 2014-04-06 20:32:32 5 2068.161995 11.019 16916054 7857 2014-04-07 20:30:05 18 6073040.428916 27.947 407560848.588562 HEYYYOO. What they hell happened between April 6th and April 7th? Let's take a look at the evening of April 6th. After chugging along around 1000 coins per block…. The coin generation is about to jump from 1000 coins a block to some truly absurd numbers…like 500,000 coins a block! Now, we can know for certain that some of these blocks were MAJORLY mined by looking for the ones with only one transaction on them. That transaction is the sending of mined coins to the miner. The coin generation jumps from 1000 CWC to hundreds of thousands of CWC… and this continues…notice that with 50 blocks per page, they are now generating an absurd 20 million coins in that period… …and continues… The carnage ends around block 8136. They now have 472,000,000 CWC in creation, **a hidden instamine of over 450 million CWC** (going back to April 6th there were roughly 17 million in creation). Absolutely unreal! Not only don't use this coin, TELL EVERYONE not to use this coin. ETA: According to supporters in the Clean Water Coin thread 34), the 450 million explosion was an accident by one of the devs. They decided to just keep chugging along. Don't bother informing Clean Water Coin, they are fully aware nearly half a billion coins come into existence beyond the rules they structured. They have decided they don't care that around 90% of their coins have been created accidentally. Does that sound like something you want to invest in and support?
Cloakcoin
type of algorithm: x13 PoW/PoS Cloakcoin joins the club of rapidly mined PoW coins that transition into PoS within a month, usually one to two weeks. This one ends the PoW/PoS hybrid period after 7 days and turns completely PoS at 6% annual interest. Unfortunately, when this author visited the blockchain of Cloakcoin he received this warning from his computer… If you can't see the image, it simply says the certificate on the blockchain website is not trustworthy. This author didn't bother clicking through the link as it is not worth it. There is enough info on the bitcointalk thread to do an analysis. This warning will **not** be considered as malicious unless someone contacts this author to verify it. It simly serves as a potential warning to others and we will give them the benefit of the doubt that this author's computer is over protective. The bitcointalk thread shows a total of 4,500,000 coins and yet coinmarketcap is showing that there are 4,510,000 coins, so they must mean there will only be 4,500,000 coins generated during the PoW/PoS hybrid. After the PoW period ended, the maximum amount of coin that can be made in a year (at 6%) would be 270,000 coins. 4,500,000 coins in 7 days. 270,000 coins in one yaer. You make the call as to whether this coin is worth investing in (if you aren't a miner who got in on such a good deal). It should be obvious.
Cryptcoin
type of algorithm: X11 PoW/PoS Cryptcoin misleadingly declares they are a coin without a premine on their bitcointalk.org thread 35). The fact not revealed is that this coin cut their mining subsidy by 10x in 14 days, which when you look at the raw math, can only be described as an instamine. Instamines can have virtually the same effects as a premine and the developer can get away with The bitconitalk thread reveals the first 2000 blocks will have a 500 CRY generation subsidy per block. From block 2001 to 4000 is 250 CRY/block, and 4001-8000 is 125 CRY/block, and 8001 to 16000 yields 62.5 CRY. The generation scheme then completely breaks its super fast rhythm and from block 16001 to 224000 the creation is only 31.25 CRY per block. EDITED TO ADD: Apparently the rate at which coins will be produced as changed. The initial distribution plan is slightly modified so that blocks 4000-12,000 produce 125 coins/block, than blocks 12,000-48,000 produce 62.5 coins/block and from block 48,000 to 386,000 there are 31.25 coins/block produced. This is a negligable change The coin launched on May 21st and block 16,000 occurred on June 5th. We cannot assume all blocks are PoW, but we can see that 1.9 million coins were created in two weeks from PoW. The maximum number of coins is declared to be 11 million coins, making this initial fortnight the time to get into this currency. Look at the graph of goldcoin 36) to get the idea of how much this two week period benefits th early adopter/miner and not necessarily the late comer investor. Ultimately, this coin is very similar than the surplus of instaPoW/PoS coins that we currently see today. Cryptcoin has decided not to turn off the PoW quite as fast as Cinni, Blackcoin, et al, but the effect is still the same. To read more about how the instaPoW/PoS system is worse than the ugliest of instamine in 100% PoW, read below. The Hottest Trend In Alternative Cryptocurrencies Is A Hidden Scam Tread with extreme caution here. This coin seems to have a lot of pumpers on its side, judging by the 2-4 million recent volume spikes in a 24 hour period. We don't advise trying to ride the wave of a pump and dump coin for obvious reasons.
Darkcoin
derived from Quark type of algorithm: blake, bmw, groestl, keccak, jh, stein PoW and PoS The following data and time stamps were collected from the Darkcoin blockchain 37). Block 1: 2014-01-19 Time: 3:54:41
Block 1000 : 2014-01-19 Time: 4:33:39
Block 2000: 2014-01-19 Time: 06:25:47
Block 3000: 2014-01-19 Time: 09:10:16
Block 3250: 2014-01-19 Time: 11:22:11 Looking at this data, we see that Darkcoin was mined with 500 DRK generated per block from the get go. **From block 1 to at least block 3250, according to their blockchain, they were still producing 500 coins each block**. The transition from 500 to 277 coins per block occurs between 3250 and 3500 but this author did not see the necessity of getting the exact moment of halving. Simple math shows that 3250 blocks multiplied by 500 coins a block is 1,625,000 Darkcoins created between the times of 3:54 and 11:22 on January 19th, 2014. As of today there are around 4,300,000 DRK in existence, making this a pretty hefty instamine. The Darkcoin website expects around 22,000,000 DRK to be created. That means in less than 8 hours, almost 5% of the Darkcoins that ever will be created spawned in that 1/3 of a day. **It's safe to say Darkcoin has left it's investors in the dark on this one**.
DonationCoin
type of algorithm: scrypt PoW only The block reward is 50 DON and it halves every 720,000 blocks. We are only on block 50,000 after a couple months from launch, so this coin does not disappoint in these terms. However, the premine is hard to grapple with. Donation actually publically announces it's premine on it's own website, unlike 90% of the altcoins here 38). It's a doozy, however, at 18 million coins out of an expected 90 million coins in total 39), a full 20%. This is the convenient way to count the premine/instamine, but for the investor it's better to look at the total coins in production. The coins will be dispensed so that 13,500,000 coins are sent to charities that get their wallet set up and openly advertise the fact that they accept donation coin. The rest of 4,500,000 coins are for the developers to use for their purposes, presumably giveaways, bounties, etc. We can see from the block chain there are 17,400 blocks and counting. Other than the 18,000,000 coin premine, every block has generated 50 coins. 17,400 x 50 = 870,000 coins. UPDATE 6/13/14: Donation coin has changed their strategy for dispensing their coins. Instead of sending the lion's share to American Red Cross, they will be sending 250,000 DON to any charity that accepts their coin. (From a logistical standpoint one can see how in planning phase they wanted the big charities but in reality they have to take what they can get.) Thus far they have sent 250,000 DON to one charity and you can expect more to come on this model as it's practical. Even at the current update, block number 49,173, there are only 20,458,650 DON in existence. Considering 18,000,000 were instamined, that leaves 2.45 million on the market. Our position still stands that this coin stays in the extremely cautious section for investment purposes. The reality for this coin is that it all depends on whether people will hold a coin that supports donations out of the goodwill of their heart. But is they are good people wanting to do goodwill, shouldn't they just give the coin to a charity instead of holding it? Feel free to use Donation Coin to send donations if you so choose. But with 18,000,000 DON planning to be dispensed in quarter million chunks to charities who will have to unload these Donation coins on the market of 2,500,000, we wouldn't recommend being a bag holder.
ECC
After seeing a plethora of rapidly PoW —» PoS coins like Yellowcoin, Darkcoin, Blackcoin, Asiacoin, Cinni, Zimstake, Whitecoin, etc, ECC is actually a breath of fresh air. All of the aforementioned coins received the worst rating in this article for rapidly mining a large amount of coins via the PoW method. ECC basically still does this, although not nearly to the obscene proportions of the other coins. ECC has a random coin generation per block of 100,000 to 300,000. On the good side, the coin never halves during the PoW phase. On the bad side, the PoW phase ends after a mere 45 days. Again, this looks good in comparision to the days or a couple weeks of other coins, but the creators gloss over the fact that this is actually a fast mine. 18,000,000,000 coins will be created during PoW. There are 50,000,000,000 coins that could possibly be created…which means the month and a half PoW phase will produce 36% of the total coins. This author doesn't see why a PoW only coin could prouce a full 36% of their coin in a month and a half would be called scammish and and PoW/PoS coin wouldn't. **This is a fast mine. Being a PoS coin should not shield this coin from that description.** In addition, the website lauds ECC as a “fair” coin 40). While they beat their bone headed competition, this coin still gives a large advantage to the people who mined the coin in the first 6 weeks. Not only that, this coin continues the tradition of not informing the public of their premining practices. Their website, despite having a “fair” section, is mum on the topic of the premine that occurred with this coin. The bitcointalk.org thread mentions a.99% premine. Of course, they are using the 50,000,000,000 total to reach this amount, which means the first block was half a billion ECC for the developers. That is around 5% of the toal coins in existence today. Not too bad, again in comparison to others, but still something an investor wants to know.
Feathercoin
type of alogrithm:scrypt PoW only Feathercoin was created on April 16th, 2013 and within 96 hours there were nearly 4,000,000 ftc created. 41) A little more than one year later, there are 40,000,000 ftc in existence. This means that at this day, April 22nd 2014, a full 10% were created in the first 4 days in comparison to the next year. This rate is simply too fast to ignore. A lot of people prefer the “old school” alternatives versus the newer versions out today. We say that feathercoin's early mining data does not inspire one bit, so it doesn't matter whether old school or new, this is a coin not to use.
Fluttercoin
type of alogrithm:scrypt PoW/PoS/PoT (proof of transaction) Fluttercoin is a PoW/PoS hybrid that provides a unique form of block generation for its first two block generations. They provide a random coin generation between 500-5000 Fluttercoins from block 1 to 3263 42). The next block period, from 3264 to 22000 blocks, would generate a random number of coins from, 1000-10000 Fluttercoins. The lesser amount for the first adopters is rather surprising and does encourage the investor somewhat that this coin is not about enriching the early adopters. The website further reveals, however, that there will only be 200,000,000 Fluttercoins via the PoW formation, at which point the PoS takes over at 5% interest. The first block occurred on March 4th, 2014 43). By April 16th, Coinmarketcap showed fluttercoin having nearly 100 million coins created 44). A mere 13 days later, April 29th, shows Fluttercoin having 182 million coins in existence 45). The supposedly slow start has now rushed to the 200,000,000 limit in almost 2 months. At a 5% PoS interest, the maximum to be created once 200,000,000 arrives will be 200,000,000 x.05 or 10,000,000,000. Rather conveniently, the coin generation goes from 200 million for initial miners to 10 million for the later investor. This does not inspire. Fluttercoin purports to have produced something innovative in their Proof of Transaction addition to their coin's protocol. The white paper informing of this incredible new innovation 46) is an incredibly unmotivating 2.25 pages long. This sort of falls outside the scope of this research but if we may comment briefly…it seems as though this innovation simply encourage people to send fluttercoin's for no purpose but to hopefully hit the lottery and win a bonus PoT award. Even with their parameters in place to limit the spamming of the blockchain with pointless transactions, one can still expect people to send Fluttercoins back and forth just for the hopes of getting lucky. Hardly an innovation that is revelant to the bitcoin revolution…
Goldcoin
type of algorithm: scrypt PoW only Goldcoin is another great example of a bad coin to invest in if you take evidence that the coins are not fairly distributed as reason for being extremely cautious. Using our www.cryptometer.org site, we can see that Goldcoin follows the same pattern. They appeal to the sense of money and wealth storage in the form of gold and yet their technology couldn't have had a worse start for someone wanting to perserve their wealth. 47) This shows 9 milliong GLD coins being created in 30 hours. www.coinmarketcap.com shows 30 million GLD coins in existene since its inception on May 14 of 2013. Nearly one third of the coins were created in one days that were created in a year! Somebody is a massive benefactor in this situation, and it isn't the average joe who buy a few hundred dollars worth of BitBar in the hopes of seeing appreciation. There is a high level of danger that someone holds a ridiculous amount of coins and they have done so in a unscrupulous and unsophisticated manner. They could sell their coins and completely crash your investment. Not mention, it is the principle of the matter…who wants to look back twenty years from now and see that a revolutionary currency had such a shitty and unfair start? How would that be any different than what we have today? It doesn't have to be this way if you simply don't use Goldcoin and encourage others to do likewise.
Infinite Coin
type of algorithm: scrypt PoW Initially 524,288 coins generated per block 48) block 1: 2013-06-05 04:47:22
block 1000: 2013-06-05 09:53:52
block 5000: 2013-06-06 22:32:01
block 10000: 2013-06-08 16:23:24
block 30000: 2013-06-15 16:36:36
block 50000: 2013-06-22 18:25:26
block 75000: 2013-07-01 14:41:58
block 85000: 2013-07-05 01:57:41 At block 85,000, Inifinitecoin was still generating 524,288 coins per block. We did not search for the precise point of halving, but it is somewhere between 85,000 and 100,000 blocks. 524,288 Infinitecoins multiplied by 85,000 blocks is 21,614,480,000 Infinitecoins. As of April 2014, there are around 90,000,000,000 Infinitecoins in existence, which means in one month over 20% of the coins were mined to this date. This is not nearly as bad as some of the more obvious scams out there, which makes this coin merely a questionable investment.
Ixcoin
type of algorithm: SHA1 PoW only We highlight this coin first as a reminder that even if the mining data looks good, you still may be in for a scam. Ixcoin has an apparently great start with a very slow mining speed at the beginning… The 90 day graph over at www.cryptometer.org begins to churn the questions, however… Why the flatline? Then the 3 year graph shows a boost in production from 400,000 IXC to 1,600,000 IXC in one week and the rest of the time a mostly straight line of production… What is going on here? Ixcoin is a Bitcoin clone with very little changed. The first block subsidy is 96 Ix coins instead of 50, like Bitcoin. The intention was for Ixcoin to reach 21 million coins (the same as bitcoin) by 2015 instead of 2033. The code was intended to practically “mirror” bitcoin for possible cross contamination of merchants and other goodies that Bitcoin earned. The creator, one supposedly named “Thomas Nasakioto”, posted an announcement of Ixcoin on Bitcointalk forums on August 10th, 2011. Yet both www.cryptometer.org and Ixcoin's blockchain show the start of the coin as May 07th, 2011. This is a big no no…essentially, from the coin's start until it was publically announced, only “Thomas” and his inner circle would be able to mine the coin. “Thomas Naskioto” is also an anagram of Satoshi Nakamoto. This person's name is likely fictional and just an attempt to use Satoshi and Bitcoin's fame for a clone to cash in. The coin was quickly outed as likely a scam for the same reasons pointed out here on bitcointalk 49). The coin went nowhere until recently a new dev has come on and wants to revive the coin. Don't bother with this one, the first publicly known leech in the crypto community.
Leafcoin
type of alogrithm: scrypt PoW only Leafcoin is the classic example of a coin primed for the super fast pump and dump. If you look at their bitcointalk thread, they are obviously scheming to get coins mined, and fast. They list openly that a full 7,500,000,000 coins will be mined in 10 days 50). That represents a full 1/3 of the coin. Naturally, this information is downplayed and basically ignored on their website 51) in favor of the “environmental” focus of the coin. Leafcoin states that the first 100 blocks are premined, but apparently they went with the randomized block subsidy up to 1,000,000 per block. So if we take an average of 500,000 Leafcoins created, that a 50 million premine. In actuality, that isn't too bad considering there are 15 billion leafcoins in circulation now. That isn't compliment, however, because the fastmine that minimizes the premine makes this coin less attractive to invest in. Leafcoin advertises that they are partnered up with the World Wildlife Foundation 52). However, there is no indication from the WWF that this is the case. The bitcointalk thread states they will find a worthy foundation to partner up with eventually…we shall see if that ever happens. Here is how Leafcoin is perfect for the pump and dump. They have the image that they want and they have the instantly mined coins that they want. Leafcoin began being monitored on Coinmarketcap on February 2nd. By late morning of that day, Leafcoin had already generated over 7.8 billion of the total possible 21 billion coins 53). They went to market at a very high price, saw action immediately, and then dumped. This is why you don't want to follow the hype of a pump and dump. You may think you have the opportunity to double your money easily, and then the currency slices in half. You hold and hold, more and more desparately so, until your expected double up becomes an evaporation of money. Don't bother with Leafcoin, the pump is already over. With nearly 3/4 of the coin already mined, anyone jumping into a revival of this coin clearly has not looked into the information here. Also, wouldn't proof of work mining not really make sense for an environmentally friendly currency? Just saying.
Limecoin
type of algorithm: scrypt PoW only As requested by a reader, we will investigate the Limecoin blockchain. The first block reveals a 500 coin block 54). block 1: (2014-04-22 05:00:44) –Coins generated per block: 500 block 999: (2014-04-22 05:27:04) –Coins generated per block: 500 block 1000: (2014-04-22 05:27:05) –Coins generated per block: 250 block 1999: (2014-04-22 05:47:57) –Coins generated per block: 250 block 2000: (2014-04-22 05:47:59) –COins generated per block: 125 block 3000: 2014-04-22 07:27:05) –Coins generated per block: 62 … block 8999: (2014-04-30 20:56:12) –Coins generaaed per block: 1.9 This pattern appears to continue. While looking for a website, there is none to be found. Even by searching bitcointalk.org forums, where this author could locate a central thread for Limecoin (LC), there was stil no actual website listed. The thread page confirms that the block halving occurs every 1000 blocks in an orderly fashion like that above… The bitcointalk.org thread says that only 1,000,000 Limecoin will be mined into existence, which poses a problem for anyone interested in investing. The first 1000 blocks, at 500 coins a pop, yields 500,000 LC. All in under 27 minutes. **This is over half the total planned coins in under half an hour**. Incredibly, the dev and others call this coin a “fair” mine and people are defending it. Hopefully, reason can speak for itself here.
Karma (formerly Karmacoin)
We give props to the Noblecoin founder who foresaw the mining power and unscrupulous developers heading towards an “ethical” generation of coins, which would merely be another pump and dump scam with the veneer of doing good. Karma is that coin in a nutshell. The Karma website gives no indication of the specs of this coin 55) but there is plenty of information about what karma is and why you should know about it. When we visit the bitcointalk.org forums, we see that the coin already has a suspicious block generation scheme 56). The coin supposedly generates 10,000 coins regardless of the block number; the catch is that there are randomly assigned “bonuses” to each block up to a certain amount. Blocks 1-10000 get up to a 1,000,000 Karma bonus; blocks 10001-25000 get up to a 750,000 Karma bonus; blocks 25000-50000 get 500,000 coins; blocks 50001-100000 get up to 250,000 coins; blocks 100001-200000 get potentially 100,000 coins; block 200001-300000 get up to 25,000 coins; blocks 300001-400000 get 10,000 coins, and then the rest of blocks get no bonus generation. This is deceptive on a few levels. One, they list the block subsidy cutting in half after 2.1 million blocks (expected to be 4 years). Normally this is commendable but considering the bonus coins…this fact doesn't matter one bit. Two, according to the blockchain this coin began on February 4th. The first bonus period ended on February 11 57) with block 10001. February 22nd saw the ending of the second block generation bonus period with block 25001 58). This trend of a week to two weeks a new lower coin coming is reminiscent of block halving way too frequently in other scam coins. Three, the first 58 blocks were mined by one account 59). You can find on the bitcointalk thread for Karma a number of people complaining about a questionable start. Four, upon searching the blockchain one sees that the specifications listd on the bitcointalk thread are incorrect. The above 58 blocks |
Burgess, R-Lewisville, was one of the few Trump supporters to issue a statement at all. He said he believed Trump's short apology, released Friday evening.
"I cannot condone nor defend these remarks," he said in a statement. "However, as Mr. Trump stated, this campaign has changed him as a candidate and a man."
"This election needs to be about which candidate will advance our conservative principles," he added. "Based on comments made by Hillary Clinton in paid speeches, there is no doubt Mr. Trump remains the best candidate for president."
Phillip Huffines, the recently elected Dallas County Republican Party chairman, also condemned Trump's comments. But he left his statement short of renouncing support for the candidate.
"Mr. Trump's words and actions are extremely offensive," he said. "Women and all people should be treated with the utmost dignity and respect. His comments are not reflective of the Republican Party or that of any gentleman. It is my hope that Mr. Trump will demonstrate stronger leadership in the future."
In Texas, a bigger problem for Trump may be hesitancy on the part of his deep-pocketed donors.
Gene Powell, a San Antonio real estate developer and former member of the University of Texas System board of regents, said Monday that he would follow through on plans to host a fundraiser for Trump in San Antonio on Tuesday, dismissing reports from campaign sources over the weekend that he was considering withdrawing from the event.
"I am deeply disappointed and offended by the comments made by Mr. Trump on the video released on Friday," Powell said in a written statement. "However, I made a commitment to the campaign and I have one obligation left to the campaign and that is a fundraising event tomorrow in San Antonio and I will fulfill that obligation as promised."
Powell has co-chaired Trump’s Texas finance team and co-hosted a country club fundraiser for him in June.
Trump is also still expected to attend a Dallas fundraiser on Tuesday. Before the latest uproar, organizers expected that event would rake in $3 million, shared between the campaign and the Republican National Committee. The San Antonio event was expected to raise about half that.
How Trump’s flagging prospects will affect his haul remains to be seen.Darryl Hamilton, an outfielder for the Mets on their last pennant-winning team, was shot to death on Sunday at a home in suburban Houston.
The authorities in Pearland, Tex., said that Hamilton was the victim of a murder-suicide and that Monica Jordan, the mother of Hamilton’s 14-month-old son, had also been found dead in the home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The child was in the house, unharmed.
“All of us at Major League Baseball are shocked and saddened by this tragedy,” Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement, adding later, “He was a talented and personable individual, and we were proud to call him a member of the baseball family.”
Hamilton, who was 50, played 13 seasons in the majors, for Milwaukee, Texas, San Francisco, Colorado and the Mets. He is a member of the Brewers’ Wall of Honor and earned a distinction on June 12, 1997, as the first batter in a regular-season interleague game. He singled for the Giants against the Rangers.Justice Department Finds Cleveland Police Uses Excessive Force
Enlarge this image toggle caption AP AP
After a long investigation, the Department of Justice has found that Cleveland's Division of Police has "engaged in a pattern and practice of using excessive force" because of inadequate training and a lack of accountability, Attorney General Eric Holder said on Thursday.
In a press conference in Cleveland, Holder added that the city and the federal government had reached some understanding on ways they could curb the deficiencies.
Holder acknowledged that this news was coming after high-profile cases of officer-involved deaths in New York and Missouri. As the investigation was ongoing, a 12-year-old boy playing with an air gun was shot and killed by a Cleveland police officer.
Holder said the Obama administration had come to the conclusion that the "time has come to do even more."
During its investigation of Cleveland Police, the Justice Department reviewed some 600 use-of-force incidents between 2010 and 2013.
The AP wraps up some examples of what they found:
— Officers fired guns at people who did not pose "an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury to officers or others." — Officers used guns in a "careless and dangerous manner," including hitting suspects in the head with their firearms and firing in ways that place innocent bystanders in danger. — Officers used stun guns and pepper spray instead of trying to de-escalate situations. — Officers punched suspects who have been handcuffed "as punishment" after a person struggled with an officer or did not comply with demands. — Officers arrested and assaulted mentally ill people after family members called police for help.
Holder said the city agreed to the appointment of a monitor who will oversee training for the department.
Update 2:13 p.m. ET. 20 Investigations:
The Justice Department under Holder has opened more than 20 investigations into police departments across the country.
It has entered into legal agreements with police departments in New Orleans, Puerto Rico, Seattle, Portland (Ore.), Detroit, the Virgin Islands, East Haven (Ct.), Warren (Ohio) and Albuquerque (N.M).Loughborough researchers are hoping photographs taken by women in Ghana of what people eat and drink in their communities will encourage them to make healthier diet choices.
Ghana, like many other African countries, is currently experiencing rapid change, a key one being increasing migration to cities.
These changes have resulted in people having unhealthier diets in urban areas and an increase in diseases such as obesity and diabetes. But there is limited understanding of the factors that lead to dietary change -- particularly the role that social environments play, such as family or friends, or the neighbourhoods that individuals live in, and their access to healthy food.
Loughborough Professor Paula Griffiths is joining a team of international researchers -- led by the University of Sheffield -- to investigate the drivers to dietary changes in Ghana, and why people in the country are choosing unhealthier foods over their traditional diet and what influences these choices.
Professor Griffiths, from the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, will be working in two Ghanaian cities, the capital Accra and the smaller provincial city of Ho. The project team will be recruiting 32 women, aged between 13 and 49, from the poorest groups of these communities and giving each of them a camera for a week.
During that time they will be asked to take photographs that reflect things about what they eat and drink and the things that influence food and drink choices in their community.
"We want to capture the good things that already exist in their community, as well as the things that need to change to help people lead more healthy lives," explains Professor Griffiths.
"By handing participants cameras we are empowering them to tell their stories about the changes they are experiencing in the city to their diet, their experiences with food and the things that influence the things they eat and drink in their daily lives.
"At the end of the project every participant will select a photo that they would like to be exhibited, to highlight the story they want to tell about the things that affect food and drink choices in their community. We will be organising local exhibitions to generate as much impact as we can from their photographs, using them to identify interventions that could be adopted with local experts and policy makers to improve diets and harness the healthy aspects of traditional dietary habits."
This 'photovoice' research is part of a larger project, which will see the creation of maps of food and drink outlets in the community, dietary assessments, meetings with stakeholders about their readiness to implement and receive interventions and a review of existing policy already in place that looks at healthy eating in Ghana.
Principal investigator of the study, Professor Michelle Holdsworth, from the University of Sheffield's School of Health and Related Research, said: "Diets are changing globally and dietary transition is now happening in most cities of the global south, including countries in Africa, Central and Latin America and Asia. Here we see people's habits are changing from a traditional plant-based diet -- which are healthier -- to a diet that is high in processed, energy dense convenience foods, rich in fat and sugar, but poor in nutrients.
"Unhealthy diets are associated with the rapid rise of diet-related diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and some cancers."Armed Militias Face Off With The 'Antifa' In The New Landscape Of Political Protest
Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League says the militia movement has created a conspiracy theory about the anti-fascist protesters, saying they're domestic terrorists backed by George Soros.
DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who's off this week. The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. 12 days ago that turned deadly attracted white separatists and neo-Nazis along with a large crowd of counter-protesters. Also among the crowd were men in camouflage, heavily armed, some carrying assault-style rifles. These were members of the American militia movement, who say they were there not to support white supremacists but as a third force to keep the peace between opposing sides and ensure the right of free speech.
Our guest, Mark Pitcavage, has been studying militia groups for decades. He's a senior researcher at the Center for Extremism (ph) at the Anti-Defamation League. He says these groups strongly supported Donald Trump for president and many prepared for armed confrontation in anticipation of a Hillary Clinton win. But Trump's victory surprised the anti-government groups and sent them in search of a new target for their anger. We turn to Mark Pitcavage for some background on militia groups and how they're changing in the era of President Trump. Mark Pitcavage, welcome to FRESH AIR.
Let's talk about militias. I guess by definition, they are armed groups. How long have the current active militia groups in the country been around?
MARK PITCAVAGE: Well, the militia movement arose in 1994 in opposition to federal gun laws, the election of Bill Clinton, NAFTA and particularly deadly standoffs with federal law enforcement at Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas in the early 1990s. So it's been around over 20 years now.
DAVIES: And what do they stand for?
PITCAVAGE: The militia movement is an anti-government extremist movement. It's part of a broader movement that's sometimes called the patriot movement, which also includes the sovereign citizen movement and the tax protest movement. The foundational belief of the militia movement is a conspiracy theory, an anti-government conspiracy theory that posits that the rest of the world has essentially been taken over by a globalist tyrannical government.
They often refer to it as the New World Order. And our own government is actually collaborating with the New World Order to slowly strip us of our rights and freedoms, starting with our right to keep and bear arms because once we lose that, we won't be able to defend any of our rights. And once the American people are rendered defenseless, we too will be absorbed by and become slaves to the New World Order like the rest of the world.
DAVIES: Well, I mean, not to get into a deep argument here but they look at other countries in the world and assume they're all acting in concert?
PITCAVAGE: This is a very nebulous conspiracy theory. So they often sort of avoid getting into details. But they basically believe that. They will often instead of referring to each and every individual country, they'll use the United Nations as a proxy or just simply refer to the globalists or the New World Order, you know, or the conspiracy, something like that.
DAVIES: OK. And they fear that the United States government will take our rights away and make us beholden or enslaved by the New World Order. What kinds of specific government intrusion do they seek to stop or prevent?
PITCAVAGE: Well, the militia movement has a heavy emphasis on guns. So particularly any sort of federal firearms regulation is something they really oppose. But they actually oppose most government regulations, most government intrusions of any sort of sort that they might even notice. The most extreme version of this is their sister movement, the sovereign citizen movement, which basically rationalizes ignoring all laws, rules and regulations. The militia movement is not quite that extreme.
But it's quite intensely anti-government.
DAVIES: Right. So give us a sense of the lay out of the militia movement.
PITCAVAGE: The militia movement really consists of three main segments today. The first are traditional militia groups, the paramilitary groups that run around in the woods with guns, stereotypically. The second segment of the militia movement, which started around 2008, is called the Three Percenters. And they may or may not form militia groups. They have the same ideology as the militia movement. Their name comes from a myth or a mistaken apprehension about the American Revolution, which was that only 3 percent of the colonists fought against the British.
And, of course, they view themselves as the equivalent of modern day patriots fighting against the government, not the British. And then the...
DAVIES: The idea being you don't need everybody, you need a dedicated but small group. Right.
PITCAVAGE: That's exactly right, that sort of a Bolshevik sort of idea, a vanguard of the revolution, if you will. And the third segment is actually a single but very large group called the Oath Keepers. And they view it as their goal in particular to try and spread militia ideology among current and former military personnel, police and first responders.
DAVIES: And what oath or oaths do the Oath Keepers keep?
PITCAVAGE: They refer to the oath that they take to uphold the Constitution. And the premise of the Oath Keepers is a list of orders that they will refuse to obey should the government give them. And these orders all relate, in one way or another, back to New World Order conspiracy theories about disarming people and putting them in camps and so forth.
DAVIES: But the activities that they pledge to - the orders they pledge not to obey include...
PITCAVAGE: Well, they're essentially, I mean, to disarm the American people, to round people up and put them in camps. In one way - directly or indirectly, they all allude to common militia movement conspiracy theories. So the orders are never actually going to be handed down that they will refuse to obey because those conspiracy theories are basically fantasy.
DAVIES: And do the Oath Keepers, I mean, they have weapons. Do they drill? Do they practice? Do they prepare for armed confrontation?
PITCAVAGE: Well, the Oath Keepers, even though they're a single group, are pretty loosely organized. And some groupings of Oath Keepers around the country do more training and are sort of more like a local militia group while others are not. You know, the militia movement in general tends to view itself as defensive in nature. So they're not usually preparing to overthrow the government. They're usually preparing for the day when the New World Order finally steps in or when the federal government finally crosses some sort of red line.
One of the problems for law enforcement and the government is that because of their ideology, some people in the militia movement often decide the government has already crossed that line and then they begin plotting or planning some sort of violent act or terrorist plot...
DAVIES: Right.
PITCAVAGE:...To go against the government.
DAVIES: To what extent have we seen violence propagated by members or former members of militias?
PITCAVAGE: The militia movement has a high association with violence. It has since its earliest days in the mid-1990s. In fact, just this past week, there was a man indicted in Oklahoma, a Three Percenter, for allegedly plotting to blow up a building there. And several months back, there were three militia members arrested in Kansas for plotting to blow up an apartment complex that primarily housed Somali Americans, i.e. Muslims.
You know, you can sort of go on back - plots against government officials, plots to raid National Guard armories, plots against infrastructure, plots against police as well as spontaneous violence from time to time, too.
DAVIES: They seem to, at times, appear to provide what they call a security or a protection for someone who they perceive needs it like the military recruiting stations in Tennessee after there'd been an attack there.
PITCAVAGE: Yes. This is something they occasionally do. They also - the Oath Keepers also did this in Ferguson, Mo. following some of the unrest there. Because they are paramilitary groups, they often like to conceive themselves as being legitimate forces. Some even claim to be the true militia in the Constitution and in federal and state law, which is not actually true. But they will often, you know, volunteer to provide security at a county fair or a state fair.
They'll volunteer to do search and rescue for a missing child. These are also good public relations aspects. And occasionally, as with Ferguson or at recruiting centers after the Chattanooga attacks, you know, they will show up to be sentinels, you know, at least until people ask them to leave.
DAVIES: It was fascinating to me that they decided to provide some, quote, "protection or security" to recruiting offices in Tennessee after there was an attack there because they're the anti-government group. They're there to protect the government's military recruiting office. It gets kind of weird, doesn't it?
PITCAVAGE: Well, it does, except that one of the secondary enemies of the militia movement in recent years has been Muslims. Although the militia movement is not white supremacist, it has, in recent years, become unambiguously anti-Muslim in nature. And as I mentioned, there are often armed protests in front of mosques by militia groups. And so this was sort of a way for them to respond to the call from what they believed was, you know, this sort of attack from outside from the greater Muslim conspiracy, so to speak. And so it wasn't too surprising that they would show up to do that.
DAVIES: And what have the militias' attitudes been towards white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups?
PITCAVAGE: It's a little complicated. There is some overlap between the militia movement and white supremacists, particularly through adherents of a racist and anti-Semitic religious sect called Christian Identity, which has a long history in the United States, and a lot of white supremacists have come from that.
But for the most part, from the founding of the militia movement to the present day, the militia movement has tried to distance itself from associations with or accusations of white supremacy. And there are some of - you know, a few, but there are some people of color within the militia movement. So they have tried to distance themselves.
And in fact, you know, until recently, when they became so anti-Muslim, you know, you could sort of say they were - they generally tended to speak out against bigotry in general. But they have not hesitated to speak out against Muslims, unfortunately.
DAVIES: We're speaking with Mark Pitcavage. He is senior research fellow at the Center for Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF FLORATONE'S "FRONTIERS")
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Mark Pitcavage. He is a senior research fellow at the Center for Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League. He studied militia groups in the United States for many years.
So what do the militias do? I mean, do they have monthly meetings? Do they do drills and training in the woods with weapons? What do they do?
PITCAVAGE: In terms of their activities, you know, a lot of what the militia movement does, is - to a greater or lesser degree, involves weapons or paramilitary training. They'll spend a lot of time, effort and money to accumulate all sorts of weapons and gear. And some of them are also survivalists too, so that could include food supplies and other survival gear.
From militia group to militia group, they may be greater or - involved to a greater or lesser degree in paramilitary activities. Some are actually quite intense, holding regular FTXs - field training exercises - where they may train on subjects such as reconnaissance, sniper training, cold-weather training, search and rescue, a wide variety of things, sometimes using U.S. military manuals to guide them.
They engage in other things too. They may meet at a local restaurant or library, you know, once a month to talk about political things or talk about strategies online through social media, or through websites or message forums. They'll engage in a wide variety of activities from recruitment or spreading their ideas, to networking or strategizing with other groups. So, you know, all in all, it's a pretty wide array of things.
DAVIES: You know, it's also occurred to me that if you're really talking about resisting the government in the event of some terrible crisis, you know, hand-held weapons are not going to go very far. I mean, do they deal with explosives or trying to talk about getting heavier weapons - you know, grenade launchers, tanks, artillery?
PITCAVAGE: They often fantasize about, you know, all sorts of ordnance, and military gear and vehicles. Some realities set in. First of all, a lot of that is prohibited. Automatic weapons are prohibited. Explosives are prohibited. Now, some will acquire those regardless, right? They'll break the law to get them.
They will sometimes try to get vehicles, but vehicles get very expensive. There actually have been a couple extremist groups to buy some armored cars. You can actually buy them on the open market. They won't come armed, but you can always arm them yourself. But that's really expensive, and these people are not, by and large, rich. And they sank a lot of their money into simply buying regular weapons and gear.
DAVIES: How do the militias recruit people?
PITCAVAGE: Well, the militias recruit people the way most fringe groups or even mainstream groups, you know, tend to recruit people. People are most likely to be recruited through someone they know - through a coworker, a relative, someone who lives near them who exposes them to the ideas of the movement, the conspiracy theories - and if there's some sort of like-mindedness may, you know, invite them to a meeting. They will also sometimes hold public events - what they hope will get attention. You know, and people may inquire after that.
And of course, these days, online is very important. Some will do passive recruiting by maintaining a website, or uploading field training exercise videos to YouTube or conspiracy theory videos to YouTube, so that, you know, someone who comes across them might play those videos and be interested. Whatever the latest technology is, the militia movement tends to use it.
When the militia movement first formed in the mid-1990s, they were using fax networks. And they were using VHS tapes, where they would make VHS tapes about the militia movement, or conspiracy theories or what have you, and encourage people to copy those tapes and spread them around. And whenever any sort of new type of technology - you know, the Internet, social media on the Internet, anything - comes along, they will quickly find ways to try and exploit that technology too.
DAVIES: How did militia groups respond to the election of Donald Trump?
PITCAVAGE: Well, the militia movement, by and large, was ecstatic because they had really come out strong for Donald Trump. And in fact, in September and October, we were actually tracking sentiments of the militia movement - people who were darkly talking about revolution should Hillary Clinton somehow be named the winner.
As it turned out, we needn't have worried. Hillary Clinton did not win the election. Donald Trump did. And they were very excited. And then they remained strong supporters of Donald Trump as president. But his - at the same time, his election sort of poses problems for the future of the movement because everything about the movement was aligned very strongly against the federal government. What do you do now that the head of the federal government is someone who you consider one of you - right? - the - someone you support.
And there was a real chance that the militia movement, which had grown for the past eight years or so, you know, might slide, that - because of the lack of energy, because of the lack of a desire to go after the federal government now, at least compared to before, that people might drop out or become less active. And, you know, while there was always the possibility of some sort of fallout between the militia movement and the federal government, you know, that didn't happen. They would have to do something in order to survive, to find some sort of new enemy.
DAVIES: So who did they focus on, if not the federal government?
PITCAVAGE: Well, during, like, the period between his election and the inauguration, we were sort of looking at several of their traditional secondary enemies. The militia movement happened to be strongly anti-immigrant. It happens to be against black lives matter. And as I've mentioned, it's anti-Muslim. And so we were looking at all of these. And it was really the anti-Muslim sentiments that we were afraid would really come to the fore.
But, in fact, the militia movement surprised us because the militia movement started, instead, going after the antifa and elevating the antifa to a new enemy for themselves.
DAVIES: And explain what the antifa is.
PITCAVAGE: The antifa is a collection of groups, networks and individuals, mostly from the far left or from the anarchist movement, who sort of specialize in confronting white supremacists on the streets. When white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan hold public rallies, demonstrations, protests, these people will show up to counter protest, typically in much larger numbers. And some of them will actually physically confront the white supremacists and assault them.
The idea is to chase them off the streets. It gets back to - they believe that the Nazis were able to take power because the Nazis won the battle of the streets. And they're determined to not let that happen in the United States.
DAVIES: And they sometimes show up at events - what? - dressed in black. Do they carry protective gear, weapons, that kind of thing?
PITCAVAGE: I mean, it's a lot of variation. Some will. Some, who come from the anarchist movement, like, may dress up like anarchists. Black bloc members sometimes do. Some people just wear whatever they want to wear. Sometimes they'll have some makeshift protective gear. There's a lot of variety there. It sort of depends upon the individuals involved. The militia movement had largely been, you know, unaware of the existence of the antifa because the antifa targeted white supremacists.
But because the antifa came to the conclusion that the Trump campaign and the Trump presidency was racist in nature, they started protesting at Trump-related events and rallies too. This brought them to the attention of the militia movement, who sort of became aware of the antifa for the first time. And it was hate at first sight. This was a new enemy for them. And they very quickly picked up the banner against the antifa.
DAVIES: And so what kinds of activities do they undertake in opposition to the antifa?
PITCAVAGE: Well, essentially what they try and do is to just as the antifa try to confront the white supremacists, they try to confront the antifa. So they will show up to any of a variety of events that they think the antifa might show up for or they might even organize their own events that they hope will - sometimes in conjunction with others that they hope will bring out the antifa. And what they've also done is sort of built the antifa up into an even bigger sort of more formidable force than it actually is. In their minds, they call the antifa domestic terrorists.
And it's common to hear them claim that antifa are actually being trained in Syrian terror camps overseas. And furthermore, they don't see this as a grassroots movement. They see the antifa being orchestrated and funded by some sinister force. Typically, George Soros, the liberal philanthropist, is pictured as sort of the puppet master of the antifa using them to help overthrow the Trump administration. So in their minds, they have really built the antifa up into this elaborate enemy worthy of combating.
DAVIES: And just so we cover this, do they have any evidence to cite for this notion of antifa being trained elsewhere or being funded by George Soros or anybody else?
PITCAVAGE: No, there's no evidence for that at all. But, you know, the militia movement are past masters at coming up with elaborate conspiracy theories. And so this was just natural for them to do the same with the antifa.
DAVIES: Mark Pitcavage is a senior researcher at the Center for Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League. After a break, he'll tell us more about the leftist groups known as the antifa and about the role militiamen played at Charlottesville. Also, Maureen Corrigan reviews the first book published by Lena Dunham's Lenny imprint. And Kevin Whitehead tells us about a new CD by jazz pianist Vijay Iyer. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who's off this week. We're talking about the American militia movement, a collection of armed anti-government groups. We're speaking with Mark Pitcavage. He's a senior researcher at the Center for Extremism of the Anti-Defamation League. He says militia groups have kept their distance from white supremacist groups. And over the past year, they've targeted their anger at confrontational leftist groups known as the antifa. Militias have been appearing at rallies of right-wing groups saying they want to protect their free speech rights from interference by leftists.
So they've been showing up at various rallies where they believe or suspect antifa folks will show up. The interesting dilemma that this presents is that, you know, it's white supremacists who the militias don't care for and want to - don't want to associate with who attract the antifas at events. So the militias show up to counter the antifas, but they don't want to be seen as associated with or supporting white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. That kind of presents a dilemma, doesn't it?
PITCAVAGE: Yes, it does present a dilemma for them. The militia don't want to be tarred with that brush of white supremacy. And so they've evolved a strategy where they try and present themselves at these different events and protests and so forth as a third force. They are neither with the white supremacists, they say, nor are they with the antifa. But they're there to protect everybody's rights. They're there to help maintain public order. This allows them both to exercise their fantasies of being sort of a quasi-military or quasi-law-enforcement body as well as to try and have their cake and eat it too regarding confronting the antifa and disassociating themselves from the white supremacists.
DAVIES: Right, and protecting first - free speech is, you know, consistent with the group that says it's all about protecting our rights.
PITCAVAGE: Well, they're not showing up at left-wing events to protect the free speech of people from the left. They're only concerned about, quote, unquote, "free speech" from people on the right. It's kind of important to point out. So it's not like they are free-speech crusaders. You know, much of this is very calculated and tactical in nature. And the real goal is to sort of be able to oppose the antifa.
DAVIES: Tell us a little more about the antifa. And how widespread are they? How organized? Do they have publications? What do they do?
PITCAVAGE: Well, the antifa originated in Europe in the 1960s and '70s, in opposition to the neo-Nazis that were emerging at that time and with the desire to confront them on the streets - not to cede the public square to them. And by the 1970s at the latest, these ideas had come across the Atlantic to the United States and Canada. And the antifa have been a presence in this country ever since. And it's a very loose network. You have some groups that are more or less full-time antifa, often locally based like Rose City Antifa in Oregon or By Any Means Necessary in Detroit.
And then you have a lot of other people or groups or networks that will engage to lesser degrees with antifa activities from time to time but may also be involved with other causes as well. And they're very well-networked. They have to be to sort of publicize these extremist events and get people to come to them. But they're not well-organized or orchestrated. It's very loose. It's very sort of voluntary participation. If people want to participate in one of these, they can. And so I sometimes hesitated even calling them a movement. That's why I sometimes just sort of call them a collection or a network.
DAVIES: Do they have rules or policies about things like weapons or how much violence to use and when to use it?
PITCAVAGE: Individual antifa groups might have some notions about what should be permissible and what's not. But, you know, this is a very loose movement. And many of them are anarchists. So they're not necessarily, you know, compiling huge rulebooks in terms of what to do or not to do with these things.
DAVIES: Do they ever carry weapons?
PITCAVAGE: They tend to carry - you know, they may carry makeshift weapons, if allowed, or things like pepper spray. They don't typically carry, like, knives or firearms. You know, so, you know, usually, if they get into it, they're getting into it with someone with fists or pepper spray or hitting them with a stick - something like that.
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Mark Pitcavage. He is senior research fellow at the Center for Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League. He has studied militia groups in the U.S. for many years.
You mentioned that militias had grown a lot over the last eight years. Why have they grown over the past eight years?
PITCAVAGE: There was a general resurgence of the extreme right that started roughly 2008, 2009. Part of it was due to the recession and the foreclosure crisis. And a lot of it, particularly for the militia movement, was due to the election of Barack Obama. For white supremacists - were energized by the election of Barack Obama because he was African-American, and they hate African-Americans. For the militia movement, it was not because he was black. For some, it was because they thought he was a Muslim. But for most, it was because they were very easily able to put him at the center of their New World Order conspiracy theories and to sort of personalize all of those theories and all of that anger at the government in the person of Barack Obama himself. And so he very quickly became a focal point or even a symbol for the anti-government extremists to focus on.
Moreover, at the time this was happening - 2008, 2009 - this was really when social media had finally taken over the Internet and become the dominant force that it's been since. And so the anti-government movements in general - the sovereign citizen movement, the tax protest movement and the militia movement - were able to do a lot of growing and spreading through social media. The militia movement started on MySpace in terms of spreading this. And then when Facebook overtook MySpace, they started doing it there and then also on YouTube and a little bit on Twitter. They were not as big on Twitter as some of the other social media platforms.
But they were able very - to spread their ideas and their conspiracy theories to audiences that had never come across them before, including a lot of young people, with one of the results being that over the past 10 years, a number of the people in the militia movement who had been arrested on various charges were actually in their 20s - right? - reaching a younger demographic than was the case in the 1990s, for example.
DAVIES: So let's talk about what happened at Charlottesville, at the Unite the Right rally. Do we know how - why there was a militia presence there at this set of events - how that happened?
PITCAVAGE: Well, we expected, as the weeks lead up to the Unite the Right event, that there would be some sort of militia, Three Percenter or Oath Keeper presence, even though the event was organized and primarily attended by white supremacists. Because the opportunity to confront the antifa would certainly be there, we thought they might show up. And a couple months earlier when there was a big white supremacist event in Pikeville, Ky., a number of Oath Keepers did show up for that. So there had been recent precedent.
In this particular case at Charlottesville, we did not track Oath Keepers themselves. They seem to have stayed away. But we did find representatives from several different militia and Three Percenter groups who were there in full uniform and armed and so forth.
DAVIES: Yeah, yeah, describe what they wore, what they carried.
PITCAVAGE: What they all carried was varied because, you know, they're not an actual military force with uniform regulations. But they had a variety of military-style gear and protective gear. Most of them carried weapons, long arms, assault-style weapons. We saw a lot of those. Virginia is an open carry state. And there was no attempt to prohibit weapons at the event. So that was allowed.
DAVIES: How did they see their role at Charlottesville?
PITCAVAGE: Well, they saw their role the same way they had been positioning themselves at previous events over the spring and summer as the sort of third force where they were there and they were going to protect everybody's rights and they weren't with the white supremacists but they were definitely against the antifa.
DAVIES: Right. And were there any reports of the militia members themselves intervening to break up fights or keep the peace?
PITCAVAGE: There were several reports of that where because law enforcement was not getting involved, the people on the militia there were actually breaking up a few fights, which is very - it's very problematic when you're in |
of organized baseball last year, and it came against pitchers who were often two or three years his senior. Players who are among the best and the youngest hitters in their league often go on to do good things in the majors.
KATOH’s evaluation of Albies is encouraging, but it doesn’t come without risk. His projection is more than a little top heavy, giving him a healthy 34% chance of accumulating at least 16 WAR through age 28, but a 20% chance of never playing in a single game. Such is the nature of trying to forecast players players buried deep in the low minors. Here’s a look at Albies’ full breakout from KATOH.
MLB >4 WAR >6 WAR >8 WAR >10 WAR >12 WAR >16 WAR 80% 53% 52% 44% 37% 36% 34%
To help better personify the range of possible outcomes for Albies, let’s take a gander at what became of past players who turned in seasons similar to his 2014 campaign. K%, ISO, BABIP and frequency of stolen base attempts are the stats that best predict success for players in Rookie ball, so I used these metrics to set some filters. Note that a hitter’s walk rate wasn’t taken into account since my research found it to be unpredictive of future success for players below full-season ball. Below, you’ll find the complete list of 17-year-old in Rookie ballers from 1990 through 2008 who fell within one standard deviation of each of Albies’ league-adjusted numbers.
Year Name Position Age BB% K% ISO BABIP SBA% WAR thru 28 MLB Games WAR/ 150 G 1999 Carl Crawford RF 17 4% 16%.065.371 19% 35.7 1,235 4.3 1992 Richard Hidalgo OF 17 6% 15%.123.376 21% 20 755 4.0 1991 Manny Cora SS 17 4% 16%.116.380 15% 0.0 0.0 0.0 2014 Ozhaino Albies SS 17 12% 10%.089.407 25%???
That’s an exciting list of names, but there’s also only three of them. There simply haven’t been too many seasons that looked like Albies’ 2014 campaign. Let’s expand the pool by including 18-year-olds who met my original criteria, and 17-year-olds who fell within 1.5 standard deviations of Albies’ numbers.
This wider net catches a total of 19 players, who averaged 8 WAR through age 28. If we limit this analysis to just the 17-year-olds, this average jumps up to 18.6 WAR. Five of the seven seventeen-year-olds who had seasons similar to Albies’ went on to do very good things.
In fairness, not all of these players look all that much like Albies. Abreu, Sizemore and Hidalgo were all tall, power-hitting outfielders. Albies, on the other hand, is listed at 5-foot-9, and hit 62% of his batted balls on the ground last year. Yet even if you cast the hulking outfielders aside, you still have Erick Aybar and Jose Vidro to dream on. Both were middle infielders who went on to have productive careers despite never hitting for a ton of power. Regardless of how you slice the data, players who do things similar to what Albies did last season have a habit of turning into quality hitters. Considering how often prospects fail, especially ones that are still years away from the majors, this is a good sign.
Rookie ball stats mean very little. The sample sizes are tiny and the competition only faintly resembles what a player will see in the majors. But Albies’ performance last year was about as good as it gets, and the tools suggest it wasn’t a fluke. The driving force behind Albies’ projection was his 10% strikeout rate, which illustrates his ability to make consistent contact. Pair that with excellent speed and solid defensive skills, and you have a pretty exciting prospect on your hands.
Albies pro debut was more than a little encouraging, but 2015 will be the real test of his skills. Full season ball is what separates the men from the boys, and Albies’ performance in the South Atlantic League will give us a better idea of just how good he’ll eventually become.A group of British treasure hunters have found a chest that could contain up to £100million in Nazi gold in the wreck of a German cargo ship off the coast of Iceland.
UK-based Advanced Marine Services found a box containing up to four tons of valuable metal, believed to be gold from South American banks, in the post room of the SS Minden, which sunk in 1939.
The gold was believed to be on board the ship and headed to Germany when the boat sank 120 miles southeast of Iceland on September 24, 1939, shortly after World War II began.
UK-based Advanced Marine Services found a box containing up to four tons of valuable metal, believed to be gold from South American banks, in the post room of the SS Minden. The Minden's sister ship, SS Porta, which it likely looked similar to, is pictured above
The SS Minden was scuttled - or purposefully sunken - approximately 120 miles southeast of Iceland in September 1939
Advanced Marine Services has applied to the Icelandic government in hopes of gaining permission to cut a hole in the ship to remove the box.
The treasure hunters, who believe the haul belongs to the finder of the box, want to bring the contents back to Britain, according to The Sun.
Earlier this year, the group was accused of looking for the wreckage of the German cargo ship without proper licensing.
Authorities became aware of the firm after a stationary Norwegian research boat Seabed Constructor, rented by the firm, was spotted in Icelandic waters.
According to Iceland Monitor, when the coastguard asked the crew why they were there, they gave 'vague and different explanations', prompting the coastguard to instruct them to dock at a pier Reykjavik before sending in police to question the crew.
Georg Lárusson, director of the Icelandic Coastguard, told the website they did not have a permit to search in Icelandic waters.
Earlier this year, the treasure hunters were accused of looking for the wreckage of the German cargo ship without proper licensing. Authorities became aware of the firm after a stationary Norwegian research boat Seabed Constructor (pictured) was spotted in Icelandic waters
When the Minden was spotted by British cruisers HMS Calypso (pictured) and HMS Dunedin, Adolf Hitler ordered Minden's captain to scuttle - or deliberately sink - the ship so the Royal Navy wouldn't seize the cargo.
He added: 'The first answers we got were that they were looking at an 'interesting target' from the WW II, but couldn't explain it any further.'
The SS Minden set sail from Brazil on September 6, 1939 after officials from Banco Germanico, a subsidiary of German Dresdner bank helped load the ship's cargo.
When the ship was spotted by British cruisers HMS Calypso and HMS Dunedin, Adolf Hitler ordered Minden's captain to scuttle - or deliberately sink - the ship so the Royal Navy wouldn't seize the cargo.
The Minden crew was rescued by the HMS Dunedin and brought to Scapa Flow naval base in the Orkneys.
Historians have claimed records say the cargo on board was worthless, but due to how expensive it is to rent a research vessel, rumours are now circulating that the materials are valuable, with some saying that gold was on board.The Accelerate With Google program has various partners, including the US Black Chamber, and is designed to get more minority businesses online.
Google makes a large chunk of its revenue through selling advertisements, and the company wants black businesses to partake.
In partnership with various business organizations, including the U.S. Black Chamber, Greater Austin Black Chamber, and The Michigan Black Chamber of Commerce, Google is asking minority-owned businesses to join its Accelerate With Google program.
In the 12-week course, Google will show businesses how to create website landing pages, manage Google AdWords to advertise their business, and manage marketing campaigns.
The program is beneficial to businesses as well as Google. More businesses using Google’s services gives the search company more data to mine, and helps it provide more granular data to people searching for businesses.
To apply, you’ll have to answer a few questions about your business, including how much you spend on marketing (if anything).
If you’re interested, check out the site here. But don’t waste any time in applying. The deadline is Wednesday, May 28, so go for it.The trailer for the new "Battlestar Galactica" movie was unveiled at the San Diego Comic Con on Thursday, July 24, as part of the usual excitement and revelations slated for the big science fiction and fantasy convention.
The International Business Times' schedule of events set the viewing of a trailer for the new "Battlestar Galactica" movie for Thursday morning. Called "The Legacy and Return of 'Battlestar Galactica,'" the panel included actors Richard Hatch, Luciana Carro and Jamie Bamber along with Dr. Kevin Grazier, the show's science consultant, and producer Alec Peters. They discussed the new movie and showed a trailer.
Ever since the news of a "Battlestar Galactica" movie, fans have been worried about what the new movie would be like. According to Wired, one of the greatest issues is the alleged "reimagining" of the series. However, since some of the actors involved in the show spoke about the movie, it seems likely some characters will return.
Aside from the movie, two "BSG" actors appeared in a project called the "Titans of Comic-Con," which tried to bring back the convention to its comic book roots, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Grace Park and Katee Sackhoff appeared as Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo, respectively, in the "Star Wars" section of the mixed-media project. Various other stars recreated classic characters.
Syfy, the channel that spawned "Battlestar Galactica" and countless other great science fiction shows only to devolve into "Sharknado," will be returning to its own roots, according to The New York Times. Syfy will use Comic Con to promote its new upcoming space shows.
"Ascension," "a six-hour miniseries about a covert United States space mission launched in the 1960s: Hundreds of people have been sent to populate a new world, but halfway there they face a mystery that makes them question whether to turn back," will carry on the torch of TV shows set in space. The show will air on Syfy in November.
Other new shows, like "Killjoys," made by the producers of "Orphan Black," and "The Expanse," a space opera set 200 years in the future, will also continue the legacy of space television, though no dates have been given for these two shows.When the Hyde Park bomb news broke I was horrified.
On the rule of law and due process, immunising and exempting credible suspects who face credible evidence from justice – by way of unchecked, secret letters – represents a serious blow to western democracy. We are all bound on equal terms by a common code known as the rule of law. Upon that equality we share a sense of shared society. Exempt a few from the standards you impose on the many and you risk serious societal breakdown.
On the actual politics, I felt utterly dejected. I wanted to join the so many in Northern Ireland who have exempted and absolved themselves from the whole process.
On the debate I felt unable to comment. It was before my time. It was a matter for victims. Frighteningly complicated, too deranged a political quarrel, a forever cycle of claim and counter-claim.
On the future, I feared for our ability to move the political economy forward and for our “normalisation”.
Then I thought of the counter-narrative: Of the “other Northern Ireland”. That world which has liberated itself from sectarian debate and from unionism and nationalism (the world Heaney and others said). Those people – young and old, victim and non-victim – who know nothing of the past and want nothing to do with the past. The world we hear little or no word of.
“Get yourself educated and get out of here… We are going to have to leave it to another generation.”
These words then fixed my mind; spoken by the son of a woman murdered by a loyalist death squad. When I heard them, I felt it imperative to say something.
Why?
Firstly, for the sake of balance, fairness and hope, we need to hear the story of “the other Northern Ireland”. The “normal Northern Ireland” Mick Fealty, Pete Shirlow, Fionuala Meredith, David McCann, Professor John Brewer, Ian James Parsley, David McElfatrick, Brian Feeney, Jim Fitzpatrick, Jamie Pow, Rick Wilford, Lyra McKee, Brian Rowan and John McCallister and many others have attested to.
We need to hear both stories. Nobody should have a monopoly on the process. There should be no hierarchy of attention. There should be no privilege or special treatment granted to victims, fundamentalists or violent types (not in any way linked).
For every relative of a victim who wants the truth, there’s a relative who wants to move on. Like the South African Kader Asmal. Like Kevin Skelton of Time To Move On.
For every fanatic, there are hundreds of moderates.
For every Jamie Bryson, there are 1000s of pro-agreement, pro-compromise unionists who recognise that Sinn Fein did not land in office by some dreadful accident, but by the good faith of a very many people who gave the party their vote.
For every blocked parade, 100s proceed unabridged.
For every belligerent politician who stood at the Haass talks and held out on a deal, there were thousands of unionists who wanted a deal, a deal they did not get and an explanation for which are yet to receive. For every Sinn Fein call for justice there is a duplicitous support for amnesty.
The victim, fundamentalist and the fanatic dominate the agenda. What of those like Hannah Nelson who have utterly divorced themselves from the squabble?
Hyde Park is not the only affront to justice; giving a hearing only to one half of Northern Ireland is unpardonable, an affront to a free and fair society. (Excuse the cliche but…) Democracy does not start and end at the ballot box – we need to hear from other persuaded, passionate voices. Believe it or not, it’s not just the victim, fundamentalist, loyalist, Orangeman and fanatic who has unalterable convictions, cherished traditions and unshakeable values.
Secondly (looking more specifically at the unionist half of the “other normal Northern Ireland”) the DUP should give careful thought to those many Protestant unionists not installed at Twaddell, protesting or waving a flag, or those not talking about a “holy war” and the “extermination” of Protestants.
Here’s my point. If the DUP allows its reaction to the Hyde Park opacity – which needs enlightened – to be one dictated by these forces, they risk further alienating moderate unionists. Unionists who look at Twaddell and claims of “holy war” with a fathomless and unspeakable disbelief.
To reiterate, I condemn the sending of secret letters; the sending of which should be fully investigated. I quite agree with Colonel Tim Collins here. Sunlight is the only remedy and only way to regain the trust and accountability of the public.
Within the “other Northern Ireland” there is a huge body of Protestant unionism that is utterly at odds and variance with the current trajectory of political Unionism. As it’s been said:
“Loyalists are doing a grand job of demonising Unionism and encouraging educated Protestants to leave NI.”
“If we absolutely must speak of “exterminating” certain communities and “eroding” a culture, it is moderate and middle class Protestants who are being “exterminated”.
Look at this young man who’s resolved on his intent to leave Northern Ireland to escape the madness.
“When I’m finished with my degree I’m probably going to get the hell out of Northern Ireland, I’m sick of the same old bull**** sectarian arguments peddled over and over again.”
Look at this young woman studying in the US who said Americans have an incredibly negative perception of Northern Ireland because of a delinquent minority:
“Why do those people always behave like such freaks? That tiny minority makes them all look like a bunch of losers dude.”
Look at this young man, born in Northern Ireland, now living in Australia:
“[I’m] annoyed by Northern Ireland Unionism’s lack of substance/vision/morality. Seeking the alternative. Currently in Australia.”
Or this Protestant taxi driver who said that politicians do too much to appease the “nutters”:
This is the whole history of moderate, middle class unionist in two lines. And of course, Irish senator and protestant, David Norris, spoke for so many Protestants when he called last summer’s loyalist rioting an “appalling embarrassment”.
Violent loyalists, hardliners in the OO and political fundamentalists habitually, serially and routinely bring Northern Ireland into disgrace and incur the contempt of the world. In doing so, they create a cold house that alienate moderate Protestants and forces them to opt-out of the civic process. This has given rise to two phenomenona:
One, we have what Brian Feeney called the internal émigré and what Alex Kane suggests could be called, “Opt -out-couldn’t-care-less-about-the-whole-thing-anymore unionism.” As Feeney said:
“None of these internal émigrés participates in or endorses the antics of the yahoos waving flags or hammering big drums outside Catholic Churches… [the Haass talks] failure will simply reinforce the majority of unionists in their opinion that, in the words of Alex Kane, they prefer to go to the garden centre that bother voting.”
Two, we have what we could call the external émigré. The same as the internal émigré, entirely divorced from Northern Ireland life, but living, often forced by political and economic circumstances, abroad.
People have long spoken of middle class Protestants being raised and schooled in Northern Ireland, then exported to university or to work abroad, never to return. In April 1982 Sir Peter Frogatt, vice-Chancellor of QUB said there was “a considerable exodus to British universities especially on the part of the Protestant community.” In May 2008 a study found that two-thirds of students from Northern Ireland do not return to the province in the short to medium term. It also found that Protestant school leavers (34%) were more likely than Catholic school leavers (23%) to migrate to study in Britain.
In 2011 Stephen Farrey revealed that a third of the 35,000 students attending university in Northern Ireland are Protestant. Only a fifth at Magee are Protestant.
It leans towards Protestants, but ultimately it cuts both ways. The bottom line is, we’re sacrificing our best and brightest on the altar of mindless sectarian squabbling. As David McCann said, ‘Northern Ireland’s greatest challenge is the loss of the best of our next generation.” This – not flags, parades and the past – should be animating minds.
The protestant brain-drain is not only a detriment to our local economy, but it also condemns and exacerbates “brain-dead” unionism and loyalism. (Perhaps some of our protestant émigré friends could come back and give loyalists the political education that veteran loyalist Raymond Lavery said they so desperately need. Certainly they would surely be keen to extinguish loyalism’s terrifically damaging “phantom fears”.)
The Hyde Park Bomb case needs addressed, and in full. However there are broader issues that must be faced. We cannot allow fringe unionism to dictate events. We must hear from the “other Northern Ireland”: those who don’t want Sinn Fein playing the sore thumb policy for a United Ireland, or the DUP playing bogey-man politics with impressionable loyalism. Moderate unionism needs to reclaim that cause, only they can offer an open, welcoming, persuasive, Catholic-friendly and ‘unremittingly positive’ case for the Union.
The Union needs to be saved from unionist extremists who say they’re British but operate by Ulster nationalism, a code opposite, antithetical and hostile to Britishness. All they do is give an unremittingly negative case for the Union and in doing so make the argument for secession.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption George Osborne: '"It will always pay to work"
Chancellor George Osborne has unveiled the biggest UK spending cuts for decades, with welfare, councils and police budgets all hit.
The pension age will rise sooner than expected, some incapacity benefits will be time limited and other money clawed back through changes to tax credits and housing benefit.
A new bank levy will also be brought in - with full details due on Thursday.
Mr Osborne said the four year cuts were guided by fairness, reform and growth.
But shadow chancellor Alan Johnson, for Labour, called the review a "reckless gamble with people's livelihoods" which risked "stifling the fragile recovery" - a message echoed by the SNP, despite smaller than expected cuts in Scotland.
Mr Osborne ended his hour-long Commons statement by claiming the 19% average cuts to departmental budgets were less severe than expected. This is thanks to an extra £7bn in savings from the welfare budget and a £3.5bn increase in public sector employee pension contributions.
'Frontline cuts'
The chancellor claimed it meant his savings were less than the 20% cuts Labour had planned ahead of the general election.
BBC Economics Editor Stephanie Flanders said that, at first glance, "the cuts to the welfare benefit are regressive, in the most basic sense of costing families in the lower half of the income distribution more".
Local councils are also in the firing line, with the amount of money they receive from government cut by 7.1% from April.
The Local Government Association said the move would "hit councils and the residents they serve very hard and will inevitably lead to cuts at the frontline".
Outlining the £81bn cuts package, Mr Osborne vowed to restore "sanity to our public finances and stability to our economy".
He told MPs: "Today is the day when Britain steps back from the brink, when we confront the bills from a decade of debt.
"It is a hard road, but it leads to a better future."
The main new welfare savings come from withdrawing Employment and Support Allowance, the replacement for incapacity benefit, for some categories of claimant after one year, raising £2bn.
Universal benefits for pensioners will be retained as budgeted for by the previous government and the temporary increase in the cold weather payment will be made permanent.
But a planned rise in the state pension age for men and women to 66 will start in 2020, six years earlier than planned.
In other measures, rail fares will be allowed to increase by 3% above RPI inflation from 2012, higher education spending will be cut by 40%, flood defences by 15% and sport England and UK Sport cut by 30%.
Heated negotiations
Up to 500,000 public sector jobs could go by 2014-15 as a result of the cuts programme, according to the Office for Budgetary Responsibility.
Mr Osborne has not set out in detail where the jobs will go but he admitted there will be some redundancies in the public sector, which he said were unavoidable when the country had run out of money.
Government departments facing major cuts to their budgets include the Home Office, on 6%, including a 20% cut in government funding for police over four years, the Foreign Office, facing 24% cuts, and the Cabinet Office, which will see its budget slashed by 35%.
The justice department is facing cuts of 6%, with 3,000 fewer prison places over four years.
Winners include the Department for International Development, which will see its budget rise to £11.5bn over the next four years, reaching 0.7% of national income in 2013.
The science budget will be ringfenced and the increase for the NHS over the whole spending period has been confirmed as 0.4%, or 0.1% a year.
The schools budget will rise from £35bn to £39bn and, overall, the Department for Education will be required to find resource savings of just 1% a year.
Each government department will next month publish a business plan setting out reform plans for the next four years.
The government will also deliver £6bn of Whitehall savings - double the £3bn promised earlier, said the chancellor.
He also confirmed that the budget for new social housing would be cut by 60% over four years, and rents for new tenants would be brought closer to private sector rates, with the money raised to go towards building new affordable homes.
Campaign groups reacted angrily to the move, with the National Housing Federation calling it "a devastating blow to the millions of low income families currently stuck on housing waiting lists".
The Spending Review is the culmination of months of heated negotiations with ministers over their departmental budgets and comes a day after the Ministry of Defence and the BBC learned their financial fate.
Tough action
The MoD is facing cuts of 8% - less than most other departments but enough to mean 42,000 service personnel and civil servants will lose their jobs over the next five years and high-profile equipment such as Harrier jump jets, the Ark Royal aircraft carrier and Nimrod spy planes will be scrapped.
The BBC has been told it must freeze the licence fee for six years and take over the cost of the World Service, currently funded by the Foreign Office, and the Welsh language TV channel S4C. This adds up to an estimated 16% cut in the BBC's budget in real terms.
The chancellor insists tough action on spending is needed to stave off a debt crisis - and that the private sector will create new jobs to fill the void.
A special BBC News season examining the approaching cuts to public sector spending The Spending Review: Making It Clear
Labour would also have had to make major cuts if they had won the general election, but the party insists Mr Osborne's plans were too aggressive and risked tipping the country into a "double dip" recession.
During raucous Commons exchanges, shadow chancellor Alan Johnson accused Tory backbenchers of cheering "the deepest cuts to public spending in living memory".
He claimed that for some on the government benches cuts were an "ideological objective" and "what they had come into politics for".LAKE FOREST, Ill. -- The Chicago Bears will start Jimmy Clausen at quarterback this week over Jay Cutler, coach Marc Trestman confirmed at a news conference Thursday.
"I think we need a lift at quarterback. We need a spark," Trestman said, adding that the "weight of the world shouldn't be on the shoulders of Jimmy Clausen."
"He [Clausen] is going to get a chance to play, and I'm hoping that our team, against a very good defense...that there will be some response from our football team," Trestman said. "I'm looking forward to seeing how it unfolds."
Trestman said he personally informed both quarterbacks of the switch Wednesday prior to meeting with general manager Phil Emery, insisting the call to send Cutler to the bench was "ultimately my decision."
"It's a coaching decision," Trestman said. "It's [a] 46-man roster [decision]. Everybody was made aware of the process, and that was finalized with my discussions with Phil last night and with our staff. That decision on the 46 [man roster] is ultimately mine."
Cutler said he was "shocked" at first at the benching and then "disappointed."
"I didn't see it coming," he said. "But any time you lose a lot of games and don't do as well as you hoped, there's a chance that could happen."
Cutler paused for a moment when asked if Trestman's decision was fair.
Editor's Picks Greenberg: Cutler handles benching well Jay Cutler said all the right things in response to his benching, and it makes some wonder whether this is indeed the end for him in Chicago, Jon Greenberg writes.
More from ESPN Insider Mike Sando explains Chicago's options if the team decides to move on from QB Jay Cutler. 1 Related
"There's a lot in that question," Cutler said. "I haven't really thought about it that deeply. All I know is there is a lot of money involved in my contract, which comes with a lot of expectations, and a lot of responsibility. Whenever you're not winning and performing the way you should there's a likelihood that can happen [being benched]."
Trestman said the benching is just for this week at this point and that Cutler would be active and serve as the backup in Sunday's game against the Detroit Lions.
"We're not playing well enough at the quarterback position on a consistent basis," Trestman said.
Asked if he could play for Trestman next season, Cutler said, "Yes... but we'd have to work on some things in the offseason that we could easily identify."
"That's not out of the question, in my book anyway," Cutler added.
Cutler has struggled this season in leading the Bears to a 5-9 record.
Bear Of A Contract The $22.5 million cash value this season of Jay Cutler's contract is more than that of quarterbacks Aaron Rodgers, Cam Newton, Andrew Luck, Mark Sanchez and Russell Wilson combined. Cash Value Aaron Rodgers $10.9M Cam Newton $3.4M Andrew Luck $2.4M Mark Sanchez $2.3M Russell Wilson $662K Total $19.6M -- Source: Roster Management
In Monday's 31-15 loss to the New Orleans Saints, he threw for two touchdowns but had three interceptions to bring his NFL-leading totals to 18 interceptions and 24 turnovers. He produced a season-low passer rating of 55.8 and generated a total QBR of 6.8, which registered as his second-worst performance of the season in that category (he had a 6.0 QBR in Week 10 against the Green Bay Packers).
He also was sacked a season-high seven times against the Saints.
Cutler's contract could be a big reason for the quarterback's benching, according to ESPN NFL Insider Mark Dominik.
The deal calls for Cutler to be paid $15.5 million in 2015. A $10 million guarantee kicks in on March 12, the third day of the 2015 league year, if Cutler is on the Bears' roster. If Cutler is injured at that time, the Bears will owe him $10 million in 2016.
By sitting Cutler the final two games of the season, the Bears guarantee he won't get injured and will have the ability to cut him or trade him after the season, basically saving the team $10 million.
Cutler was asked where he'd like to play next season.
"I would like to stay here," he said. "I really like it here. I love the guys in the locker room I get to play with. Clearly, it's a different set of circumstances now. Looking forward, this is the place I want to be."
However, Cutler conceded the franchise may be wavering in its commitment to the quarterback less than a year after inking a seven-year extension.
"It's a fair question. I don't know if I can answer that," Cutler said. "I think that is something for Phil [Emery], or the McCaskeys, or Trestman. In my role right now, I have to support Jimmy, and try to help him as much as possible. But of course, I wonder [about my future here]. That's a natural response to wonder.
"Going forward, it is what it is. Whatever happens, after the season or in March...we'll cross that bridge when we get there."(CNN) The Dutch government says it wants to help set up an international abortion fund to help families across the world after US President Donald Trump reinstated the so-called Mexico City policy.
On Monday, Trump signed an executive order, widely known as the "global gag rule," which bars international nongovernmental organizations that perform or promote abortions from receiving US government funding.
'Far-reaching consequences'
Trump's move has infuriated many charities and politicians across the globe, with Dutch official Lilianne Ploumen saying the lack of financial support will lead to "dangerous backroom procedures and higher maternal mortality."
"This decision has far-reaching consequences above all for the women it affects, who should be able to decide for themselves if they want a child, but also for their husbands and children and for society as a whole," Ploumen, the Dutch minister for foreign trade and development cooperation, said in a statement.
"Banning abortion does not reduce the number of abortions."
Trump signed the policy that the Reagan administration initially put in place. President Bill Clinton later rescinded the gag rule, but President George W. Bush then reinstated it. President Barack Obama once again revoked the rule.
This group just made it more difficult for women to get access to health care worldwide. You tell me what's wrong with this picture. pic.twitter.com/8UQFWg8qO3 — Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) January 23, 2017
During the Obama years, US law banned direct funding for abortion services, but nongovernmental organizations were allowed to receive funding for other programs, including those related to contraception access and post-abortion care.
Dutch official Lilianne Ploumen is taking aim at the US "global gag rule."
According to the Dutch government, the new fund would allow women in developing nations to gain access to contraceptives, clear information and abortion.
"We have to make up as much as possible for this financial blow, with a broad-based fund that governments, companies and civil society organizations can donate to," Ploumen said.
"So that women can continue to make their own decisions about their own bodies."
'Catastrophic'
Trump's order is "catastrophic," according to Marie Stopes International, an NGO that provides contraception and abortion services.
Women in developing countries will end up "paying the price," said Marjorie Newman-Williams, the group's vice president.
Fewer women will now get contraception & be able to have children by choice not chancehttps://t.co/brawnkuLGW #GlobalGagRule #TrumpGagRule pic.twitter.com/uN8D3IwzZo — Marie Stopes (MSI) (@MarieStopes) January 23, 2017
"All the medical evidence, as well as everything we know from our daily interactions with women, is unequivocal: If you take safe abortion services out of the reproductive health care package, it exposes women to risk," Newman-Williams said.
Marie Stopes International said the loss of its services during Trump's four years in office could cause 6.5 million unintended pregnancies, 2.2 million abortions, 2.1 million unsafe abortions and 21,700 maternal deaths.
The organization said it also would be prevented from reaching 1.5 million women with contraception every year.
"Attempts to stop abortion through restrictive laws -- or by withholding family planning aid -- will never work, because they do not eliminate women's need for abortion," Newman-Williams said.
"This policy only exacerbates the already significant challenge of ensuring that people in the developing world who want to time and space their children can obtain the contraception they need to do so."Jane, 4, the daughter of Mexican immigrant Nieves Ojendiz, looks up as her mom speaks to the New York Immigration Coalition at a rally in Foley Square on June 28 in New York. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
On Sunday, Feb. 26, the sermon at the Spanish-language Mass in Waterloo, Iowa, was about fear. Like many Catholic churches, the tan-brick, gothic Queen of Peace serves as a community center for Hispanic immigrants in this Cedar River town of 68,000. Waterloo has a claim to be Iowa’s most diverse big city. Immigrants, including Latinos and refugees from Bosnia, Myanmar, and Liberia, have helped stabilize its population and housing market, and revived downtown storefronts. But for the undocumented men and women of eastern Iowa who work in meatpacking, restaurants, and hotels, a chill has set in since the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the introduction of his new, aggressive priorities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement police.
The deacon of Queen of Peace, the Rev. Rigoberto Real, told a slightly smaller-than-usual crowd not to let fear overtake their lives, to leave things in God’s hands. But not everything: The following Sunday there would be a workshop with lawyers in the church basement to help parishioners prepare should one of their worst fears—detainment and deportation by ICE—come to pass.
That next Sunday, the church was so full it had to open the balconies. Scores of people joined lawyers in the basement after Mass for what has become, for unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., an essential ritual of the Trump era: drafting legal documents, and making emergency plans, for what will happen to their children if a parent is detained or deported.
Those plans encompass everything from who will pick up the kids from school if their parents are detained, to who will buy plane tickets if the U.S.-born children follow their parents to Mexico or Central America, to who will raise them if they remain apart from their parents but in American schools. Miryam Antúnez de Mayolo, an immigration lawyer who has practiced law in Iowa for 18 years and helped organize the church event, told me she had never seen an atmosphere so tense—not even after the Bush-era Postville raid, which became a symbol of the harms of dragnet immigration enforcement.
“I’ve never seen this level of desperation,” she said. “In this brave new world, I do not know what is normal now.”
* * *
The widely covered February deportation of Guadalupe García de Rayos, the Phoenix mother of two who had been convicted of using a false Social Security number nine years ago, inaugurated a new era of immigration policing. Aliens with or without deportation orders had settled into something like comfort under the revised priorities of Obama’s second term, when the administration decreed that authorities should focus their enforcement efforts squarely on violent criminal aliens, taking a hands-off approach to everyone else. Now these off-the-books U.S. residents are targets again.
There’s a sense, said Gunda Brost, an immigration lawyer in Cedar Falls, Iowa, who helped parents prepare surrogate caret |
by Black Lives Matter activists who heckled the former president, he lashed out. The protestors were there to blame Clinton for the passage of his signature crime and welfare reform legislation in the 1990s. Those achievements were acclaimed at the time as an example of how bipartisanship can foster consensus legislation. But the bills are now something of a badge of shame that his wife has been trying to live down in the course of her efforts to win the support of African-American voters for her presidential campaign.
In the last years, Clinton has attempted to blame the provisions in the crime bill for mandatory sentencing for drug offenders as the fault of Republicans. But when confronted by people yelling that Hillary Clinton was “a murderer” and that he should be charged with “crimes against humanity,” the former president had had enough. He told them that their position amounted to a defense of “the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and set ‘em out onto the street to murder other African-American children.”
Clinton is right about that. Despite their shortcomings, the primary beneficiaries of the crime bill and welfare reform were the poor and disadvantaged people that strove to reclaim their communities from criminals. Neither he nor Hillary has anything to apologize for on account of either effort.
But 2016 is not 1992. The base of the Democratic Party that once embraced a “new Democrat” identity in the form of Bill Clinton now reserves most of its enthusiasm for a socialist gadfly. And Hillary, who must depend on black voters as her firewall against white liberals who are rallying to the cause of Bernie Sanders, can’t afford to let her husband pick a fight with the Black Lives Matter movement.
That’s why the general reaction to her husband’s 13-minute rant in which he lectured his tormentors about the truth about the impact of the crime bill was that he had lost his magic political touch and proved once again to be more of an embarrassment to his wife’s campaign than an asset.
In the last year, the willingness of liberals and Democrats of all stripes to kowtow to Black Lives Matter activists or to even apologize for pointing out that we should believe that “all lives matter,” has become a matter of political orthodoxy on the left. It doesn’t matter that these extremists are doing nothing to improve their communities. Their war on police is now a sacred cow that Democrats — and especially Hillary Clinton — offends at their peril.
So it was no surprise that a day after he let loose on the group, Clinton was sounding apologetic. While not backing down on the historical record, he said he was guilty of “talking past” the audience as much as the hecklers were doing the same to him. He admitted to being not “effective” in answering the complaints.
The Clintons will survive this brouhaha. But it shouldn’t pass unnoticed. In fact, it is as telling a moment in our political history as what happened in 1992. Then, the “Sister Souljah Moment” — a phrase that has become emblematic of any politician being willing to talk back to his base — was important not just because it showed Bill Clinton’s mettle under pressure but because it demonstrated that the Democratic Party was ready to shift back to the center after more than a decade of allowing itself to be a prisoner of its most extreme activists.
But, after eight years of the Obama administration — a historic presidency that was supposed to allow the country to transcend the divisions of its racial past — the Democrats have shifted decisively to the left. Part of that is seen in the way Sanders’ socialist beliefs are embraced by much of his party’s mainstream — and which Clinton’s supporters are helpless to demonize as our Noah Rothman points out — but also in a refusal to speak plainly about the way the racial hucksters of Black Lives Matter are seeking to undermine police efforts that are vital to the survival of urban minority communities.
In a different era, we might have expected responsible Democrats to respond to extremists the way Bill Clinton did to Sister Souljah and win the applause of the country. But, contrary to the Post’s cheers for Clinton, in a Democratic Party that in thrall to the left on both economic and racial issues there can be no more Sister Souljah moments. That’s a liability for Clinton in November but not one that a Republican Party that may be led by a candidate that has been guilty of pandering to advocates of racial or religious prejudice will be in a position to exploit.
All Americans — be they black or white — ought to lament the spectacle of an ex-president being forced to walk back a bout of truth-telling about the last moment in our political history when bipartisanship triumphed. At a time when both Republicans and Democrats ought to be telling off the worst elements of their coalitions, Bill Clinton’s humiliation is a sign that common sense is in full retreat on the American public square.American political campaigns have come a long way since a certain Barack Obama was successfully able to mobilize the grassroots votes through social media in his 2008 run for president.
The then-senator from Illinois was able to get the lion’s share of millennials and first-time voters who seemed to have never been inspired by politics before – an important contribution to his coalition. In the 2016 race, all candidates are trying to emulate Obama’s game-changing approach.
“Social media has become an essential part of a larger apparatus of campaign strategies to reach out to people and also to recruit field activists,” says Joe Rospars, founder and CEO of Blue State Digital, a Democratic strategy firm.
“The idea is to try to create a voice of the campaign that is different than the voice of the candidate himself”, he adds.
Although the rise of social media and a robust blogosphere had been building over more than a decade, it took political campaigns some time to fully embrace platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Tumblr and others.
The reason for this initial hesitancy is understandable, says Mindy Finn, a Republican digital strategist who worked for the George W. Bush and Mitt Romney campaigns. “Campaigns want to control messaging and brand-building which is difficult on instant and spontaneous social media.”
The good old “spin room” where campaign officials and surrogates endeavored to frame the narrative by talking to traditional media has almost become obsolete, Finn says. “Today there is instant spin on Twitter, and it is everywhere and everybody can participate.”
“Today, we are living in an era in which the majority of voters are turning to social media, especially Facebook, for political information,” she adds.
Facebook has become the most powerful social media platform for political campaigns, since it is the number one news source for millennials – and it is relied on by family and friends, unlike the more professional Twitter.
In addition, Facebook recently launched a donation environment native to its platform. A “Fundraiser” page allows approved nonprofits to create a fundraising campaign directly on Facebook, enabling users to donate to the campaigns without ever leaving Facebook.
The pages offer increased capabilities to nonprofits, as organizations can incorporate tailored content to explain the campaign, show progress to their goal, and benefit from full integration in the social media platform via the Facebook News Feed and Facebook Ads.
Regardless of which candidate wins the election, Citi analysts say the big winner will actually be Facebook edging out Google.
“In our conversations with industry sources, an overriding theme across all conversations was that Facebook and Google will be the largest recipients of political digital ad spend over the 2016 cycle,” wrote Mark May and Jason Bazinet of Citi in a recent note to clients.
“Facebook specifically has seen great momentum within their political-related ad spend in recent years, as campaigns and their media buyers have developed an appreciation for the platform’s reach, targeting capabilities, as well as its growing tech stack.”
May and Bazinet estimate that the amount of ad money spent digitally for the 2016 federal elections is going to quadruple from the 2012 elections, from $145 million(139 million euros) to $607 million (550 million euros). For all elections, including the state and local level, they expect $1.07 billion (980 million euros) will go to digital ads.
Another way to keep up with what candidates are doing and saying in a day is Twitter. Many voters do not sit down to an hour of television news each night, and the 140-character message service caters to today’s on-demand convenience of many voters, especially millennials.
For the upcoming 2016 elections, it has also become clear that the candidates themselves know the value of social media presence.
The candidates’ followings range widely from more than 5 million (Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton) to 120-150,000 (Martin O’Malley, John Kasich), and to no surprise, the polling leaders in both political parties do have the largest followings.
Twitter has driven (and is driving) the conversation between the candidates and their supporters, their rivals and even their professional chroniclers, the journalists, like no other social media (or traditional media, for that matter).
The undisputed master of Twitter is Donald Trump. No one tweets like him. In the eyes of the Huffington Post, his style is “cocky, abrasive – it’s unmistakable”.
In fact, Trump would not be so powerful without the amplification of Twitter “on a near-daily basis”, says Mindy Finn, the Republican digital strategist.
“Trump has the best understanding of manipulating media” and uses Twitter to his full advantage, Finn adds.
This always follows the same pattern: Trump would attack a Republican rival like Jeb Bush or Carly Fiorina, an overly critical journalist like Fox News’ Megyn Kelly or the Clintons.
Then the traditional free media would pick up on his attack lines, assuring an exponentially high coverage, very often topping that day’s news agenda.
Result: everybody is talking about Trump, his supporters are energized, his rivals on the defensive – and Trump does not need to spend a single campaign dollar.
Certainly, Twitter has become an essential arena of the campaign. But the fastest-emerging platform in this election cycle is Snapchat which, according to the New York Times, has well over 100 million users worldwide, a huge swath of whom are in the United States.
Of all social media platforms, Snapchat has the highest percentage of millennial users. 71% of Snapchat users are between the ages of 18 and 34, and 45% are between the ages of 18 and 24, according to internet analytics company ComScore.
Because of Snapchat’s “Live” feature, over 100 million viewers have tapped into Snapchat’s live coverage of presidential debates and rallies, bringing millennials to the heart of the campaign action.
Much like Twitter and Facebook, candidates have made use of the tool to broadcast news about their campaigns.
Martin O’Malley used the platform to tell users when he would make his presidential announcement. Rick Perry used it to show voters “extra” behind the scenes moment during his announcement in May.
But Snapchat itself seems to be gaining momentum among all candidates, even the ones who don’t (yet) have accounts. The same day Jeb Bush officially launched his candidacy, for instance, his campaign also announced that he would be the first candidate to partner with Snapchat.
As a result of this partnership, Snapchat had a representative on the ground at Bush’s announcement, and employees curated photos and videos from people on the ground, turning them into a live story, “campaign 2016” that was available to the platform’s millions of users.
When it comes to Tumblr, Bernie Sanders has an edge. He uses his Tumblr presence to boil down complex issues for young voters, and also can have some fun while doing it. His page is filled with policy positions, quotes from the campaign trail and mini videos.
But it is less about what Sanders posts on his own page, and more about the immense support show on Tumblr’s Bernie Sanders hashtag. Tumblr has turned into one big Sanders rally this election cycle, which comes as no surprise given that Tumblr users are predominantly liberal.
Tumblr users are overwhelmingly educated young adults and minorities of lower socio-economic class living in urban areas, according to a Pew Research study. These attributes are strongly correlated with affiliation to the Democratic Party, which explains why Sanders is a favorite among Tumblr users.The Montana Supreme Court decision aside, we're also 10 years removed from the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence vs. Texas that made anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional and same-sex sex legal in every U.S. state and territory, and still 13 other states have anti-sodomy laws on the books. That number should come down to 12, as a court on Wednesday denied Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia's attorney general and potential next governor, his efforts to challenge a ruling that said that state's anti-sodomy law was unconstitutional. But as Virginia and Montana make clear, just because the constitution says something about gay sex doesn't mean local conservative lawmakers won't put up a fight. Buzzfeed's Chris Geidner explains how the Montana law remained, even though federal and state decisions deemed it unconstitutional: "The courts' actions do not actually take the laws off the books, but rather render them unconstitutional to be enforced," Geidner writes. "Few states have, in fact, repealed the laws since the 2003 ruling that applied nationwide."
So essentially, the Montana bill to get rid of the existing law is a formality—to make a point about gay rights and wipe an ugly part of the state's history off the books, which is something that one of the bill's supporters says people have been trying to do since 1991: "I was excited and shocked at the same time," Rep. Bryce Bennett, Montana's only out gay lawmaker, told Geidner. "Folks have been trying to pull this language from our statute in Montana since 1991, so this has been a long time coming and I almost couldn't believe when I saw we had 60 votes up there."
On the other side of that, though, is the bloc of 36 Republicans who want to make a point about keeping the law in place:
"Sex that doesn't produce people is deviant," Rep. Dave Hagstrom, who voted against bringing the bill to the floor, is quoted as saying in the Billings Gazette. "That doesn't mean it’s a problem. It just means it's not doing its primary purpose."
"If some second-grade teacher wants to take her lover and introduce her lover to the kids, I don't think there is anything that the school board can do to stop that," said Rep. Jerry O’Neil, who also voted against the bill.
We hate to break it to the lawmakers in Helena, but there are plenty of people, both gay and straight, who are having sex (perhaps even right now) without the sole purpose of trying to "produce people." Justice Kagan said as much during the Supreme Court's Prop. 8 hearing last month. A final vote should arrive Wednesday afternoon.
Photo by: Alvaro Pantoja via Shutterstock
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.American farmers feed the world. Here's how they're bringing their industry into the digital age.
Ask city dwellers what an American farmer looks like and it’s likely that they’ll describe an image reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting: a man sporting overalls and a John Deere hat, bouncing his daughter on his lap as he steers a combine through his corn fields. In truth, today’s agrarian ideal is much different. Instead of rusty tractors working the land, fields are hooked up with the same modern technology used in Silicon Valley.
As part of our continuing coverage of FarmNext’s nationwide listening tour on food and young farmers, NationSwell talked to a few tech-savvy individuals building systems that can more efficiently feed America.
Drones
Trevor Witt, a third-year student at Kansas State University in Salina, spends most of his days flying unmanned aircraft systems, or drones. He’s involved in a project in the school’s entomology department — with “the bug guys,” as he says — studying techniques for early detection of invasive species. Witt spent the summer mapping sorghum fields, looking for evidence of an aphid that can ruin an entire harvest in just a few weeks. “If you can detect that aphid early on, you can spray that specific area to get rid of it,” Witt explains. With a camera shooting in high-resolution visuals and near-infrared imagery, Witt’s drone flies over fields of crops, looking for a shiny, sugar-dense resin on the top of leaves and a black underside — the telltale sign of this aphid’s infestation.
Witt, who dates his interest in unmanned aircraft to his high school shop class, says the primary goal of his research at K-State is “dealing with information overload.” His team is “translating all this data that we can collect and make actionable solutions,” he says. “Earlier, using satellites, the data pixel had a 15-acre resolution; now data pixel resolution is sub-centimeter. It just gets significant amounts of data even in the smallest field.”
For now, the farmer must take action against the infestation himself. But eventually, perhaps a decade from now, a grower won’t have to do a thing: he’ll have another drone or self-driven tractor that can automatically spray the area. “That’s the end goal when it comes to mapping,” Witt says. Unmanned aircraft systems aren’t the end-all solution, he concedes, but it’s “an extra tool in the toolkit.”
Solar Power
To lay the optimal number of eggs, a hen needs a full 16 hours of light. That’s an impossibly high bar for small farmers to reach during the winter, when a December day at California’s Riverdog Farms, for example, only receives eight and a half hours of sunshine — causing production to drop anywhere from 30 to 60 percent. (During that time, chickens continue to consume the same amount of feed.) Most large farms employ artificial lighting to stimulate production, but the cost can be prohibitively high for small-scale farmers to invest in the technology.
Egg producers “take those seasonal changes pretty hard,” says Edward Silva, who developed a solar-powered supplemental lighting system called Henlight as an undergraduate at University of California, Davis. Programmed by software, the Henlight “comes on in the morning hours, a little before sunrise. The very darkest days, it comes on earlier,” he says. “It doesn’t wake [the chickens] up. Eventually they rustle up, but what’s happening is that laying hens receive the okay to reproduce through a gland on the top of their head.”
According to Silva, who grew up on a farm in the Central Valley, field data from one coop using the Henlight in Capay Valley, Calif. saw a 20 percent boost in egg production — laying an additional 2,253 eggs — compared to a control group. Sold at $3 a dozen, the farmer made $563, meaning that he got a return on the $450 investment in the first year.
“There’s this movement where tech in ag is becoming much more democratic,” says Silva. “Smaller farms can optimize their operations as well. With Uber, anyone can be a taxi driver; with Aribnb, anyone can open a hotel. In agriculture, with a lot of precision sensors, with smartphones and drones, the systems are allowing small-scale guys to be competitive with what’s existing on a bigger level.”
Genetics
Donald Gibson is trying to grow a better tomato. A graduate student at University of California, Davis is using cutting-edge biotech that would allow tomato plants to grow with far less phosphorous, a vital nutrient (along with nitrogen and potassium) that’s increasingly costly and environmentally damaging to extract for fertilizer. When lacking phosphorous, a tomato expends much of its energy expanding its root system. By identifying and switching off the gene that activates that response, the fruit could grow with much less of the nutrient.
Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, have earned the wrath from the organic crowd for altering a plant’s fundamentals, but Gibson argues his research will make agriculture sustainable. “Today we’re seeing a major shift in advances in plant breeding. There’s been a boom in the biotech field in the last 20 or 30 years, a technology revolution and also a biological revolution. Now finally, we’re using brand new technology and adapting that to select better and better plants,” he says. “When it comes to GMOs, it’s actually getting a lot better from the consumer perspective.” Most of the innovation in the field has benefited farmers, but the next generation will benefit consumers with products like a potato that doesn’t bruise or an apple that doesn’t brown as quickly.
Data Analytics
FarmLink is employing analytics to help farmers decipher big data and turn it into actionable items, moving agriculture from maps on paper that tracked annual yields to create more precise information. “There is plenty of data out there, and the data increases every day. It’s not that we need more data,” says Kevin Helkes, FarmLink’s director of operations. “Farmers are saying they need to know what to do with that data.”
Helkes compares the farmers’ fields to a front lawn. “There’s always that part of the yard that’s higher, where the grass grows taller. It’s the same thing in the field. Farmers know that year over year, this area is higher and this area is lower,” he says. What’s new, though, is that data analytics will be able to tell a farmer how productive those high and low areas could potentially be. Instead of a grower learning the hard way that he’s been wasting money on a fallow spot of land, FarmLink can communicate in advance how much he can expect from an area.
Agriculture’s first great revolution was switching from a donkey towing a plow to a tractor trailer. Now, agriculture has reinvented itself with new improvements in genetics and feed. This is called Ag 3.0.
(Homepage photograph: Courtesy of Gregory Urqiaga/University of California, Davis)Apollo 11 lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin stands on the moon near the American flag during NASA's historic first manned moon landing on July 20, 1969. Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong took the photo.
In 1962 that President John F. Kennedy delivered the now-famous line in a speech at Rice University in Texas: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Seven years later, the first humans walked on the lunar surface.
It took a Cold War space race with the Soviet Union to spur such statements and spark the United States' manned rush to the moon, a race that led to the first manned lunar landing with Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969. Once the last Apollo mission, Apollo 17, wrapped up in 1972, no human has returned. NASA has sent lunar probes, but today, the agency is focused more on a potential human asteroid visit and putting boots on Mars. Other countries, on the other hand, are starting to think about manned lunar missions.
"NASA is not currently considering a human return to the moon and remains focused on the asteroid-retrieval mission," James Clay Moltz, a professor in the department of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, wrote in an email to Space.com. [Apollo 11's 45th Anniversary: Complete Coverage]
Before President Barack Obama took office, NASA was operating under the George W. Bush-led vision called Constellation, which included a plan to return to the moon.
"The Obama administration made the calculation that President Bush's Constellation program was unaffordable and that, in terms of science, there was nothing 'new' offered by returning to the moon," Moltz added. "A Mars mission is still a U.S. goal, but it remains a long way off, especially given the current lack of independent U.S. human access to space."
National possibilities
In the past five years, several nations have openly mused about launching their own human missions to the moon. In 2010, Japan talked of sending a humanoid robot. China has been rumored to be considering a lunar mission, although the nation talks mostly about constructing a space station. India, Iran and Russia have also been cited as nations thinking about going the moon.
"It's only three days away," John Logsdon, a professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at The George Washington University's space policy institute, told Space.com. "Compared to any other destination, if you're going to go anywhere, the moon is basically an offshore island."
Heading there is not a stated U.S. goal, although it was a brought up in a recent National Research Council report and, according to Logsdon, Obama has expressed an interest in participating in other nation's moon missions — just not leading one.
The Chinese flag is clearly visible on the moon in this photo taken of China's Chang'e 3 moon lander by the country's Yutu lunar rover (the country's first moon rover) in December 2013. China has said a manned mission to the moon is one of its major human spaceflight goals. (Image: © CASC/China Ministry of Defense)
While Logsdon said going to the moon would be primarily for national prestige, Moltz added that it would be a "useful environment" to test how to live outside Earth. Unlike going to Mars, he added, it would be relatively easy to mount a rescue operation, since it would take just a few days to send help there.
"In my opinion, yes, the moon should be our main focus in order to establish a semi-permanent research base and to build our capabilities for long-duration spaceflight and settlements," Moltz said. [Moon Base Visions: How to Build a Lunar Colony (Photos)]
"We will also learn more about using lunar materials for energy and construction purposes," he added. "Finally, a lunar mission would offer better prospects for meaningful cooperation with foreign partners, which is likely to be essential to fund and carry out a Mars mission in the future."
Are they serious?
Both Logsdon and Moltz said that with enough money and dedication, several different countries could conceivably go back to the moon one day.
Both China and Russia, for example, have sent humans into Earth orbit. Russia also knows about long-duration spaceflight through its former Mir space station and participation in the International Space Station program.
"The real questions are funding, risk tolerance and long-term commitment, none of which can be undertaken lightly," Moltz said. "Given its growing economy and apparent commitment to space exploration, China's plans, in particular, pose a serious challenge to U.S. leadership, especially if it were to organize a major international mission to the moon, which might attract U.S. allies in Europe."
Russia has a stated goal of getting humans to the moon in the 2020s or 2030s, Logsdon added, while China is more focused on a midsize space station. However, Logsdon noted that any country with a human spaceflight program would likely set the moon as a target.
That also goes for India, which has a strong rocket program. However, India also finds itself battling a tough economy and domestic problems.
"I think it's an unlikely candidate all by itself to put together the resources," Logsdon said.
A manufacturing cooperative called Astro-Technology SOHLA in Japan once mused that humanoid robots could be sent to the moon, but Logsdon said that, in the five years since, the nation has decided instead to look for exploration with more direct benefits to Earth. Moreover, scientists would likely want humans on the surface anyway, since they would be more flexible in making decisions, Moltz said.
Both Moltz and Logsdon agreed that there is a growing movement in the United States to return to the moon, even if it's not a stated presidential or NASA goal yet. If such a manned lunar mission does happen, it will most likely be as a part of an international consortium.
"This option still remains a viable path to success if some future U.S. (or foreign) leader decided to revive such a mission," Moltz said, pointing out that Constellation failed because it did not marshal the international expertise or finances required to pull it off.
"But it will take political vision, hard work and compromises," Moltz added. "In the end, though, such an effort is likely to be more sustainable than any project led by a single nation."
Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Originally published on Space.com.Metaphors involving dogs appear to be really catching on of late. The latest one comes from BJP leader Kailash Vijayvargiya, who reportedly hit out at Shatrughan Sinha using the canine analogy.
"When a car is being driven and a dog is in the car, the dog believes he is driving the car," ANI quoted Vijayvargiya as saying. He was commenting on actor-turned-BJP leader Shatrughan Sinha's comments after the verdict in the Bihar polls. Sinha had said that Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar was the most successful chief minister in the country after West Bengal's Jyoti Basu.
Sinha, however, said that he had not worked against the BJP in any way, adding, "But if the BJP wants to take action against me, I cannot stop the party."
Not long ago, Vijayvargiya had triggered a controversy when he tweeted that Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan's soul was in Pakistan. This was when the actor had spoken about the rise of intolerance in India.
Vijayvargiya, not exactly known for restraint in his public utterances, has made controversial statements on several occasions in the past as well. In July, reacting to reports of multiple deaths allegedly linked to the Vyapam scam, he had said that the controversy was of a chutput (small) nature for the party.
In anticipation for his denial, we clarify that Vijayvargiya has absolutely not compared Shatrughan Sinha to a dog. That, clearly, is the wrong conclusion to draw from the statement.
The last time, after his tweets on Shah Rukh Khan, he had done a complete turn-around after pressure from his party.
He had said, "My intention was not to hurt anyone. I take back my yesterday's tweet," he said on microblogging site Twitter this morning, even as his party distanced itself from his earlier remarks critical of the actor saying it was "not the view of the BJP".
In another tweet, the BJP general secretary had said that had there been intolerance in India "after Amitabh, Shah Rukh would not have been the most popular actor. Some people have drawn different meaning from my tweet."
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.A Winnipeg grandmother says her dispute with Sears Canada over a faulty sewing machine and its extended warranty is putting her home-based business in jeopardy.
Sylvia Wiebe, 71, is demanding that Sears replace her $3,199 Kenmore sewing machine after it broke down five times in five months.
Wiebe said the sewing machine had been taken to a Sears office in Winnipeg for repairs five times since July, but it kept malfunctioning.
The machine was then lost while being shipped to Regina for more repairs, she said.
Without a sewing machine, Wiebe said she cannot work on the sewing and embroidery projects she had been taking on for extra income.
"I can't do my own sewing, let alone sewing for other people that call me to do repairs for them — replace zippers, shorten pants, do a little bit of embroidery with a name on a towel or embroider a picture on," she said in an interview.
The extended warranty that Wiebe has been paying since she purchased the sewing machine in 2004 guarantees her a replacement item — or issue store credit for the same value — if the original product has to be repaired three times during a 12-month period.
While Wiebe was speaking with CBC News on Tuesday, a Sears representative phoned and offered her $1,200.
She is demanding a full refund or a new sewing machine, citing the warranty.
"So your warranty isn't worth the paper that it's on?" Wiebe told the representative.
A Sears official told CBC News that someone is looking into Wiebe's complaint.
"We try to satisfy our customers and I will approach our team on Mrs. Wiebe's behalf and look forward to a satisfactory resolution," Vincent Power stated in an email.
Wiebe said the situation with Sears is especially disappointing given her husband worked for the company for 43 years.
For now, Wiebe said she is losing income as well as the pleasure she took in sewing gifts for others.
"I'm five and a half months backed up with embroidery, sewing, pyjamas for my grandchildren for Christmas," she said.
"How am I going to get them done? And they always look for Grammy's jammies at Christmas."Image copyright PETO Image caption PETO promotes itself as "the young alternative"
A political party founded by high school students has trounced establishment parties in Germany's local elections - and taken 95% of the mayoral vote - in Monheim am Rhein.
Daniel Zimmermann was just 27 when he first became mayor of Monheim five years ago. Now, aged 32, he's wiped out his town's debt and seen a landslide re-election, leaving his only opponent with just 5% of the vote.
Zimmermann's party Peto, which is the Latin for "I seek", has been fielding candidates since 1999, when most of its members were about 18 years old. On Sunday, the party took nearly two thirds of the vote, leaving little ground for Germany's main parties - Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, the Rheinische Post newspaper reports.
As Peto's founding members have grown older, the party has had to create an "over 30s" club so its adult members can stay involved. The local party says that, politically, it's neither left nor right and it wants to turn Monheim into a "town for all".
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Monheim stands on the bank of the Rhein, near Duesseldorf
Use #NewsfromElsewhere to stay up-to-date with our reports via Twitter.WASHINGTON -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under increasing pressure from President Barack Obama to prove his commitment to a two-state solution, is likely to name a new top negotiator for talks with the Palestinians. But Netanyahu’s pick is no peacenik.
An Israeli official told The Times of Israel on Monday that Netanyahu had chosen recently appointed Interior Minister Silvan Shalom to oversee peace talks.
The choice is unlikely to appease the White House. Shalom has made comments in direct opposition to Palestinian statehood. In 2012, while serving as a member of the Knesset in the Likud party, Shalom told party activists, “We are all against a Palestinian state, there is no question about it.”
More recently, as minister of national infrastructure, Shalom blocked the water supply to the newly constructed West Bank town of Rawabi, despite approval by the Defense Ministry.
Shalom on Monday said his assignment proves Netanyahu’s dedication to peace.
“The appointment indicates the desire of the prime minister and Israel to have negotiations with the Palestinians, in contrast to the accusations that Israel refuses peace, and in contrast to the Palestinian claims that they cannot avoid unilateral actions in order to advance the establishment of a Palestinian state,” Shalom said, according to a translation provided by The Times of Israel.
Palestinians are unlikely to see it that way. While they have yet to comment on Shalom’s post, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat earlier slammed Netanyahu's appointment of Naftali Bennett as education minister and Ayelet Shaked as justice minister.
“With the dust beginning to settle on the new Israeli coalition government, the face of a new form of racist and discriminatory Israel has been revealed; Benjamin Netanyahu vehemently leading the charge to bury the two-state solution and impose a perpetual Apartheid regime …” Erekat told WAFA, a Palestinian news agency, this month.
At the moment, Shalom’s appointment has little practical significance. Peace talks are stalled and there is no indication that they are likely to resume in the near future. Rather, the post is further evidence of Netanyahu’s rightward lurch in an effort to maintain his fragile majority within the Israeli government.
The controversial appointment comes two months after Netanyahu clinched re-election, in part by reassuring right-wing voters in the settlement blocs that he would not allow for the creation of a Palestinian state. Though he has since walked back his comments, the Obama administration has said that it is reevaluating its policy toward Israel and the Palestinian territories in relation to the two-state solution.
According to The Times of Israel, Shalom’s portfolio also will include strategic dialogue with the U.S.
J Street, a pro-Israel organization in the U.S., on Monday called on the Obama administration to hold Netanyahu accountable for appointing Shalom.
“Appointing an opponent of two states to manage negotiations with the Palestinians is yet another sign of Prime Minister Netanyahu's expectation that he can successfully defy the international community in this upcoming term. It is up to the Obama administration to demonstrate that he has badly miscalculated,” said Alan Elsner, J Street’s vice president for communications.
The White House has been quiet on details of its policy reevaluation, but there is growing speculation that the U.S. may soften longstanding opposition to Palestinian efforts to secure statehood through through the United Nations in lieu of a negotiated settlement with the Israelis.Duality
Lauer and Needham, 1979:
Many operating system designs can be placed into one of two very rough categories, depending upon how they implement and use the notions of process and synchronization. One category, the “Message-oriented System,” is characterized by a relatively small, static number of processes with an explicit message system for communicating among them. The other category, the “Procedure-oriented system,” is characterized by a large, rapidly changing number of small processes and a process synchronization mechanism based on shared data.
In this paper, it is demonstrated that these two categories are duals of each other and that a system which is constructed according to one model has a direct counterpart in the other. The principal conclusion is that neither model is inherently preferable, and the main consideration for choosing between them is the nature of the machine architecture upon which the system is being built, not the application which the system will ultimately support.A TRANSGENDER woman who was referred to as a “he” by custody suite staff at St Helens Police Station has had a complaint against her treatment upheld.
Alison Jane Stokes, of Grange Park, made a formal complaint about the conduct of two officers after she was arrested on suspicion of threatening behaviour.
The 35-year-old, who was born Andrew Stokes, took offence at being asked whether she should be searched by a male or female officer and at being referred to as a “he” in a telephone conversation with her family.
No charges against Ms Stokes were ever brought.
She told the Reporter: “As if it wasn’t bad enough being arrested and taken into the police station, I felt it was then an insult to be asked whether I was a man or a woman when it came to being searched.
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dead by the amount of abuse it had received.
"Dude! You're freaking scary!" Sun said as he crouched on his branch, the leafs fell due to his weight. Garfiel growled, using his foot to unhinge his hand from the tree. "Like, I have met some scary guys, but you definitely take the cake! Roman Torchwick might dress like a bad guy, but you have the face and teeth to just pull off that 'Ultimate Villain' slot!"
"Why're ya helping 'hat punk!?" Garfiel questioned, ignoring Suns insults. "That guy is t'true bad guy 'ere! He's a member of the Black Fang! An enemy t'us Faunus! Y'should help me kill him!"
Sun's eyes widened in surprise. His head snapped to Subaru, a pained expression set upon his face. Watching, Sun started noticing the similarities between the Black Fang and him. While he hadn't ran into any of them personally, Sun had heard of the horror stories about them and what they wore. The skins and bones of the wildlife within and outside the Kingdom, a mockery of all Faunus alike. The killings and atrocities they committed reached all the way through the Underground to the public.
They were not good people. And he was one of them?
"You… You're a Black Fang?" Sun asked, Garfiel allowing for the conversation to take place. Sun watched, as Subaru looked away, unresponsive. Sun stood shocked, unsure how to take this response. Honestly, Sun detested the Black Fang; they were racist, oppressive and insane. Although, the same could be said about the White Fang. They have done as much, if more, atrocious things to this world the the Black Fang has. "Are you really?"
Subaru grimace, not wanting to admit it. He technically wasn't part of the Black Fang, and had no business with them, but in all honesty that was a lie. Subaru actively supported the Black Fang, if only part of his petty revenge. Gritting his teeth, he looked directly at Sun. He detested lies.
"I hate Faunus." Subaru admitted, surprising Sun by the bluntness of this revelation. "I detest them with every fiber of my being. I hate every non-human. They are liars, they manipulate and murder without a care in the world! They think that they rule the world when in reality they walk the same soil we do! What right do they have to kill families and ruin friendships just because they exist!? Faunus never keep their word, they cheat you out of your money and Will backstab you without a second thought! I hate every Faunus and Demi-Human that exists!"
Sun didn't respond immiedstly, Subaru's words holding so much emotion and belief in them that even someone like him understood Subaru had meaning to say those. That if he were to lie about it, Subaru would have probably killed himself. As dark as that was for Sun to think, he didn't doubt it one bit. The look in the eyes of the dark haired one was cold and merciless.
"Ya see now!?" Garfiel yelled, catching the attention of Sun. Subaru watched, prepared for the betrayal. "He's a'racist an' murderer! As Faunus, we need'a kill him before he kills more of us!"
"Nah, I'm good!" Sun declined, squatting on the tree, his grin resembling a monkey's.
"Huh?" Subaru and Garfiel both sounded at the same time. Both Hazel and Jaded eyes watched as the monkey scratched his cheek sheepishly.
"Well, I mean, look at you two!" Sun said, pointing to Subaru. "You're part of a group that actively hunts down Faunus like we're the next big game! I don't like the thought of that, but even a kid could tell you have your reasons!" Sun then pointed the staff to Garfiel. "And your no better! You joined a group of Human killers that actively kill and ransom children! Not cool, man!"
"So, yer not gonna help m'kill this freak?" Garfiel asked, his brain not processing fast enough. Nobody could say that Garfiel was the sharpest tool in the shed without being a complete liar.
"Nah, I'll stick with him this time!" Sun said, as he stretched his legs, getting ready to get back to fighting. "I mean, I did make a promise with Ruby, and if I don't keep it she'll be upset. When she's upset, Blake will be upset."
Garfiel bristled, his anger clear on his face. Without meaning to, he round house kicked the tree right next to him destroying its base. Grabbing the tree itself, he spun around and tossed it at a very surprised Sun, who narrowly dodged the incoming threat. Landing on the ground, he had to back flip to avoid a downwards kick sent Garfiel. Not letting up, Garfiel sweep kicked Sun, successfully landing a hit. Fortunately, Sun was able to use the staff to launch him further back, avoiding a side chop Garfiel sent.
For Subaru, this fight was too much for him. Sure, he had went up against the likes of Elsa and some of Volakia's finest, but whenever he had he always had someone with him. He was always with Regulus or his own grunts, who protected him with their lives. He had always used the powers of others to further his own goals, not his own. Now that he was alone, it made him realize how powerless he truly was.
Even with Sun, an Enigma to him, Subaru felt completely useless. Sure, he was probably going to be the one to finish Garfiel, but that was still due to the help of Sun. He didn't have the moves or abilities that these two monsters had, and that sent a bout of jealousy through his body.
So as he watched the two blondes jump and attack with a strength no normal human can attain, he swore to himself that he will one day gain that skill and power(4).
Sun sent an uppercut with his staff, stunning the raging blond. Following up, he sent his Staff downwards, aiming for Garfiel's face. Garfiel in turn grabbed the staff between his hand, attempting to pull it out of the monkeys hands. Sun didn't falter however, knowing that he would die if he did. Not letting go of the weapon, he used the force of the pull to jump over Garfiel and push him forward. Landing, he poked Garfiel in the back, who gave a roar of rage.
"Fine! 'F y'want t'fight like that then I won't hold back!" Garfiel yelled, throwing off his vest. Sun watched skeptically as Garfiel relaxed his body. With his eyes widening with adrenaline, Garfiel's body bulged and convulsed, golden hair grew all over his body. His teeth, as sharp as knives, turned into daggers as his legs cracked and bent back. His circular pupils turned vertical, and the ground around him cracked and deformed. Rocks floated in the air at the sheer power Garfiel was displaying.
"Dude! You were scary enough as you were! Please don't do this to me!" Sun begged as he watched the scene in apprehension. While it may be awe inspiring, Sun never wanted to ever see this again. From the core of his being, he felt like running, but couldn't. Shaking knees and chattering teeth was all he was able to do.
So when Subaru came out of nowhere, grabbing onto Garfiel with a victorious grin, he couldn't help but feel his fear dissipate. Garfiel didn't seem to notice until it was too late, as Subaru chanted the words of binding.
"Ur-Shamak!" Subaru yelled, the words containing a deep, dark magic seeping out from his body. Instinctively, Sun hopped away from the mist, able to tell being in it would be in a world of trouble. As the mist dissipated, Sun saw Subaru standing in front of Garfiel, his eyes cast downwards, drool seeping from his mouth. Walking forward, he gave Subaru a curious look.
"What did you do?" Sun asked, Subaru watching him from the corner of his eye.
"I removed all of Garfiel's senses. He's unable to tell what he's doing, where he's standing, or if he's even breathing." Subaru explained, Sun shocked by the revelation. That was a heck of a useful ability.
"He can be broken out of it, right?" Sun worriedly asked, not wanting a fellow Faunus death on his hands. Subaru glanced at him, before sighing. As stated above, he had a distaste for Non-Humans, but this one had at least saved his life. He would play kind for now.
"Of course." Subaru said as he cocked back his fist, two Unseen Hands forming inside his fist. "But I'm gonna knock him out of the game before then."
With that, Subaru let his fist fly, a direct uppercut with his regular fist. Next, his second fist enhanced that, letting him fly. The third hand however didn't punch him. No, it sunk its claws into him, tearing at his insides. Subaru watched as Garfiel flew through the air, landing out of sight of both Sun and Subaru, dead.
Sun didn't need to know that though.
"Holy crap! You hit hard!" Sun said in amazement, as he watched the body fly through the air, not knowing that he was dead. Again, it was better if he didn't know. Sun yielded his weapon to his back, Subaru gave him a look as Sun started tapping his foot. "So~ what now?"
"Isn't a giant Robot chasing Ruby and that other girl?" Subaru said, not a hint of amusement in his voice. Sun flinched at the tone, a total one eighty from the hyperactive voice during the fight. Something must have changed with that fight. Or was it because he was a Faunus? Something told Sun he didn't want to know.
"Uh, yeah." Sun said as he scratched the back of his head. "Are you sure you wanna go fight that thing though? From what I've seen of the girls, I'm sure that they'll be ok."
"Lets go just to make sure then." Subaru suggested. He started following the trail, his hands in his pockets and his face downcast.
"Awe god Dang it!" Sun said as he followed behind him.
"Freeze!" With a sudden flash of light, Subaru and Sun were blinded, the voice echoing throughout the are. "Put your weapons on the ground! Get on your knees with your hands in the air; NOW!"
"Well… crap!" Sun whined.
Vale
Downtown District
A Few Hours Later
What did it mean to be alive? Was it to live in the wealth of the world? Or struggle against a world that would like to see you dead? Or was it just moving forward, doing your best to survive? What was the meaning? Why does life even exist?
That was what Penny Polendina questioned herself as she ran from the church, a fire of hate and anguish brewing as she distanced herself from it. In her hands a child of unknown age, malnourished and beaten. A tinge of regret and panic filled her heart as he cried for the young Nun left behind in that burning building.
Penny had miscalculated by many digits. She had thought she was facing only one opponent, yet as the battle had dragged on, she was greeted with many other hooded figures, each as skilled as the last. While by no means was she unable to deal with the growing threat, she had to also protect the child in her arms. So with quick thinking, Penny had ran out the building, the hooded figures setting fire to the run down church. It filled her with sadness that she was unable to save those within, but her main concern right now was the Child.
With another jump, she landed on a cars hood, startling the occupants within. She needed to plan. She needed to find a way to get this child to safety before these criminals get to them. Using the GPS implanted in her head, she looked for the nearest police station or Atlas Outpost. While this was indeed Vale, due to recent events Atlas had taken occupation in the Kingdom, bringing their military arsenal to show the world how Atlas will bring peace to the world.
Unknown to Penny, this had the opposite effect. The locals saw the floating ships in the Sky as a declaration of War. Apprehension ran through the air of Vale as they waited for the first set of bombing to take place. Families strayed from Atlas personnel, street rats harassed the local outposts, and an over all chaos had erupted between Vale and Atlas. Of course, this had been covered up to stop fear from escalating to other Kingdoms, as with fear came the creatures of Grimm.
"You should really pay attention to your surroundings." A voice spoke up above her. Dashing forward, Penny narrowly avoided three daggers being imbedded into her back. The person in the car however was not as lucky. The honk of a horn sounded as the once living body landed on the wheel. Landing on another car, Penny looked at her opponent. Masked in all black, a cloak covering her features, was a woman who went by the name Purpura. In Latin, that would translate to purple. Yet, Purpura was also a name of a rash, that Penny couldn't help but to attribute to this woman. "Now look what you made me do. This poor man could have went home to his family, yet because of you he had to meet his untimely demise here."
Penny didn't respond, feelings of sadness and regret gripped her steel heart as she heard the cries of pedestrians who saw the atrocious crime the woman had just committed. Pulling out the bloodied dagger, the woman smiled at Penny, not thinking twice of the blood she had spilled.
"I'll make you an offer." Purpura said, catching Penny's attention. "If you hand over the boy, we'll let you go. Our mission was to quiet him, not kill random bystanders." Purpura lifted the dagger to her face. "Of course, if you intend to continue this farce then I would be happy to oblige."
"No." Penny responded without any hesitation. Holding the child closer to her protectively, she glared at Purpura. Wordlessly, Swords came out of her back, and shot out behind her latching onto building far behind her. Pulling her back, she could see the surprised gasp leave Purpura mouth as she continued to distance herself.
"Crap!" Purpura yelled as she dashed towards the mechanical girl. If she lost sight of them, there was no guarantee that they would be able to track them down again, unless the Witch decided to step in. "We need to kill them!"
Almost like magic, a few Cult members appeared besides her, tossing daggers at the girl. Swords of levitation struck down those daggers though, the girl controlling them. When Purpura had first started her attack on the robot, she thought that this would be a fun battle, toying with her until she ran. Instead, the girl had proved to be not only a worthy opponent, one that could beat her if she truly tried. It scared her how someone so young could be so skilled. Was every child in Remnant like her?
Penny watched as her attackers drew farther away from her, yet she felt no happiness. Many had lost their lives tonight, and she could not save those who moved on. Her sole purpose in life was tarnished in a matter of seconds, yet this feeling would last a lifetime.
Hearing the distinct sounds of clothing moving in the wind, she gave a chance look up, and ended up grateful. As what laid in wait above her was none other more of the hooded beings, their arms drew back in preparation of throwing the spears of death. As the daggers flew through the air, a whistling sound penetrated her ears as they cut through air. Using three of her swords, she cut past the daggers. Gasping in shock, another dagger was hidden behind of its brother. Not having enough time to deflect the attack, she pulled herself towards a skyscraper, receiving damage to her right leg. Luckily it wasn't anything serious, just her skin being peeled off, revealing metal underneath.
With a swing, she turned, using the GPS to find the fastest way to the Atlas military Outpost. Onlookers below watched in amazement, not realizing the dangers that that awaited them if those daggers fell. A hard turn as she swung around another building, the boys shriek of fear frightening her. Holding him tighter, she flew, only to be stopped as more cloaked individuals jumped from the shadows, blocking her way. Throwing more daggers, she repelled them once again, prepared for the one that hid behind the other.
Instead of moving however, Penny stayed stalk still, two of her blades in two adjacent buildings suspending her in the air. It wasn't like she could move however, as she was surrounded by hooded men and woman, all wielding daggers. The crowd below them became more prevalent as time passed, civilians getting out of their cars, taking pictures and making videos. Penny had an internal crisis at this, as with more people formed around them, the more danger she was bringing to Vale.
"You could have just given him to us." Purpura said as she slid out of the shadows, her smile twisted and corrupted. It didn't take a genius to realize she was enjoying this, nor did it take a good Samaritan to detest her for it. "Now we have all these citizens as spectators, but that won't do. If word gets out of our deeds, then it would cause trouble for my husband." Her smile grew more demented. "So like good Shepherds, we must clear the herd!"
As those words left Purpura's mouth, the hooded threats all threw their daggers at the pedestrians down below. Panicking, Penny used her eight remaining blades to continually deflect the daggers that rained from the sky. If she could sweat, she would be sweating buckets by now at how much stress was being transmitted through her receptors. Sparks flew as the sound of metal meeting metal sounded out in the air. Most Daggers were deflected, but the unlucky few that made it through hit their mark, causing the sound of tearing flesh and screams of pain to fill the air.
As the daggers ceased their fall, Penny concentrated on finding a way of this situation. She couldn't stay any longer as the reason the pedestrians were being killed was because of her. It only took nanoseconds to find a back alley that would lead to the Atlas outpost. Dashing, she landed on the ground, the wires in her legs pumping and forcing her to move forward.
"Perfect." Purpura said from afar, the plan working quite well.
Penny heard the distinct sound of cloth in the air again, and the Screech of metal against wind. On instinct, Penny used the swords to pull herself back, avoiding the daggers.
"Ahhhh!"
A screech reached her ears. A bloodcurdling, pained screech that was all to near for her to bear. Fear gripped her metal heart as she shakenly glanced down to the boy in her arms. A dagger, as wide as her arm, was embedded in the boys stomach. A silent scream coming out of his mouth, his face contorted in pain and agony.
"No…" Penny painfully said, disbelief in her green eyes. Moving ever so slightly, she did her best not to move the boy, yet that seemed to be the most he could endure. His eyes rolled into the back of his head, and Penny could sense his heart come to a stop. Agony gripped her heart, as his lifeless eyes stared into oblivion.
"I believe I did tell you to give us the boy." Purpura said as she walked behind Penny. A smile of demented glee and sadness graced her face. She didn't take joy in killing kids, but she did enjoy watching someone break. She hated continuously torturing someone when you could just kill them, sure, but this wasn't that case. This girl willingly broke herself by getting involved. "If you hadn't gotten involved, you may not be feeling this regret right now. The regret of failure. The regret that because of you that child will die. Finally, regret that you ever involved yourself with us." Purpura said, walking in front of Penny, who held the child close to her chest. "I am sorry, but now that you've seen what we can do, and who we are, I must send you to the other side. May your soul find rest in the ever spanning abyss."
"I will protect you…" It was with these words that Purpura realized her mistake. A mistake she will regret for the rest of her life. While Purpura had been talking, praying for her soul to pass with ease, Penny had been moving. Ever so slightly, her blades had crept up on Purpura. And in a flash of words, three cut through her stomach. The rest to the Cult members around her grunted in pain as more blades entered through their backs.
"I will protect you…" With these final words, Penny dropped the kid, and began her rampage.
Vale
Beacon Academy
Same Time
General Ironwood was having a very, very stressful day.
It all started from a call from Glynda Goodwitch, a comrade in the ongoing war against Sa-… Grimm. News from Qrow had come in, and it had been less than reassuring. While most of the report had been gibberish only able to be understood by Ozpin, one small detail had indeed been troubling news.
The Witch Cult was on the move.
Apparently it wasn't only Qrow who had reported this either, as other informants across the world of Remnant had reported the same. Assassinations of important political figures, village purging and more had been noted by Ozpin. Usually this was a problem for the World Above, as the Cult was not of this world. Yet as the barriers between this world and that slowly crumbled, a worrying thought seemed to cross Ironwoods mind.
What if the Cult was working with the enemy?
The Cult was a unpredictable and terrifying force. They never seemed to have one leader to coincide with, not one vision to rally behind, even disputes between themselves being common place in the World Above. That was the only reason why the World Above hadn't already been torn asunder. So when the thought that they may be coming together under one mind came to his attention, a deep fear gripped his heart. Stress and fatigue seemed to take his mind.
Then news that his latest project, Penny Polendina, had went missing. Again. That did the job of causing bags to grow under his eyes. Ironwood had immediately sent out an order to find and bring her back. To this very moment, he had yet to receive an all clear.
"I really need to put a tracker on that girl." Ironwood said, pinching the bridge of his nose. Sighing, he looked into the distance, the shining lights of Vale flashing in an incandescent light. It was truly alluring, how beautiful the city was in this time of War. While the citizens rested peacefully, those in the shadows protected them from the dangers of the night.
"I hope that didn't mean what I think it did, Ironwood." Looking behind him, Ironwood gave a charming smile to the blonde beauty of Vale, Glynda Goodwitch.
"I'm sure you are just misinterpreting what I said." Ironwood said, Glynda standing next to him. It was calming standing up here, like none of the world's problems existed. "I was just thinking about Penny Polendina."
"Ah, you're current 'project'" Glynda remarked, distaste in that last word. "I don't understand your need to keep a eye on her twenty-four-seven. The girl is fully capable of protecting herself as demonstrated with the battle against Torchwick. If anything, she deserves a little space after that."
"Personal Space isn't the problem, Glynda." Ironwood said, walking along the cliff of Beacon. The slight sound of a heel tapping against metal indicated she was following, so he continued. "Penny isn't a normal girl. She's an android created with Atlas science. She's over trusting and over curious. Even if she can protect herself, she isn't ready for the real world yet."
"The more I hear you talk, the more I see an overprotective father." Goodwitch teased, a small blush adoring Ironwoods face. "Don't worry so much about her, Ironwood. I'm sure that she just wants to see the world she had been birthed into. To see what the other Kingdoms have to offer." Goodwitch looked downcast, a saying which Ozpin said not too long ago running through her head. "This may be the last chance she may ever get."
Ironwood didn't respond. Silence overtook the area as he delved into deep thought. He knew what Goodwitch said was right, but he couldn't help but be overprotective. While the honor of being her father went to the scientist that created her, he couldn't help but see her as a daughter himself. It may have only been a year since her creation, but she had been such a breath of fresh air that Ironwood came to enjoy her company. Even if at the time she was a little problematic. Worry was a thing when she disappeared, as no one would know what happened to her.
It also wasn't just a parental worry that grabbed at his heart either. On a logical level, Penny Polendina, even though she was but a year old, was probably the most skilled of her generation. With no exaggeration, Ironwood was sure she could give Pyrrha Nikos a run for her money. If that was possible, imagine the years following, when Penny realized her true abilities and put them to use. She would be a formidable force against the creatures of Grimm, and the ones in control.
With a sigh, Ironwood turned to the sprawling city once more, a face full of calm. Maybe Glynda was right. In the coming years she may not experience this happiness again. She would just become what Ironwood initially wanted: a emotionless killing machine.
"You may be right." Ironwood admitted, swaying to her words. Glynda smiled as she turned to the city, content with her work today. A few minutes passed before Ironwood gave a nervous cough, his stomach growling. "U-Um. Ms. Goodwitch, I know it's a little more than late, but would you care to join m-"
A series of beeps caught his attention, as his watch flashed a bright red. Bringing up his left hand, he clicked a series of buttons. Eye's widening in disbelief, he reread the alert on his watch, confirming what he read was right. Without warning, Ironwood stomped off in a panic, heading for the nearest Atlas airship.
"Hey, Ironwood! What's wrong!?" Goodwitch asked, keeping up with his brisk pace. Ironwood glanced over, the face he held being enough to tell her nothing good had happened. Looking forward, Ironwood continued his speedy pace.
"Penny Polendina has activated a secret phase in her programming." Ironwood admitted, shocking Goodwitch. "While her Aura confirms that she does have a soul, at first I didn't want that. I wanted a killing machine, so I had a backup program installed to cut off all emotional attachment when introduced to extreme stress or sadness. She would become the ideal killing machine against the Grimm. So much so I'm not sure if I could win a fight against her."
Ironwood looked at the city through the corner of his eyes, a foreboding feeling of despair overtaking him. Why did he have that program implemented? Looking back, it was a horrible decision. To mess with a living beings emotions like that was only something a person of the night would do. To manipulate them to benefit others… it was truly vile.
"We call this program: Marionette."
Vale
Downtown District
Same Time
"Where are those useless, selfish chess pieces!?" Regulus said, stomping as he followed the path of destruction left by the fight. Blood and glass littered the street, as bodies laid here and there. From the looks of it, this could have been described as a war zone, but Regulus knew better. He had set fire to many towns and capitals in the past, so this was no different. Sure, to the average person, this would have been disturbing, but to him this was business. There was no need to cry over spilled milk. "Seriously! They could have at least left me a Grunt to harass! Purpura knows I'm not able to use most of my abilities right now!"
That's right, since Regulus only had one wife left, he wasn't able to use any of his abilities. Well, that technically wasn't true. If he so wished it, he could use all of his abilities, but it would have put strain on Purpura, who was his last pair of batteries before he needed to get more. If she died while outside of combat, he would be no better than Subaru. Actually, considering the circumstances, he would be worse off than Subaru. He had stolen abilities from Betelgeuse, which made him formidable to a point.
Looking around, he did have to appreciate how empty the streets were. Due to the battle that had taken place, civilians had decided to take shelter inside or flat out run away. Of course there were a few stragglers who decided to take this chance to loot the city. Honestly, it was disgusting how greedy people could be in times of need.
The daggers of Cult members ingrained in the sidewalk brought him to a stray alleyway. Slash marks littered the walls, indicating the battle had followed through here. Sneering, he couldn't help but take in the disgusting sight that it held. Trash and beer glasses littered the sides, even though a dumpster was right next to it. Daggers laid in the ground and walls, as Cult members bodies lied dead.
"Cult Members?" Regulus asked himself, ignoring his disgust for the horrible alley way, he walked in to evaluate the scene. Five bodies laid out in total, more being on the other side. At first glance, they were all Cult members, blood pouring out of their uniforms. However, as he looked over one of the bodies, he noticed that it had a smaller figure, and his face was revealed. A dagger hung from his stomach, unlike the other members. Looking him over, he noticed that it was a child. "Ah, they succeeded the mission. Congratulations Cult, your sacrifice was not in vain."
"R-R-Regulus?" A familiar voice spoke, her tone weak and desperate. Golden eyes widened as he turned to the many desecrated bodies in the alley, one of which was shaking furiously. Running over, he rolled the familiar cloaked figure over, her uniform wide open, revealing burn marks on multiple parts of her body. The smell of burnt flesh hit his nostrils, telling him that this was recent. "A-A-Ah… you're ok… I'm glad…"
"Purpura!?" Regulus called, unbelieving. This was his final wife, the one who stuck by him when all else betrayed him. For him, it didn't matter if she loved him or not; she stayed by his side when no one else would. Whoever did this was going to pay. "Don't move! I'll fly us to a nearby hospital, so just hold onto me!"
"N-n-No!" Purpura said, pushing away Regulus, even if it didn't have that much force. This was worrying for Regulus, as she never disagreed with him before. "I-i-I-I c-can tell m-my time has come. I-I was able to burn m-my wounds close, but I c-can feel my i-insides destroyed. T-there is no hope for me…"
"Shut up, Purpura!" Regulus commanded, his voice shaky. He had never felt this kind of emotion before: Sadness, anger, and denial. Grabbing her hand, he looked at her cloaked face. "You are going to live! I am going to make sure of that! Now just hold on while I fly us to th-"
"My Love." Purpura interrupted, a normally grave sin for those who did so. Regulus breath hitched, having never been interrupted by Purpura before. "I-I am dying, and no amount of healing will stop the wounds. My organs are a mess, and my heart is fading. I can feel the end creep up on my very soul." She tightened her grip on Regulus' hand, a smile on her face. "Use the last of my strength to finish our mission."
"W-What!?" Regulus asked, a lump forming in his throat. Why was he getting so choked up by someone replaceable like Purpura? "I-I… but-"
"No buts, Love." Purpura said, her smile widening, a softness that could only be granted when looking at a loved one. "We mustn't fail our mission. If we do so, then Sir Pride would have been right in assuming we shouldn't have split up. For now, focus on the task at hand."
Regulus stared, wet stains marking his face, disgracing his holy visage. Purpura smiled at this, he lilac eyes holding unshed tears that she refrained from letting out. She mustn't be weak now, not when they were almost there. Another step closer to Regulus' true desire. Swallowing her greed, she smiled once more to the man she swore her heart to.
"Go, my love, use me to your hearts content. This is my final gift to you, my heart. Find the girl, and kill her. Make as many wives as you need to, live forever, and find your true desire." Purpura smiled at him, the lump in her throat growing. "I'm happy you kidnapped me from my castle. I'm happy you treated me like I was no one special. I'm happy I came to know you, and you to I. I love you, my sweetest."
Regulus couldn't help the hiccup that accompanied that speech, as he finally realized that this was the end. The long journey between them Finally coming to an end. He could still see it, the first night with Purpura, him and Subaru chatting away about their lives over a bonfire. Laughter filling the air in a joyful moment of peace and solidarity. The smell of cooked meat as the Cult chugged and ate with glee. Regulus could tell those happy moments were finally coming to an end.
And it hurt so, so much.
"I love you too." Regulus said as he leaned down, kissing the second woman he ever truly fell for. Swallowing the lump in his throat, he left that tender kiss, placing her hand on her bare chest, a memory of peace flashing through his eyes once more. Closing them, he stood, and slowly floated away, in search for his prey.
Purpura laid there, feeling her heart beat faster as each second that passed. Her god known as Regulus floating away to the distance, to finish the mission that was assigned to them. It broke her heart, how he cried for her. While Purpura did enjoy the knowledge that her love would cry for her (who wouldn't), it also hurt to see such a pained expression. Regulus was the representation of Greed, he shouldn't be making such a sorrowful face.
"Maybe I'm being to greedy." Purpura thought to herself, her mind a jumbled mess of memories. Pride, her and Regulus walking along the path, chatting intimately. Those were truly good times; memories of when she wasn't the princess trapped in that castle. The day when Regulus came and kidnapped her was the day when she started to truly feel alive. It may have been caused by Stockholm syndrome, but she could care less. She was happy, right down to her spoiled bone.
With that, she closed her eyes, passing with glorious bliss.
Vale
Downtown District
Same Time
It hadn't taken too long to find his lovers murderer. Having the ability to fly and go through objects had its uses. Spotting the battle raging on below, he nose dived towards his opponent, not bothering to make any grand speech. One of his wives had died and he was seeking revenge.
Landing in the ground, he could see that all of the Cult members had been cut down. No matter where he looked, blood, bodies broken glass, and daggers littered the streets. If he was anybody else, this might have been a scene straight out of hell. For him? This was Sunday morning practice.
A lone girl sat in the middle of this, rocking back and forth with tears trailing her eyes. Blood covered her dress, soaking in crimson, making it reflect off the light that surrounded the area. Truly, a pitiful sight, but Regulus didn't share that sentiment. This was of her own doing. If she had stayed away from them, then maybe she might've lived. Maybe Purpura wouldn't have to die.
His eyes widening in anger, he wordlessly lifted his hand, ready to slash down. This was for himself. For the Cult members. This was for Purpura.
With that, he brought down his hand, the wind traveling in an instant, cutting her in half. The building behind her sustaining damage, as well as the ground near her. Blood sprayed everywhere, Regulus' revenge having been completed, leaving only a feeling of emptiness.
That was how it should have happened. Instead, only the ground and building sustained any significant damage. The girl however, had dodged, using her blades to latch onto some buildings to drag her through the air. Regulus' surprised gaze watched in fascination as she floated upwards, similar to his own ability. Except she was physical, and he was in a completely different dimension.
The song of blades against wind reached his ears, causing him to glance to the left. He only had a split second to see the object, the blade that cut through his body without any resistance. Looking to the right, he was surprised by how fast the blade had traveled, being much faster than in the Chapel. He knew, if he was physical, he would have been dead by now. Watching the girl, he knew how much of a threat this girl was to the Cult. If she were to go against Pride, Sloth, Gluttony, or even Wrath, they would be done for in an instant. She needed to be eliminated tonight.
With that in mind, |
Enjoy!It resulted in the “Patras” server being closed down – meaning that federal police had to halt operations tracking suspects and their vehicles. Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich subsequently said computer security would be made a top priority.
Der Spiegel magazine reported on Sunday that the Frankfurt officer concerned had put a Trojan program on his daughter’s computer to monitor her activities in the internet.
A friend of the young woman from the hacker scene discovered her father’s spyware – and hacked into his computer in order to get back at him. There he found work emails which enabled him to get into the federal police computer system, the magazine said.
A 23-year-old man from North Rhine Westphalia was arrested last summer, and admitted hacking the German customs authority computer systems. The anonymous “No Name Crew” hacking group had previously posted sensitive information from customs investigations on the internet.
A police spokesman on Sunday said he could not say whether the two cases were linked.
DPA/The Local/hcThese are not Release Notes! This is an informal list of changes which are considered important or interesting to the users of FreeBSD. As such, they may contain incomplete or wrong information. If you are a developer, please keep this page updated!
See also:
The intent is for this page to collect major, user-visible changes to FreeBSD while in the development cycle for FreeBSD 10, no matter if the changes are eventually MFC-ed to earlier versions.
What's new for FreeBSD 10
Overall system / architectural changes
(architecture as in "the overall design of the system", not in the sense of "ARM vs x64")
LDNS and Unbound will replace BIND
Status: LDNS and unbound imported into -CURRENT; DNSSEC support enabled in OpenSSH (requires LDNS); LDNS-based host(1) replacement and drill(1) imported; configuration generator and init script committed; default switched from BIND to unbound; BIND removed from base. Author: Dag-Erling Smørgrav Web: http://blog.des.no/2013/09/local-caching-resolver-in-freebsd-10/
Unbound and LDNS will be imported into the FreeBSD base system.
GCC is no longer built as part of the base system
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Many Web: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/255348
GCC is no longer a part of the default base system on architectures where CLANG is used instead. CLANG is used on i386 and AMD64.
Unmapped VMIO buffers
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Konstantin Belousov Web: http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/248508
The use of the unmapped buffers eliminate the need to perform TLB shootdown for mapping on the buffer creation and reuse, greatly reducing the amount of IPIs for shootdown on big-SMP machines and eliminating up to 25-30% of the system time on i/o intensive workloads.
Raspberry Pi support
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Oleksandr Tymoshenko Web: http://kernelnomicon.org/?p=275, http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/239922
With little work, FreeBSD is now able to run on the Raspberry Pi platform!
bhyve
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Neel Natu, Peter Grehan and others Web: bhyve
"bhyve" is the BSD Hypervisor, developed from scratch to offer a light-weight low-level HVM virtualization on FreeBSD. It supports virtio for IO paravirtualization.
Hyper-V Virtualization
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Microsoft, NetApp, and Citrix Web: HyperV
Kernel, hardware support & other low level improvements
Superpages for ARMv6/v7
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Zbigniew Bodek Web: ARMSuperpages
Superpages support provides improved performance and scalability by allowing TLB translations to dynamically cover large physical memory regions. All ARMv6 and ARMv7-based platforms can take advantage from this feature.
General ARM improvements
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Oleksandr Tymoshenko, Tim Kientzle, Warner Losh and others Web: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arm/2012-August/003757.html
FreeBSD/arm has been greatly improved, including support for ARMv6 and ARMv7, SMP and thread-local storage (TLS). Additionally support for some newer SoC like the MV78x60 and OMAP4 was added.
ARM EABI
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Andrew Turner Web: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arm/2013-July/006053.html
The default ABI on ARM is now the ARM EABI. This brings a number of improvements and allows future support for VFP and Thumb-2.
Atomic close-on-exec
Status: Committed to -CURRENT, partially MFC-ed Author: Jilles Tjoelker, Konstantin Belousov, Jukka A. Ukkonen Web: AtomicCloseOnExec
Add various APIs that set the close-on-exec flag atomically with allocating a file descriptor. These can be used to avoid undesirably passing file descriptors to child processes if threads or signal handlers call fork and exec. Some software starts to depend on these features.
There is no atomic close-on-exec support for various interfaces not specified by POSIX.
Improved AES-NI support
Support for AES-NI instruction and intrinsics has been added to gcc. The aesni module has been improved to use pipelining when possible. This results in a significant speed up for AES-XTS and AES-CBC decrypt.
Support for AMD GPUs kernel-modesetting
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Jean-Sébastien Pédron Web: AMD_GPU
It will allow the use of newer xf86-video-ati drivers and AMD GPUs.
Support for the RDRAND random number generator
Status: Committed to -CURRENT, MFC-ed to 9-stable Author: Konstantin Belousov Web: http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/240135
RDRAND is the new Intel's CPU instruction for accessing its hardware random number generator, also known as the code-name Bull Mountain. It is present in Ivy Bridge and newer CPUs.
Virtio
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Bryan Venteicher, Peter Grehan and others Web: http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/227652
"virtio" is the name for the paravirtualization interface developed for the Linux KVM, but since adopted to other virtual machine hypervisors (with the notable exception of Xen). This work brings in a BSD-licensed clean-room implementation of the virtio kernel drivers for disk (block and SCSI) IO, network IO, PCI and memory ballooning. Tested with on Qemu/KVM, VirtualBox, and bhyve.
Xen PVHVM support in GENERIC kernel
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Roger Pau Monné, Justin Gibbs, and others Web: http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/255744
Support for Xen PVHVM virtualization is now part of the GENERIC kernel.
FreeBSD/EC2 support with release binaries
Status: Available Author: Colin Percival Web: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/
FreeBSD images are now available for EC2 using exclusively "straight-off-the-ISO" binaries, allowing freebsd-update(8) to be used on EC2 images. A mechanism is now available for launch-time autoconfiguration of instances, including package installation, via EC2 user-data.
Networking improvements
ipfw support for setting/matching DSCP
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Alexander V. Chernikov Web: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ipfw/2013-March/005318.html, http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/248552
Add ipfw support for setting/matching DiffServ codepoints (DSCP) in IP header (former TOS field). Setting DSCP support works for both IPv4 and IPv6 packets. DSCP can be specified by name (AFxy, CSx, BE, EF), by value (0..63) or via tablearg. Matching DSCP accepts several classes at once (af11,af22,be).
SMP-friendly pf firewall
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Gleb Smirnoff Web: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-pf/2012-June/006643.html, http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-pf/2012-June/006662.html, http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/240233
The pf firewall, originally from OpenBSD, got upgraded to support fine-grain locking and better utilization on multi-cpu machines, which allows it to perform significantly faster.
CARP rewrite
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Gleb Smirnoff Web: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-head/2011-December/032303.html
NetMap
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Luigi Rizzo Web: http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/, http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/227614
NetMap is a framework for high-performance direct-to-hardware packet IO, offering low latency and high PPS rates to userland applications while bypassing any kernel-side packet processing. With NetMap, it is trivially possible to fully saturate a 10 Gbps network interface with minimal packet sizes.
Up to 65536 routing tables
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Julian Elischer Web: http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/250700
Until now FreeBSD only supported up to 16 different routing tables. With this changes up to 65536 are supported.
Wireless Improvements
This includes both improvements and new features for the wireless stack (net80211) and the individual drivers.
For more information, please visit WiFi. Development/debugging discussions occur in public on the freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org mailing list.
Concurrency/SMP work
net80211 has had issues on preemptive, multi-core CPUs. A lot of these race conditions have been found and fixed in -HEAD. The important fixes have been backported to 9.x.
Improved 802.11n stack support
The net80211 stack has had numerous 802.11n improvements, including (but not limited to) better handling of 802.11n BAR TX frames and 802.11n options. It also correctly supports 1, 2 and 3 stream 802.11n configurations. 802.11n is now supported in IBSS (adhoc) mode for NICs which support this (notably Atheros.) TDMA support also now includes 802.11n rate awareness but doesn't currently include aggregation - make sure aggregation is disabled when using 802.11n hardware with TDMA.
802.11s mesh support
The 802.11s support is being continuously updated to the release specification rather than earlier draft specifications. Although this doesn't yet support 802.11n, the aim is to be specification compliant and complete by 10.0-RELEASE.
Atheros PCI/PCIe 802.11n support
Status: Committed to -HEAD Author: Adrian Chadd Web: dev/ath(4)
The Atheros driver, HAL and rate control code has undergone some significant development work to support 802.11n.
This includes:
Fixing many SMP/concurrency races;
Teaching the HAL about 802.11n rates;
Teaching the ath_rate_sample rate control module about 802.11n, as well as the required rate control API changes;
Implementing 802.11n TX aggregation, including software retransmissions, BAR handling and other required features;
Implementing 802.11 PS-POLL and legacy power save modes, for both 802.11n and pre-802.11n;
Support for AR9380 and later NICs, including 3-stream rates.
Storage subsystems' improvements
New iSCSI stack
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Edward Tomasz Napierała Web: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.freebsd.current/152279, Native iSCSI target
The new iSCSI stack is kernel-mode and focused on reliability and interoperability.
ZFS NOP-write optimization
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Martin Matuska, Illumos project Web: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=243524, http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.os.illumos.zfs/200
The zio nop-write improvement from Illumos was imported into -CURRENT. To reduce I/O, nop-write skips overwriting data if the checksum (cryptographically secure) of new data matches the checksum of existing data. It also saves space if snapshots are in use.
It currently works only on datasets with enabled compression, disabled deduplication and sha256 checksums.
Online growfs(8) for r/w-mounted UFS filesystems
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Edward Tomasz Napierala Web: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/243246
UFS filesystems can now be enlarged with growfs(8) while mounted read-write. This is especially useful for virtual machines, allowing the addition of more harddrive space without interruption of service.
ZFS TRIM support
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Pawel Jakub Dawidek Web: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2012-September/036777.html, http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/240868
As a world's first, FreeBSD now has TRIM support in ZFS! UFS has already had TRIM support for some time.
LZ4 compression support in ZFS
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Xin LI Web: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/246586
LZ4 is a new, very fast compression algorithm (http://code.google.com/p/lz4/) which improves ZFS compression/decompression performance by up to 50%/80% compared to the default LZJB (http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/LZ4+Compression).
FUSE support in the base system
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Attilio Rao, George Neville-Neil, Csaba Henk, ilya and several others Web: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=241519
A state of the art FUSE implementation is now part of the FreeBSD base system. It allows the use of nearly all fusefs file systems under FreeBSD without installing the unstable "fusefs-kmod" kernel module from ports. Most notable is the "ntfs-3g" implementation of Windows NTFS.
http://fuse.sourceforge.net/ FUSE is the userland file system API developed for Linux. The FreeBSD port (including the clean-room BSD-licenced reimplementation of the kernel module) was created during 2 summer of code mandates and being revived by gnn recently. The functionality in this commit matches the content of fusefs-kmod port, which doesn't need to be installed anymore for -CURRENT setups.
Security
Desktop-related changes
USB Audio 2.0
Status: Committed to -CURRENT Author: Hans Petter Selasky Web: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=240609
USB Audio support was upgraded to support version 2.0. New devices should support higher bandwidth, increased sampling frequency and wider dynamic range.
Other changes
Superpages are available on ARMv6 (ARMSuperpages)
Maximum username (login) length increased to 32 characters: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=243023
vmxnet3 VMWare paravirtualized network driver committed: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/254738
Efficienty improvements in network-related kernel data structures: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=254780
Improvements in parallel GEOM processing, using direct dispatch in simple cases: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/254787
Efficiency improvements in the virtual memory system: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=254544, http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=254025
CAIA Delay-Gradient (CDG) congestion control algorithm for TCP: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/252504
Since the ports tree has also been converted to Subversion from CVS, the cvs program has been removed from the base system (it is still available in the ports): http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/251794. Instead, svnlite (http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/251886) and svnup (http://www.freshports.org/net/svnup) are available.
ZFS now has L2ARC compression (http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/L2ARC+Compression): http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=251478
Newly created UFS file systems will have faster fsck operation: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=248623
GEOM_LABEL creates labels based on disk ID strings: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/249508
Faster booting by using a better read cache: http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/241053
64-bit ino_t, allowing file systems with a really huge number of files: http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/241011
Shared memory pages between kernel&userland for faster interaction: http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/237433
Clang 3 will be the default compiler for FreeBSD 10: http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/228379, http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2012-May/067486.html
New timecounter infrastructure: RADclock, http://www.synclab.org/radclock/
ZFS fault monitoring and management daemon, http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/222836
NVM Express drivers: nvme(4) and nvd(4), http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/240616
unbound (validating, recursive, and caching DNS resolver) included?, http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/249140
counter(9) API that implements fast and raceless counters, provided (but not limited to) for gathering of statistical data: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/249268, http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/2013-April/014204.html
The ip, tcp and udp DTrace providers are now available in FreeBSD: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=254889
A variant of Larry Wall's patch(1) from the other BSDs has replaced the older GNU patch.
Maximum physical memory bumped to 4TB on amd64 platforms, http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=254466
Quarterly status reports
CategoryHistoricalI’ve always had a love for British faire and tradition. Some 18 years ago, I traveled across the pond for a wonderful stay in London and have been craving a second visit since then. In order to tame my longing for what would be a very expensive trip, I’ve embraced aspects of the culture and made them a regular part of my daily life. This includes becoming a bit of a connoisseur of fresh tea. It only made sense then to visit the Garden View Tea Room at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa for an experience that was practically perfect in every way.
The Garden View Tea Room is located on the first floor of the resort. The front portion of the room overlooks the impressive hotel lobby while the other half offers a spectacular view of the well-manicured grounds and gardens. It’s the perfect spot to take a break from the typically hectic nature of a Walt Disney World vacation whether alone, with friends, or even as a mother/daughter date.
Upon approaching the hostess stand, you’ll notice a new feature right away: text message notification service. This is a new system that Disney is experimenting with and, during my visit, I found it to be fantastic. A guest provides his or her cell phone number and receives a text once the table is ready. This allowed me more time to enjoy the lobby of the resort without being tied down to one location. Those having tea in the later afternoon – around 3 PM or so – will especially enjoy this perk when the live band or piano player is serenading guests in the lobby.
After being seated, a friend and I were presented with a menu featuring a wide assortment of offerings. The menu is broken down into “packages” which feature multiple courses of pastries, fruit, cheeses, sandwiches, and desserts; guests choose a pot of tea each from a grand selection of aromatic herbal and exotic teas.
We selected the Derbyshire Tea experience for our visit which featured not only tea but also a glass of champagne. I found it difficult to choose from all of the wonderful teas listed on the menu. Ultimately, we both shared the Osmanthus Green and Apple & Elderflower selections. Both were fabulous, but the Osmanthus was absolutely incredible. It was nutty, but sweetened by flavors of apricots and peaches. The Apple & Elderflower was crisp and refreshing as well.
The first course included a crisp onion tartlet made with sweet caramelized onions, chilled berries, an assortment of cheeses, several types of finger sandwiches: curry chicken salad, cucumber and watercress, open-faced golden beet, and more. All were freshly prepared and absolutely delicious. I appreciated the variety of items and, even for a picky eater like me, enjoyed every bite except one – the beet sandwich which I found to be overly sour and just not to my liking.
After enjoying these delicate, yet hearty treats, we then met our next dish, a jam tart and buttery scone. Both were accompanied by a trio of toppings; fresh marmalade, creamy lemon curd, and luscious clotted cream made for a charming second course. The jam tart was sweet, but not overpowering and the scone was perfectly prepared.
The final course was an assortment of pastries to enjoy while sipping the remainder of our tea. Eclairs, puff pastry swans filled with cream, and chocolate-covered strawberries were the stars of this course. Despite being filled to the gills with the other courses, the relaxed nature of this dining experience allowed a reprieve before diving into these desserts. They were quite good!
Overall, this was an amazing way to spend a sunny afternoon at the Grand Floridian. The entire experience took close to two hours from start to finish due to the leisurely, and very much appreciated, pace. I would highly recommend it for those looking to take a break from the parks, celebrating anniversaries or birthdays, or veteran visitors to the World looking for something new to do. There is also a special tea option for younger guests; note though that this is a very quiet and serene atmosphere, so proper etiquette is necessary (think tea with Mary Poppins).
Tea is served 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM – Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, and 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM – Tuesday and Thursday. A reservation is highly recommended as the tea room itself is relatively small in comparison to most eateries at the Grand Floridian.
About The Author:
Born and raised in New Jersey, Nicole is an avid Disney fan and frequents both Walt Disney World and Disneyland several times each year. Interests include Walt Disney Imagineering, merchandise, dining, backstage tours, and more. You can also find her on The DIS Unplugged forum on DISBoards.com. Be sure to check out Nicole’s other articles here on the DIS Blog and follow her on Twitter @DISNikkiBell for regular updates about all things Disney!
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N. ManciniTop GOP recruit Vaughn Ward loses in Idaho primary
Top national GOP recruit Vaughn Ward on Tuesday lost his primary in Idaho after a series of missteps by his campaign, throwing the Republican Party's chances in doubt against top-targeted Rep. Walt Minnick (D-Idaho). Ward was trailing state Rep. Raul Labrador (R) 48 to 39 percent, with 90 percent of precincts reporting. The Associated Press called the race for Labrador early Wednesday. Ward becomes the latest establishment favorite to go down in defeat, although his loss will more likely be chalked up to his campaign's myriad gaffes. He was one of the first 10 candidates named to the final stage of the National Republican Congressional Committee's (NRCC) Young Guns program for its top 2010 hopefuls this cycle. Over the past month, however, his campaign has fallen victim to multiple charges of plagiarism, revelations that he didn't vote in the 2008 presidential election and a slip-up in which he said (in front of his Puerto Rican-born opponent) that Puerto Rico is a country (hint: it's not). That opponent, Labrador, moves on to the general election and leaves national Republicans to evaluate where the race fits in their list of priorities this November. Labrador, an immigration attorney, is something of a blank slate to Washington. He joined the NRCC's Young Guns program but has yet to reach the goals required to be named to the first stage of the program. Given the right candidate, the freshman Minnick's district should be at the top of the GOP's target list. It went for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) with 62 percent of the vote in 2008, but former Rep. Bill Sali (R-Idaho) severely underperformed the top of the GOP ticket, losing narrowly to Minnick. Sali backed Labrador, while Ward was backed by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin (R). Minnick has proven a savvy congressman, voting conservative on almost all major pieces of legislation and building a sizeable war chest for 2010. Republicans can't rely on merely a good environment to take him out. In other races in Idaho on Tuesday, Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter (R) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R) both overcame nominal primary opposition, as did Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), who faced a reasonably well-funded opponent and was a Troubled Asset Relief Program (a.k.a. bailout) supporter. All will be heavy favorites in the general election. -- Aaron Blake
By The Fix | May 26, 2010; 2:55 AM ET
Categories: House
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The comments to this entry are closed.Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
If I were one of the big corporate donors who bankrolled the Republican tide that carried into office more than 50 new Republicans in the House, I would be wary of what you just bought.
For no matter your view of President Obama, he effectively saved capitalism. And for that, he paid a terrible political price.
Suppose you had $100,000 to invest on the day Barack Obama was inaugurated. Why bet on a liberal Democrat? Here’s why: the presidency of George W. Bush produced the worst stock market decline of any president in history. The net worth of American households collapsed as Bush slipped away. And if you needed a loan to buy a house or stay in business, private sector borrowing was dead when he handed over power.
As of election day, Nov. 2, 2010, your $100,000 was worth about $177,000 if invested strictly in the NASDAQ average for the entirety of the Obama administration, and $148,000 if bet on the Standard & Poors 500 major companies. This works out to returns of 77 percent and 48 percent.
But markets, though forward-looking, are not considered accurate measurements of the economy, and the Great Recession skewed the Bush numbers. O.K. How about looking at the big financial institutions that keep the motors of capitalism running — banks and auto companies?
The banking system was resuscitated by $700 billion in bailouts started by Bush (a fact unknown by a majority of Americans), and finished by Obama, with help from the Federal Reserve. It worked. The government is expected to break even on a risky bet to stabilize the global free market system. Had Obama followed the populist instincts of many in his party, the underpinnings of big capitalism could have collapsed. He did this without nationalizing banks, as other Democrats had urged.
Saving the American auto industry, which has been a huge drag on Obama’s political capital, is a monumental achievement that few appreciate, unless you live in Michigan. After getting their taxpayer lifeline from Obama, both General Motors and Chrysler are now making money by making cars. New plants are even scheduled to open. More than 1 million jobs would have disappeared had the domestic auto sector been liquidated.
“An apology is due Barack Obama,” wrote The Economist, which had opposed the $86 billion auto bailout. As for Government Motors: after emerging from bankruptcy, it will go public with a new stock offering in just a few weeks, and the United States government, with its 60 percent share of common stock, stands to make a profit. Yes, an industry was saved, and the government will probably make money on the deal — one of |
country is doomed."
The defense was granted a continuance and Barrett will remain in jail. Below are the details of his upcoming court appearances.
- On April 28, 2014, he faces charges of conspiracy to make publically available restricted personal information of an employee of the United States, retaliation against a federal law enforcement officer, and making internet threats.
- On May 19, 2014, he faces charges of trafficking in stolen authentication features, aggravated identity theft and access device fraud. As part of a separate indictment included in this trial, he faces two charges of obstruction: concealment of evidence and corruptly concealing evidence
Barrett Brown currently faces up to 105 years in prison.
More on Barrett Brown:
Why Is Barrett Brown Facing 100 Years in Prison?
We Spoke to Barrett Brown from Prison
Reading 'Born Again' in Jail
@dellcamThese Lionesses Have Grown Manes And Are Now Acting Like Males
These lionesses have grown manes and are now acting like males in what is turning out to be one of the most surprising phenomena in the animal kingdom. These lionesses from Botswana have grown manes and are showing more and more masculine traits. The 5 lionesses with manes from a pride in Mombo have even developed deeper voices, similar to the ones of lions.
A lion’s mane is considered a symbol of virility and strength and the bigger the mane, the bigger the chances of finding a suitable partner during mating season. The mane also works as a mechanism to scare of other animals, making the lion appear to be much bigger in size.
Mombo’s maned lioness with male. huge size difference! Photo: Jamie Thom http://t.co/12s5hXexga. @WeAreWilderness pic.twitter.com/n1g5rQkF5o
— Simon Dures (@SimonDures) May 16, 2014
Luke Hunter, President of Big Cat Protection Agency Panthera, explains why these 5 lionesses from Botswana have grown manes:
The genetic contribution of the sperm – which determines the sex of the fetus in most mammals – was probably aberrant, giving rise to a female with some male characteristics
Geoffrey D. Gilfillan, researcher at the University of Sussex, has been observing the group of lions in Botswana’s Mermi Game Reserve, their present habitat. Out of the 5 felines, Geoffrey D. Gilfillan has been studying one of them in particular. He named her SaF05 and for the past two years this lioness is the one that caught his attention the most.
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.
Au Botswana, des scientifiques observent cinq… de Gentside
A similar situation occurred at the National Zoological Gardens of South Africa in 2011 when Emma, a lioness, started growing a mane. After several tests were carried out, it was discovered that the feline had ovary problems which triggered a rise in her testosterone levels. Her ovaries were removed and her behavior returned to normal and she had no problem returning to her pride.
(Source)Bucke (1837-1902), an interesting character, rugged adventurer, medical doctor, and "alienist" (psychiatrist) helped set up an "insane asylum" in Canada with quite progressive "treatment" for its time. Unity of the universe
"alienist" study, or giving us a fairly ordinary _étudiant_ and aspirant in letters. A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 To the Close of the 19th Century
The weapons on the wall had been used in actual homicides and were provided by Chicago policemen; the skulls by an alienist at a nearby lunatic asylum, the blankets by a member who had acquired it while covering a battle between the army and the Sioux. Hometown News: The Ballad of Ray and Rose
He engages Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, the noted alienist, to solve the murder – off the record, of course. 12. The Alienist by Caleb Carr
Stevie Taggert, former child of the streets and current employee of the noted alienist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, is approached by private detective Sara Howard. 4. The Angel of Darkness by Caleb Carr
He also sends his friend Dr. Lefebre, an observant alienist, to check on the emotional well being of the distraught Lucy whose aunts insist she is deranged. A Mortal Curiosity-Ann Granger « The Merry Genre Go Round Reviews
The ancient alienist did not know the doctor as I did: Though by outward sign Warthrop appeared completely calm and collected, within him a fire burned, as hot as the sun, and only by the supreme effort of his inestimable will was the doctor able to contain it. The Monstrumologist
“So you have taken up his odd profession,” ventured the alienist. The Monstrumologist
The doctor handed her his card and twenty dollars in gold, and presently we were escorted to the little parlor with its odiferous atmosphere and tired trappings, where the ancient alienist huddled in his dressing gown beneath a threadbare blanket, shivering despite the robust fire dancing in the hearth. The MonstrumologistA gay West Hollywood television editor has founded a local chapter of the national LGBT gun rights organization Pink Pistols in response to the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Florida.
Jonathan Fischer, 47, told the Los Angeles Times that he started the chapter in the days after 49 people were fatally shot at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando because he wanted to do something to make his community safer.
“If someone was to try and break into my home, and especially if someone were armed, I don’t want to fight back with a kitchen knife,” Fischer told the paper Friday. “And I don’t think that’s extremist or crazy.”
Fischer showed up a shooting range last month for a defensive handgun class in what he said was his “gay-K-47” tee shirt, the Times reported.
He was with gun owner Elizabeth Southern, a bisexual 25-year-old, who joined the West Hollywood Pink Pistols this summer.
“I had an unfortunate experience and it scared me to the point where I felt like I needed to defend myself and my family,” she told the paper on video.
Pink Pistols has dozens of chapters nationwide but not everyone in the gay community has been supportive.
Pink Pistols national spokeswoman Gwendolyn Patton told the paper that the broader LGBT community’s response to her organization has been mostly negative.
She said some LGBT centers have even banned the Pink Pistols from using their facilities.
Click here for more from The Los Angeles Times.They are two local football clubs that are trying to rejoin the professional S-League ranks, but that dream is now more distant with the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) set to wind down their money-spinning jackpot rooms.
Gombak United and Tanjong Pagar United are two of seven clubs that have been told by the ministry to cease their jackpot operations by the end of next April. There are 82 clubs with fruit machines, and a fifth of them have failed to meet MHA's revised guidelines on such facilities announced in July.
For Gombak chairman John Yap, the loss of the jackpot licence could mean the end of the Bulls' bid to play S-League football again. The club has sat out the professional competition since 2013.
Mr Yap, whose club operates 22 machines at the Kitchener Road premises, said: "If the authorities stick to their decision, we will lose our biggest revenue stream, and it will be impossible for us to return to football.
"All the hard work over the last few years is not recognised.
"We suffered by putting in our own money to keep the club afloat while we were in the league. We suffered to revise our business model to pay back our football-related debts. We suffered when we got kicked out of our premises last year. We suffered going through stringent audits, and we suffered to put things together again.
"Never mind that our efforts weren't appreciated, but we are misunderstood."
In July, MHA mandated that a club will be allowed to operate jackpot rooms only if it provides at least two other recreational facilities such as karaoke, a gym or swimming pool, to align clubhouses closer to their main purpose of offering recreational and social activities.
ADVERSE EFFECT The league authorities have already decided the S-League is not commercially viable. And taking this move has taken out a big component of revenue that can help the football landscape. I think there should be some leniency exercised. GOMBAK UNITED CHAIRMAN JOHN YAP
Membership rules will also be strongly regulated, with entry to the jackpot rooms restricted to individuals aged 21 and above who hold a membership of at least one year.
Members are also not allowed to take guests into the jackpot rooms, whose operating hours will be between 10am and 11pm.
The quota of jackpot machines, which was 1,900 in 82 clubs at the time of the announcement, will also be reduced over the next two years.
Clubs that do not meet the criteria will have to cease their jackpot operations by April 30 next year.
The new regulations were rolled out to protect people from the dangers of gambling.
Tanjong Pagar United chairman Edward Liu, who was informed of MHA's decision on Oct 27, had targeted 2018 as the season for the Jaguars to make their S-League return after sitting out since 2015.
He has since written to both MHA and the Football Association of Singapore to appeal against the decision. "It will be very, very difficult to come back if the authorities deem that we do not meet these enhanced requirements," he said.
"Tanjong Pagar are always committed to playing football. We have fielded a team in the Women's Premier League. We train 40 kids from the Tanglin School in our outreach programme, and we are actively coaching the grassroots in our CDC (community development council). And we were one of the pioneer members of the S-League (in 1996)."
Related Story Stricter rules for jackpot machines: Football clubs worry as jackpot revenue looks set to shrink
Mr Liu said that the club needed at least $1 million a year "to field a decent team" in the S-League. Local professional clubs previously received $800,000 in subsidies from the Tote Board. Mr Liu said his club has 18 jackpot machines which generate another $250,000 to $300,000 annually.
It is understood that another sit-out S-League club, Woodlands Wellington, has also ceased jackpot operations in Prinsep Street, although the reasons are unknown. The club could not be reached for comment.
Mr Yap added that the tough new rules will have an adverse effect on the struggling S-League.
He lamented: "There have been big calls to restructure the league, and clubs like us are ready to answer the call to help what is a depleted football landscape.
"The league authorities have already decided the S-League is not commercially viable. And taking this move has taken out a big component of revenue that can help the football landscape. I think there should be some leniency exercised."
• Additional reporting by Shamir OsmanThe Detroit Tigers have backed themselves into an awkward place. Sitting on a 46-46 record, the Tigers are 9 1/2 games behind in an AL Central division that they have owned for the past four seasons. They are four games out of the second AL wild card spot, which seems like a small miracle given the state of their pitching staff. With Dave Dombrowski at the helm and an ever-impatient Mike Ilitch watching from above, common sense would dictate that the Tigers will be aggressively looking to improve their roster before the MLB non-waiver trade deadline.
This may not be the case, though. On Monday evening, Bob Nightengale of the USA Today reported that the Tigers "are going to surrender and be sellers" this July. With David Price and Yoenis Cespedes nearing free agency, the Tigers could look to move both players to a contender desperate to improve their roster. Recent trade deadline deals have netted a prosperous return for selling teams, and the Tigers could bolster a barren farm system in just a few short days. These moves, combined with wrapping Miguel Cabrera and Victor Martinez in bubble wrap during the winter, could help the Tigers come back stronger in 2016.
This may not be the case, though. A source close to the Tigers said that they are "all in" and will be looking to buy at the trade deadline. With the top-end talent up and down their roster, the Tigers could be one or two savvy moves away from storming back into the playoff hunt. There are only two teams between them and the current wild card holders, both of whom are outperforming preseason expectations. If the Tigers can find a way into the playoffs, their biggest weaknesses -- the back of the rotation and middle relief -- can be marginalized if their stars come through.
Contention may not be the only motivating factor behind a trade deadline buy. The Tigers have had one of the highest payrolls in baseball for several years, and their excellent attendance numbers have helped support the payroll. However, with attendance slipping this season as the team falls into a malaise, the Tigers brass could be discouraged to sell, as it may have an even greater negative impact on the number of fans coming to the ballpark. Television ratings, which have stayed high thus far, will also play a role.
What should the Tigers do? The fanbase seems to be divided down the middle, though the respective size of the "buy" and "sell" camps seems to be directly related to whether the Tigers won or lost their last game. This morning? Sure, buy! Go all in! If Shane Greene gives up six runs tonight? Sell everything! We are all irrational beings, and wasting pages of words on a bunch of grown men playing a game in funny costumes.
Dave Dombrowski is known for holding his cards close to his vest during trade season, so anyone saying they know for sure what the Tigers are doing is talking out of an orifice other than their mouth. They could buy, they could sell, or they could make us all angry and do nothing. Such is life during trade rumor season, and we're all just along for the ride.Welcome To BERNANKES World!
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kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net BACKGROUND : Bernanke Leaves Door Open for Cyprus Style Confiscation of Savings http://intellihub.com/2013/03/26/bernanke-leaves-door-open-for-cyprus-style-confiscation-of-savings/
US Citizens Defined as property of the government http://www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/us-citizens-defined-as-property-of-the-government/39070/THE CAVE PAINTERS
Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists
By Gregory Curtis
Knopf. 278 pp. $25
The work of other artists didn't often reduce Pablo Picasso to a state of utter humility, but that's exactly what happened just after World War II, when he was mucking about in a cave in southwestern France. This wasn't just any cave, however -- its walls were festooned with striking pictures of horses and bulls that date from the Ice Age, all rendered with exquisite sophistication and symbolic force. Upon exiting the cave, an awed Picasso declared, "We have learned nothing in twelve thousand years."
He wasn't kidding. The art in this cave -- called Lascaux, the Sistine Chapel of cave art -- and in many others that dot parts of France and Spain deservedly ranks with the greatest masterworks of Western art. Yet these paintings have provoked as much vexed speculation as they have wonder and awe: What was their purpose? Why are there so many pictures of animals? The painters had many colors at their disposal, but why do black and red dominate? Why are there no pictures of sky, moon or trees? What are the strange geometric signs found in many of the caves? Why are there few images of people? Just what does it all mean? Such questions have kept generations of scholars and archaeologists busy trying to find a definitive if ever elusive explanation.
In The Cave Painters, journalist Gregory Curtis provides a fine, lucid introduction to the debates -- there are plenty of intellectual imbroglios and, sorry for the pun, a few off-the-wall theories -- plus a succinct guide to the aesthetics of the paintings themselves.
To understand cave art, we must first radically adjust how exactly we define "primitive" and then throw conventional notions of artistic progress out the window. The glories of ancient Rome and Greece were but a blip compared to the great age of cave painting, which began about 32,000 years ago and lasted for roughly 20,000 years. (Considering the time frame itself requires a staggering mental leap.) The incredibly skilled cave painters followed a very specific set of conventions, worked collectively and "chose to paint animals that had a special place in their culture." As Curtis notes, the oldest paintings "have all the refinement, subtlety, and power that great art has had ever since."
For centuries, cave art was ignored or dismissed as a clever prank. But in 1879, a Spanish scholar named Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola had a eureka moment when he was poking around in a cave called Altamira in Spain. He was overwhelmed by paintings of life-size bison on the cave's ceiling; this was, writes Curtis, "the first time we know of that an artist from the distant Stone Age touched the soul of a modern person." When Sautuola tried to publicize his findings, which linked the art to discoveries of prehistoric tools and carvings found on horns and other hard surfaces, archaeologists turned on him, mocking his conclusions with a savage fury. The great debate was on, and the theories and counter theories haven't stopped since. Curtis deftly leads us on a tour of contending interpretations, although some of the terms can be rather arcane.
Not everyone was put off by Sautuola's daring assertions. Indeed, one of his fiercest critics, Émile Cartailhac, France's leading prehistorian, eventually came around after more and more cave art was discovered in the 1890s. Teaming up with Henri Breuil, a young priest and student of cave art, he published the ur-text of cave painting, La Caverne d'Altamira à Santillane, in 1906. Illustrated with Breuil's stunning reproductions (works of art in their own right), their utilitarian arguments turned on analogies to modern Stone Age tribes -- like Australia's Aborigines -- who used similar art, such as rock painting, as a kind of "hunting magic." For example, just as Australian tribes "used abstract signs in their art as symbols of real objects," the geometric figures in Altamira "are also some images of some device, of a weapon."
This hunting magic thesis hardly settled anything. In fact, the discovery of Lascaux in 1940, with its magnificent Hall of Bulls, completely upset hunting-oriented interpretations. For one thing, reindeer were the primary source of food for the people who lived around Lascaux, yet no paintings of reindeer were found in the cave.
Around the same time, another of Curtis's obsessive scholars, a Frenchman named Max Raphael, went on the attack. The ethnographic approach of Breuil and Cartailhac was off the mark, Raphael charged; we must take an art historical approach and look at the cave paintings in terms of pictorial space. In Altamira, for example, what seemed a bunch of random figures was actually a single composition precisely grouped around a central axis. What's more, to call cave art "primitive" was plain ridiculous. The culture of the Paleolithic era, "in the throes of a continuous process of transformation," was every bit as dynamic as ancient Greece or Rome, claimed Raphael, and this is reflected in the cave art.
Other scholars have resorted to statistical analysis, as well as linking the different animals and signs to male and female principles, to interpret the paintings. Still, consensus remains elusive. The latest uproar, subject of Curtis's last and perhaps most fascinating chapter, turns on whether cave art was the creation of tribal shamans "trying to reproduce the visions they saw while in a magic trance," an argument that has provoked heated rebuttals. One critic snorted, "If we believe that the Paleolithic art in the caves is based on the trance, we should pack our bags and go home." With more provocative theories surely on the way, it is certain we will be arguing about these glorious creations for many years to come. ·
Matthew Price is a critic and freelance journalist living in Brooklyn.Is there nothing this man won't do to save his skin? Are there no words he will shrink from saying, no reputation he won't sully, no barrier he won't cross?
Just when it looked as if he couldn't sink any lower, Mayor Rob Ford did something truly vile. In an interview with his new publicity agent, Conrad Black, broadcast on Monday night, he hinted that he thought a Toronto Star reporter might be a pedophile.
Mr. Black, the former press baron, asked him to name the most "offensive events – abrasions – that have been perpetrated on you or your family by the media?"
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"Well," replied Mr. Ford, "I guess the worst one was Daniel Dale in my backyard taking pictures. I have little kids. When a guy's taking pictures of little kids" – and here Mr. Ford shook his head and gave a small, skeptical laugh – "I don't want to say that word but you start thinking, 'What's this guy all about?'"
The insinuation was clear. Watch the interview online, if you can stomach it. There is no doubt what he is getting at. Asked on Tuesday afternoon if he would apologize to Mr. Dale, as Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly urged him to do, a defiant Mr. Ford said that "I stand by my words" and "if you watch the interview you'll know what I said." To leave such a slur hanging is unconscionable, if such a word can be applied to a man such as Mr. Ford.
Perhaps actionable, too. Mr. Dale's editors are getting their libel and slander lawyers on the case. "Mr. Ford calling reporter Daniel Dale a pedophile tells you all you need to know about our mayor's brain," said Star Editor Michael Cooke. "So sad for all of us."
Mr. Dale is a respected colleague of mine at the City Hall media gallery and one of the sharpest reporters in town. He was only doing his job when he went to a property next to Mr. Ford's house in Etobicoke in May 2012. The mayor was trying to buy the small parcel of land from the conservation authority, an unusual move that failed in the end. Mr. Dale was checking it out, as any responsible reporter would. The mayor dashed out of his house and confronted him – Mr Dale says with a cocked fist. Mr. Dale fled.
Now he finds himself confronted with … this. When Mr. Ford said what he said on a widely anticipated, much-watched program, he must have known the smear would travel far and wide. Vision TV, which broadcast it, and The Zoomer, the show which produced it, should have known, too. The show was taped on Friday. Editors, if there were any, had all weekend to look it over. Did they fail to understand what Mr. Ford had said, or understand perfectly and decide to broadcast it regardless?
Either way, they have a lot to answer for. So does Mr. Black, who let the remark pass unchallenged, along with just about everything else that came out of the mayor's mouth. He not only lobbed softball after softball at Mr. Ford, whom he has defended in his newspaper column, he ran around behind the plate and started swinging at those fat pitches himself.
His interview, if you can apply that word to this chortling love feast, was peppered with friendly interventions like "I am leading the witness here" and "if you don't mind me saying so and I'd think you'd say so yourself…." There was no need for Mr. Ford to make his case. His Lordship was happy to make it on the mayor's behalf, only with bigger words.
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In classic Conradese, he assailed "elements in the media" for "whipping up a lot of confected sanctimony" and "tearing this building" – that is, City Hall – "apart looking for things to criticize you for."
But, in the end, Ford outdid Lord with his ugly attack on Mr. Dale. The mayor said he doesn't like it when his critics "get personal," presumably about his drug use, deceptions and other misbehaviour. He showed no such scruples when he got personal about Mr. Dale and jeopardized a young man's good name.
Watching him on TV, it was hard not to think of the famous words of lawyer Joseph Welch when he confronted anti-Communist crusader Joseph McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. McCarthy had accused a young attorney in Welch's firm of having once been a member of a supposed Communist front group.
"Have you no decency, sir, at long last?" said Welch. "Have you left no sense of decency?"
In this case, the answer would appear to be no.
Editor's Note: A previous online version of this article incorrectly stated that lawyer Joseph Welch confronted anti-communist crusader Joseph McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1950. In fact, the hearings took place in 1954. This article has been corrected.The United States is in the final month of election madness. There has been much discussion here about liberals, progressives or the left and Obama and how liberals react to the inclusion of third party candidates in elections. The Dissenter will continue to cover delusions among liberals about this election.
Last week, I wrote about the illusion of democracy in the 2012 election. I went on the excellent radio program, Radio Dispatch, with hosts John Knefel and Molly Knefel and discussed the post. Particularly, I highlighted how the run of Ralph Nader in the 2000 Election has been transformed into an impediment to discussions and efforts to further democratize elections. I also talked about what I called the “Five Stages of Support for Obama.”
The program can be listened to here or here. My segment begins around the 11-minute mark.
Both Molly and John had some excellent questions for me during my appearance. They gave me ample amount of time to share my views as well.
John asked me about Obama’s personality. He said Obama has become known as the “Trust Me” president and that has allowed for infringements of civil liberties that progressives tolerate and celebrate because of trust invested in him and added this is “fundamentally anti-democratic in a disturbing way” and he thought it had been a troubling trend.
I gave a complete reaction and addressed the reality that I am a person of white privilege. Then, I made clear my belief that the folks over at Black Agenda Report really are on to something. I did not mention this specifically, but, as Glen Ford, Executive Editor of BAR has stated, he is and has been the more effective evil, able to institute atrocious policies domestically and abroad, which George W. Bush would not have been able to institute if he had tried to do so as president. Obama has been able to do this under cover of the label “First Black President.” And, I noted various issues that have gone tremendously ignored in African-American communities, such as mass incarceration, segregation in schools and austerity measures that further contribute to poverty and unemployment.
One myth promoted by liberals is that people who vote third party are able to do so because they are privileged. They are doing it because they can and there will be no impact to them socially if it “spoiled” the election of the Democrat and the Republican happened to win.
I addressed the myth:
…If you think about the struggles between low-wage farm workers against their owners, if you think the strikers in the Walmart warehouses and you think about their masters, their owners, you think their people who are dictating the conditions, which they work in—Those [owners] are actually counting on those low-wage workers and those warehouse workers not questioning those conditions, not rising up because they’re going to put their job at risk and they’re going to be cast out. Or, they’re not going to be able to continue working because they decided to raise a fuss. So, they’re saying you wouldn’t resist what we do to you because you know you are going to be on your own. But, if you talk to a lot of those workers who have decided to rise up, like the people who just negotiated a fair food contract with Chipotle, you see that they’re tremendously empowered by not letting those conditions dictate how they engage in resistance. And, I would say that is almost analogous to us. In some cases, we are slaves to the two-party system and continue to submit to its conditions and the fact that we continue to do so is because we have been led to believe that there is nothing we can do besides play inside the box and so, if we step outside the box, we’re going to be in trouble, we’re going to lose. But I would say that is a short term issue, that we are thinking about it all in the short-term. You might actually stand to gain much more in the long term by stepping outside…
Molly read an exceptional piece of listener mail at the end of the hour program that tied into much of what I had said during my segment:
First, I am a white man that has experienced privilege and used it to survive. I know that. Second, I have loved and supported a dear woman for forty-two years, who has put all her strength into fighting for vulnerable women—everything from a food co-op to a rape crisis center to research of non-English speaking women and healthcare. She and I are in agreement. We have had it with voting for the evil of two lessers and we won’t do it again. Every leader we knew in our youth—Martin Luther King, Jr, John and Robert Kennedy, Mark Clark and Fred Hamptom, draftees from our community to Vietnam, tens of leaders from the Black Panther Party (the real one), students at Kent State and Jackson State—were killed when we were young. Going into electoral politics was not an option. We felt our lives were at risk just speaking out and all our energy went to surviving and keeping the work going. I personally spoke out against the war while in uniform, fully expecting to spend my life in prison. The massive resistance to the war saved my white neck. At a point, however, despite the oppressive violence, things eased a bit and we felt we had won a space to go into electoral politics and build a progressive base. We were wrong. Obama’s a good example of the failure. He first ran trying to unseat a former Panther leader, who was on the Chicago City Council, Bobby Rush. He lost and I forgot Obama did that. Stupid me. Obama has continued Republican foreign policy and is prepared to compromise on domestic issues to a degree that is really terrifying. He has appointed women to the Supreme Court, who will—I am sure—vote to limit Roe v. Wade when the time comes. He has put into place a healthcare system that will do absolutely nothing to quell the bankruptcies of families swamped by healthcare costs. I have personal experience with this, as my brother recently successfully went into bankruptcy over healthcare costs. Obama’s ACA will soon enough become swamped with uninsured people and raising costs and we will have to fight tooth and nail for the thirty or so million left out by the system. Essentially, our experience is that we should not delude ourselves into thinking that one man can protect our lives from above. Obama is just a man and a relatively weak one. If we don’t have organized people from below, we are fucked. Now the question is, should we vote for Obama in the short-term because he can in the short run protect what rights we have won and give us time to further organize? Our answer: no. Obama is going to sell us out. We are going to war with Iran, no doubt about it, and it is going to take us down a path of horrific violence and oppression. So, we are not voting for the bastard again.
Like the hosts said, this listener does not mince words and it provides a context to help people hopefully understand that people on the left were once getting killed. The stakes seem a bit lower now, which is all the more reason to stand up and fight for what is right.
*
John praised Firedoglake as “one of the most reliable sources for information that is very, very critical of the Democratic Party and very, very much to the left of the Democratic Party. They were an indispensable source for information during the health care debate and continue to be indispensable, especially with drone stuff that has been happening.”
The praise should be returned. So, I want all who read this to know that these two people put a lot of thought and work into producing their one-hour radio program. They always are discussing subjects that should be hot topics not just among progressives but among all citizens. And they a display a great journalistic commitment to question conventional wisdom and fully explore the nuances of subjects so listeners have a more complete understanding of issues.
After my segment, Molly said she thought it was important what was raised about Obama’s campaign and how it informs conversation amongst people on the left or informs their perceptions of him. She said she wanted to further the conversation and get more voices involved in a discussion so, after listening to the program, I encourage all readers to send comments to radiodispatch[at]gmail[dot]com.
Again, the program can be listened to here. My segment begins around the 11-minute mark. And, if you enjoy the show, consider following Molly and John on Twitter at @mollyknefel and @johnknefel.Reprinted by permission of the Christian Post
By Jennifer Riley
Christian Post Reporter
Fri, Mar. 20 2009 03:58 PM EDT
The Obama administration announced this week its endorsement of the U.N. declaration decriminalizing homosexuality, a move former President George W. Bush had rejected.
State Department spokesman Robert Wood said Wednesday that the United States supports the U.N.’s statements on human rights, sexual orientation, and gender identity, according to Agence France-Presse.
“The United States is an outspoken defender of human rights and critic of human rights abuses around the world,” Wood told reporters.
“As such, we join with other supporters of this statement, and we will continue to remind countries of the importance of respecting the human rights of all people in all appropriate international fora,” he said.
The United States will join 66 other countries, including all the members of the European Union, in backing the U.N. statement. Other countries who have signed the document include Japan, Australia, Mexico, and dozens of other countries.
Previously, Bush had refused to sign the declaration explaining that he feared it would infringe upon the rights of states. Some states, for instance, allow landlords and certain employers to discriminate based on sexual orientation, according to The Associated Press.
However, Wood assured that the document would not impose any legal changes in the United States.
But World Congress of Families is concerned that the measure will pressure member states to recognize gay marriage and other special rights.
“Violence and harassment in all forms should be condemned, but this special rights measure is not needed by the United Nations,” said Larry Jacobs, managing director of World Congress of Families, in a statement Friday.
“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) has already been signed by the nations of the world and is supposed to be used by the UN to protect the rights of all persons from conception to natural death. Will this special rights measure be used to push for homosexuals serving openly in the U.S. military?” Jacobs inquired. “Will it be interpreted as a mandate for gay adoption?”
Jacobs noted that the Vatican is also concerned about how the statements would be interpreted.
Under Bush, the United States was the only western country to not sign the declaration in December when it was presented at the U.N. General Assembly.
Among the U.N.’s 192 member countries, 70 of them outlaw homosexuality. Over 50 countries, including members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, oppose the declaration.
Copyright 2009 The Christian Post. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Aug. 10, 2016, 11:24 AM GMT / Updated Aug. 10, 2016, 11:24 AM GMT / Source: Reuters By Reuters
Australia's first online national census was in chaos on Wednesday after the survey website crashed overnight due to a possible cyber attack, raising concerns over the country's cyber security and criticism of its slow internet services.
"It was an attack and we believe from overseas," Australia’s chief statistician, David Kalisch told Australian Broadcasting Corp radio.
REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
Kalisch said that no data from the 2.3 million forms already submitted to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) had been stolen. "We have it at the ABS. No one else has it," he said.
The census provides a snapshot every five years of the living conditions of Australia's 24 million people, detailing incomes, religious and ethnic backgrounds, marital status, etc.
The minister responsible for the survey, Michael McCormack, refused to call the online crash an attack, but rather a "denial of service attempt" when the website was deliberately overloaded.
He said the site was equipped to handle heavy traffic, but there was a spike in visitors so steep that a router overloaded and the website was closed as a precaution.
"This was not an attack, nor was it a hack, but rather it was an attempt to frustrate the collection of Bureau of Statistics census data," McCorm |
decision to deny the company’s EB-5 visa applications, though staffers felt that the GreenTech project fell outside of the scope of the program and that it was “really not so good of a project.”
But McAuliffe pushed for EB-5 and continuously called and met with Mayorkas on the matter. According to the IG report, after Gulf Coast’s application was initially denied, Mayorkas took a deep and special interest in the project, telling staff that he would personally oversee it. During one meeting, he shocked staffers by saying that he would take materials related to the application home so that he could work on the case.
Many USCIS staff believed that Mayorkas’ interest in the project indicated that Gulf Coast was “wired in” to the agency.
In early 2013, Mayorkas backed off of his hands-on involvement with the application. But it was understood within the agency that he still hoped to see its application approved. On Jan. 29, 2013, Rodham sent Mayorkas sent an email regarded processing delays. Mayorkas forwarded the email to staff with a “high importance” designation, according to the inspector general.
Gulf Coast’s fourth amendment for application was approved in Feb. 2014.
Mayorkas has previously denied exerting undue influence on behalf of Gulf Coast. Back in July 2013, after he was tapped by President Obama to take over as DHS deputy secretary, he responded to news that the IG was investigating his relationship with McAuliffe and Gulf Coast saying that it was “unequivocally false” that he had played favorites.
Follow Chuck on TwitterFBI Director Christopher Wray said Thursday he doesn't believe President Trump has attempted to interfere in the Justice Department's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
"I can say very confidently that I have not detected any whiff of interference with that investigation," Wray said during a panel discussion at the Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington, D.C.
The Justice Department, led by special counsel Robert Mueller, is investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 election, which includes potential ties between Trump campaign officials and Russia.
Democrats have alleged the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, though no evidence has been presented supporting that claim. Additionally, some Democratic lawmakers have accused Trump of trying to interfere with the FBI's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, which was being led by former FBI Director James Comey before Mueller was tapped as special counsel.
Trump fired Comey in May.
Wray, who was sworn in as FBI director last month, sought to quiet any questions that Mueller and the team he's assembled for the Russia probe may not be impartial, and said he has "enormous" respect for Mueller.
"There's a great group of people working on it and I have confidence in them to be able to do their job," Wray said.Over the past four months, Yemen has been ravaged by a cholera outbreak that the UN has branded the worst in the world. About 7,000 new cases are reported daily – 436,625 have been recorded since the end of April – and already there have been more than 1,915 deaths.
The epidemic is one aspect of a broader humanitarian emergency in Yemen. Two-thirds of the population – 18.8 million people – require some form of emergency aid. Food production has collapsed and 4.5 million children and pregnant and lactating women are acutely malnourished. Only 45% of health facilities are functioning, and 14.8 million people lack access to basic healthcare. About the same number require assistance to access safe drinking water and sanitation.
Cholera, a bacterial infection, is spread by water containing contaminated faeces. It can be easily prevented and easily treated. Cholera first spread from the Ganges delta in 1817, and the resulting pandemics killed tens of millions of people across the world over the 150 years. Modern improvements in water and sanitation infrastructure, and better access to medicines and healthcare, have brought a marked fall in the number of cases. Today, outbreaks occur chiefly in areas where water, sanitation and health systems are inadequate, or where they have been destroyed by natural or manmade disasters.
UN agencies, respected media outlets – including the BBC and New York Times – and influential medical journals such as the Lancet all argue that two years of conflict have created conditions conducive to a cholera outbreak. This narrative, while true, tells only part of the story. It fails to account for the possibility that one party might be more culpable for the outbreak and the other more affected by it.
Yemen: more than one million children at risk of cholera – charity Read more
The Yemeni civil war began in September 2014 when Houthi rebels, a group of Zaydi Shia from northern Yemen, took control of the capital, Sana’a, and then, with help from forces loyal to Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former president, overthrew the government the following January. The internationally recognised regime led by President Abed Mansour Hadi set up a parallel government in the southern port of Aden.
Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia has led a coalition of Sunni Arab states that has attempted to restore the government using airstrikes, an air and naval blockade, and ground troops. The US and UK provide the coalition with logistical support and military equipment. The Saudis have accused Iran of assisting the rebels, but there is limited evidence for this claim and it is denied by the Houthis and Iran.
At least 10,000 people have been killed and 40,000 injured in the conflict. Both sides stand accused of disregarding the wellbeing of civilians and breaching international law. The rebels have indiscriminately fired artillery into residential areas in government-controlled areas and Saudi Arabia. But as the Saudi-led coalition commands far greater resources, it has been able to cause destruction of a totally different magnitude.
The Saudi air force has carried out indiscriminate attacks that have caused the majority of civilian deaths and injuries during the conflict. Airstrikes have targeted civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, farms, schools, water infrastructure, markets and the main port of Hodeida. They complement a Saudi-led naval and air blockade of rebel-controlled areas that has caused shortages of many essential items, including food, fuel and medical supplies.
It was not until four weeks after the start of the outbreak that the first plane carrying medical aid was allowed to land in Sana’a. The government no longer pays public employees working in rebel-controlled areas. About 30,000 health workers have not received a salary for almost a year. Sanitation workers and water engineers in Sana’a have been on strike for months, leaving uncollected rubbish on the streets and municipal drains clogged.
So it is not surprising that rebel-controlled areas are disproportionately affected by the cholera outbreak. About 80% of cases – and deaths – have occurred in governorates controlled by the Houthis. In rebel-controlled areas the attack rate – the number of cases among every 1,000 people – is 17, compared with 10 in government-controlled governorates. The percentage of people with cholera who die is 0.46% in rebel-controlled areas, compared with 0.3% in government-controlled governorates. Thus, a person living in areas under rebel control is 70% more likely to contract cholera and, if they do, 50% more likely to die.
These numbers indicate that the outbreak is not simply an inevitable consequence of civil war. It is rather a direct outcome of the Saudi-led coalition’s strategy of targeting civilians and infrastructure in rebel-controlled areas. Criticism of the US and UK governments’ support for the Saudi-led intervention, this has not led to a policy change. In December 2016, the Obama administration banned the sale of precision-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia due to concerns about civilian casualties in Yemen, but in May 2017 the Trump administration agreed to sell $500m such weapons as part of a $110bn deal. The following month a bipartisan effort to stop the sale failed by a few votes in the Senate. Last month in the UK, the high court rejected activists’ claims that ministers were acting illegally by continuing to sell fighter jets and precision-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia when they might be used against civilians in Yemen. In the absence of strong international condemnation of Saudi-led operations, it is hard to foresee a quick end to this public health emergency and the broader humanitarian crisis.Representational Image
CBI has registered a preliminary enquiry (PE) against Internet giant Google over 'Mapathon 2013', an event organised by the US company, for allegedly violating laws by mapping sensitive areas and defence installations, prohibited by law.The CBI registered the PE based on a complaint filed by Surveyor General of India's office to the Union Home Ministry in which Google was accused of had been indulging in activities of mapping several areas which were not included in the maps of the country, official sources said here.The Internet giant had not taken permission from Survey of India, country's official mapping agency, before organising a mapping competition in February-March 2013 when they asked citizens to map their neighbourhoods, especially details related to hospitals and restaurants.Alarmed by Mapathon, the Survey of India (SoI), India's national survey and mapping organisation under the Department of Science and Technology, asked the Internet giant to share the details of the event. They found that there were several coordinates having details of sensitive defence installations which are out of the public domain.Highlighting the violations to the Home Ministry, the SoI said only it was mandated to undertake 'Restricted' category surveying and mapping, and no other government or private organisations or individual are authorised to do so.As per the National Map Policy 2005, "the responsibility for producing, maintaining and disseminating the topographic map database of the whole country, which is the foundation of all spatial data, vests with the Survey of India". Responding to queries, Google India said, "We are in touch with relevant authorities and take national regulations and security very seriously. We are not aware of any privacy issues and have nothing more to share at this point in time."MILWAUKEE (Reuters) - The wreckage of a wooden steamship that sank 152 years ago in a storm on Lake Huron with no survivors has been found, a Michigan explorer said on Monday.
What exactly happened to the Keystone State and its 33 occupants in a November 1861 voyage to Milwaukee from Detroit remains a mystery, said David Trotter, who found the wreck with his crew of explorers in July.
The 288-foot side-wheel steam ship hit rough weather and was last seen in a disabled condition off Port Austin on November 8 or 9 in 1861, Trotter said.
“She literally sailed into oblivion. Nobody heard anything from her,” Trotter said in a telephone interview.
The wreck was found in 175 feet of water 30 miles northeast of Harrisville, a small city north of Lansing. The location put the wreck about 50 miles off course.
Trotter, 72, who lives in the Detroit suburb of Canton, Michigan, has found more than 100 shipwrecks on the Great Lakes over the last four decades. In 2012, Trotter and his crew discovered the New York, a 283-foot steamer that also sank in Lake Huron in 1910.
“It’s a great chance to touch history to swim back into time,” Trotter said of why he searches for shipwrecks.
The Keystone State is one of more than 5,000 shipwrecks on the Great Lakes.
The ship typically moved immigrants to the west and cargo east, according to Trotter. But on its last voyage, it was reported that the ship was carrying farm equipment, odd cargo given the time of the year, he said.
The ship left in hurry with no lifeboats aboard, he added.
“That adds to the mystery of her leaving,” Trotter said.
Trotter said legend has it that the ship may instead have been carrying equipment for the Civil War or gold bullion - though he said he has not found military equipment or gold on the wreck.The Toronto Comic Arts Festival is proud to introduce
THE TCAF POP-UP SHOP @ TPL
at Toronto Reference Library
789 Yonge Street, Toronto, Canada, M4W 2G8
E-mail: store@torontocomics.com
Open Mon-Fri, 9am-9pm, Sat 9am-5pm, Sun 12pm-5pm
http://torontocomics.com/store
WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 3 @ 6PM
OPENING NIGHT AND ‘JUST THE TIPS’ BOOK LAUNCH
FEATURING AUTHOR CHIP ZDARSKY (SEX CRIMINALS)
—
TORONTO, Canada – The Toronto Comic Arts Festival is thrilled to announce the opening of the brand new TCAF Pop-Up Shop @ TPL! Located inside Toronto Reference Library (where TCAF is held annually), The TCAF Shop will offer a taste of the Festival spirit this holiday season–a boutique showcase for the very best comics, graphic novels, and goods by Canadian and international cartoonists! All purchases directly benefit the not-for-profit Toronto Comic Arts Festival.
The TCAF Pop-Up Shop will open with a spectacular event, the book launch for the new comedy sex-advice book Just The Tips, with author Chip Zdarsky (recently profiled in the Globe & Mail!). The event and shop opening will take place December 3rd at 6pm, opening regularly for business the next day. We sincerely hope to see you there!
—
ABOUT Just The Tips BOOK LAUNCH
Just in time for the holidays, Chip Zdarsky launches Just The Tips, a humorous sexual advice guide by the creators of Time Magazine’s Best Comic of 2013, Sex Criminals. Recently profiled in The Globe & Mail, Zdarsky will sign copies and present from the book in The TCAF Pop-Up Shop’s first ever in-store event, Wednesday, December 3rd, 2014, from 6pm-8pm.
More info at:
http://www.beguilingbooksandart.com/dec-3-just-the-tips-book-launch-with-chip-zdarsky/
https://www.facebook.com/events/357957584385193/
ABOUT TCAF
The Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) is an annual festival celebrating comic art and its creators, occurring annually in Toronto, Canada. Featuring over 400 artists from 19 countries, and 22,000 attendees across Festival events in 2014, the festival is the premiere showcase for independent comics art in North America. It is a not-for-profit festival, presented by Toronto Public Library and The Beguiling Books & Art. www.torontocomics.com
MEDIA
Please direct all media inquiries to store@torontocomics.com to speak with TCAF Pop-Up Shop runners Miles Baker, Andrew Woodrow-Butcher, and Christopher Butcher.
The Beguiling Books & Art Owner and TCAF Co-Founder Peter Birkemoe can be reached at 416-533-9168.CARLSTADT -- Officials are considering adding more acreage to a redevelopment area surrounding the American Dream Meadowlands megamall that has already seen an uptick in construction, NorthJersey.com reported.
Officials are considering adding up to 109 acres to the Paterson Plank Road Redevelopment Area.
After overcoming a number of legal, financial and development hurdles, the opening date for the massive megamall complex is in sight.
The entertainment retail portion of the project is expected to open in March 2019. The scheduled opening of the waterpark and amusement areas is October 2019.
The proposed Carlstadt acreage contains 62 properties, though it's reportedly not clear how many would be considered for the redevelopment classification.
The New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority would give the final approval on which properties would be added. A spokesman for the agency told the publication that there "is significant developer interest regarding new hotels and other commercial ventures" in the area.
The acreage under consideration is east of Washington Avenue, on streets that include Avenue A, Barell Avenue and Meadow Lane, according to the report.
Sara Jerde may be reached at sjerde@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SaraJerde.Yesterday, we showed you how to use an XBox 360 controller on your Mac, using a wired controller. We’re pretty sure it will work with the wireless controller and a Microsoft wireless adapter, as well, but we weren’t able to test it.
Today, however, we’ll take you into new territory and show you how to use your PS3 controller via Bluetooth for some wireless gaming joy with your Mac. Don’t try to use the PS3 controller with Steam’s Big Picure, just yet, though, as it only officially supports the XBox 360 controller. Other Mac games, like all of the ones ported by Feral, are reported to work well with a PS3 controller, though.
Here’s how to set it up.
First, launch System Preferences and click to open the Bluetooth preference panel. Click the checkbox next to On, and Discoverable. Then plug the mini USB charging cable into an available USB port on your Mac. Next, plug the mini USB end of that same cable into your PS3 controller. The red LED lights will blink slowly, as your Mac is now charging the PS3 controller.
Now, hold the PS button down on the controller, for about 3 seconds. Then release it, and pull out the USB mini cable from the controller. Leave it plugged into the Mac; you’ll need it in a moment. The red LED lights will start to flash faster, and your Mac will ask for a passcode. Make one up, or use the standard ‘0000’ to make the passcode dialog box disappear.
It’ll come back up again. Before you type in the passcode again, and again, and again, navigate to the preferences window again and click on the little gear there at the bottom. Add the PS3 controller to your Favorites list, then click the checkbox next to the ON label again to turn Bluetooth OFF. This is counter-intuitive, but do it anyway.
Now, strangely enough, reconnect the mini USB cable to your PS3 controller (since you left it in your Mac as directed above, right?), press the PS button for 3 seconds again, then pull the cable out. Your PS3 controller will continue to flash like it’s trying to pair. Ignore that and turn Bluetooth on again on your Mac. Your PS3 controller should now show up in the device list, letting you use it with any applications that have support for the controller.
Now you know how to get your Playstation 3 controller up on your Mac, and use it wirelessly. Go game!No Comments
Turbochargers vs. Superchargers: What’s the Difference?
Two different means of achieving forced induction
Turbochargers and superchargers both perform the same basic function: they compress and push more air into the engine—generating pressure or “boost”—allowing more fuel to be used, and thus helping the engine produce more power. This whole process is known as forced induction, but because turbochargers and superchargers go about achieving this in totally different ways, it would be a mistake to refer to them interchangeably.
So, turbochargers vs. superchargers: what’s the difference?
Power Source
The main difference between turbochargers and superchargers is how they are powered. Both draw air from a separate intake before compressing it and feeding it to the engine, but while superchargers are driven directly by the engine via a drive belt connected to the crankshaft, turbochargers are powered by exhaust gasses that spin a turbine on their way out of the engine.
Though there are numerous kinds of supercharger designs, their main job is essentially to convert engine power into even more engine power; on the other hand, by using exhaust gasses as their power source, turbochargers recycle what would otherwise be wasted energy.
Boost Characteristics
The different designs of superchargers and turbochargers cause them to have various boost characteristics, thus giving each a unique feel when behind the wheel. Most superchargers always move the same amount of air at any given RPM, creating a linear power curve and allowing them to make boost immediately, including at low RPMs. This makes them ideal for drag racing.
On the other hand, turbochargers have an exponential power curve as they build up turbine speed and pressure, also known as spooling up. This is what causes “turbo lag,” the feeling of the turbocharger finally kicking in with a delayed response after putting your foot down on the throttle. Because of this, turbochargers are often preferred on race cars where revs are expected to be kept high at almost all times.
Performance
Though turbochargers require more parts to build and more skill to properly configure, they can potentially produce more boost than a supercharger and do so more efficiently. Superchargers are less complex and less efficient, but cheaper to build and maintain when you want a quick-and-easy way to tune up your car.
Despite being minimal on most modern turbocharged cars, turbo lag nonetheless remains one of the reasons some enthusiasts prefer the direct, responsive feel of naturally-aspirated engines. It is also one of the reasons high-performance turbocharged cars have begun using hybrid powertrains, as electric motors generate instant torque and thus compensate for turbo lag at low RPMs (also known as “torque fill”); this is best exemplified in cars like the McLaren P1, Acura NSX, or even the post-2014-regulation Formula 1 race cars.
Conclusion
Turbochargers and superchargers fulfill different needs. Though superchargers aren’t necessarily wasteful, they do require the engine to already produce a decent amount of power to operate efficiently. Turbochargers are theoretically better at being efficient and at producing boost, but have clearer downsides like turbo lag and complexity. However, in the current automotive era where high fuel economy and low emissions are prioritized, it’s no surprise that downsized engines with turbochargers have taken over, while superchargers have been left to the performance enthusiasts and tuning houses.Photo by Kat Toronto
One of the more appealing elements of the BDSM lifestyle is the rigidly dual worldview. In the BDSM realm, people can always be neatly divided into groups: dominants and submissives; masochists and sadists; masters and slaves; daddies and princesses, owners and critters; and now, dolls and their makers.
Read More: An Afternoon Romp with People who Dress Like Sexy Dogs and Horses
A new link in the expanding chain of kinks that wraps itself around the BDSM community is dollification, the practice of dressing up as a human doll and being played with, sexually or otherwise. The one getting dressed up is called a doll, and the one doing the dressing is a maker. A doll's look can be as simple as wearing a Courtney Love-style baby-doll dress, or as complicated as plastic surgery to get the big eyes, and tits, of Barbie. While the aesthetics change, one element stays the same: power. Dollification is a power exchange. Some dolls can be the dominant player, instructing their makers to dress them to perfection. More often, though, the doll is submissive with his or her maker, who manipulates the doll to his or her satisfaction
Kat Toronto
"The main reason I love dollification," says Danarama, the dean of Kink University, "is because, when you dress them and play with them and manipulate them, it builds a unique connection between you and your partner. It's hard to compare to anything else you do in a relationship."
Danarama is a maker; he dresses and plays with his partners. Already into the bondage scene, he got into dollification when friends and partners asked him to turn them into marionettes, making Danarama a kinky, dominant Geppetto. He found that the kink was fulfilling artistically as well as sexually. "I'm very empathetic and very artistic," he says. "I get a great artistic satisfaction from dollification because it enables me to use my partner as a canvas, and as a sculpture, and as a performance that's just between the two of us."
Danarama and his dollie via Kink
A marionette (think *NSYNC's No Strings Attached album cover) is only one flavor of doll. Here are some other popular kinds:
Ragdoll: Ragdolls will paint on fake freckles, kewpie lips, wear yarn wigs and lay totally limp while their Maker does whatever they like. A Dollification 101 video made for Kink U shows a ragdoll getting done up, then spanked for being very naughty.
Ball-joint/poseable doll: These dolls can be positioned into provocative poses and made to stay still for long periods of time. Poseable dolls can be ballerinas (like in a music box) or action figures, among other options.
Barbie: Dolls that want to be Barbie sometimes more strongly identify with the bimboification kink. These women may get liposuction, breast implants, and other body modifications to better imitate the German doll.
Rubber Doll: Not Stretch Armstrong, but dolls in full-body latex suits.
Kitty/Puppy Doll: Sometimes just a girl with cat ears on, sometimes a full puppy play outfit. The kink world doesn't lack for diversity.
AI Fuckbot: Sentient-ish doll, programed to love (and fuck).
Kat Toronto
Kinkster Despoena Calypso prefers being a fuck bot. "I can talk. I can give a blowjob," she says. "I already know how to do all the things; you just have to tell me what you want."
Calypso doesn't want to be the perfect Barbie blonde, but she does admire her versatility. "Barbie is a doll," she says, "but also a model and a lawyer. She drives a car, she's a doctor. You just have to dress her up to do those things."
Calypso, in civilian life, loves to dress up, and dollification feels like a natural extension of her love of costume. Calypso has doll costumes for every role you can think of: cowgirl, Alice in Wonderland, schoolgirl, little sailor boy, cop. In the act of play, one doll can be every person, every job, every gender.
Since consent is a key part of any BDSM dynamic, people have to get creative with how to express their boundaries when dressing up as an inanimate object. "I just taught a class [on dollification], and one of the things I did was make a doll," says Calypso. She drew buttons on her human doll with a sharpie. Each button prompted a different phrase. When she pushed one button, the doll said, "I love you!" Another one: "Spank me, daddy!" Another: "I feel pretty!" The "I feel pretty!" button also served as a way to check in emotionally with the doll without making him or her break character. "If she said 'I feel sad' instead of 'I feel pretty,' I knew she wasn't totally into it. I'd have to step back and think, have I objectified her too much?"
For Calypso, being a doll doesn't have to be about giving up your free will. "There are times when being tied up and fucked like a sex doll is fun," she says, "but what I get out of doll work is the control I get from the play."
Kat Toronto
Artist Kat Toronto was also attracted to the aesthetics of dollification. Her photo series Dolls in the House of Venus is currently showing at the Resistance Gallery in London. Toronto's photography examines femininity as a mask, something put on or discarded. "I was introduced to dollification via a friend of mine, about five months ago, who is a latex fetishist and also seriously into dollification," she says. "He has a huge collection of vinyl and latex doll masks as well as outfits that he graciously allowed me to experiment and play with."
Due to a health crisis, Toronto underwent a total hysterectomy and was left questioning her own womanhood. "The surgery was a bit of a mind-fuck because, even though, on the outside, I look just like any other woman, on the inside, I no longer possess the organs," Toronto says. "Was I still considered female if I no longer had a uterus?"
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She began taking self-portraits as Miss Meatface, a latex-clad human doll. "I found that the dollification masks were a fantastic way to push my exploration of gender and identity in my photography work as they visually epitomize the cultural perception of the 'perfect' Barbie doll woman," she says.
For adult performer Odette Delacroix, there's something fun about giving up control. "Someone contacted me through my website and asked if I could make a custom video," she says. "They sent me a doll-like dress and a wig and wanted me to pretend to be a lifeless doll that could be repositioned and manipulated." Delacroix wound up making a video once a month for this client for about a year. "I was never much of a female dominant so the submissive aspect of being beautified and told what to do as a model is fun to me," Delacroix says.
So why would someone want to pretend to be an inanimate object, especially an inanimate object that gets banged? "Think of how people treat their dolls," says Danarama. "To be taken care of and dressed is a fun experience for someone who has a life of intense responsibility."
This sentiment is all over Tumblr—our generation's Congressional Library for kink. Tumblr user, Maker-of-Dolls, published an slam-poem-style ode to her doll kink that reads:
Gone... the mundane decision of food stuffs, clothing choices, budget calculations, political correctness, and socialized societal mandates.
Enhanced... your purpose in life, serenity of it (self), the calm elation of a flat- lined mind.
Enhanced... the flow of blood to nether regions, the natural release of serotonin, tactile touch and sensory feedback from every inch... every pore... every input and erogenous point on it's body.
How wonderful it must feel to quietly wait for Maker to lay next to it, whispering the sweetest cotton candy instructions into the empty... soft... pliable mind.
The soft, pliable mind of the doll fetishist dovetails with those who seek bimbofication. Being a bimbo basically means transforming from a thinking woman into a sex-crazed, big-breasted, tiny-waisted, full-bootied fuck machine. And while you may think that this is just a fantasy women are conjuring to appeal to men, bimbofication has been a popular erotica genre for female romance readers for several years. Again, it's the appeal of losing control and being dehumanized as an object of pure desire. Of course, with any kink, there are extremes. For bimbos and dolls, sometimes surgery comes into play. Tumblr user Make Me a Perfect Girl writes: "[i] totally loveee the thought of someone picking apart every part of my body and face and telling me what procedures and treatments i need to get and telling me what is wrong with myself, standing there while they measure me and poke and pinch me clinically like i'm just some defective object."
Websites like Dollification.com and FetLife provide a place for Dolls to hook up with Makers that will play by the doll's rules. So if you're feeling constrained by your life, there's a community of people online waiting to dress you up and give you tea.
And maybe fuck you.“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it, 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” — Abraham Lincoln, known cuck
After an endless stream of Tim Hortons restaurants and the coniferous glacier-ironed Canadian lands that seem to exist only to separate them, our car finally eased into line at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint at Detroit, idling alongside other freedom-yearning automobiles queued before the heavily guarded passage, a brilliant orange smog-sky lit by the ambient neon of downtown Motor City.
My friend Elijah and his buddy Carl drove from Louisville, Kentucky, to Toronto International airport to ferry my girlfriend, our cat and me back to the United States after we spent nearly a year in the United Kingdom. I’d read with some trepidation the Supreme Court’s partial upholding of President Trump’s travel ban less than 24 hours prior, but I took bizarre comfort in the fact that, despite the dystopian nightmare set to unfold for Muslims without friends or family in the U.S., we, as white American citizens, would have little trouble coming back home.
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If anything, my biggest worry was the cat: a fat, snow-colored beast whose tagging-along on various international border crossings caused far more headaches than any human-related red tape ever did. In an age of international terrorism, rabies remains a big concern for many countries. Such was my security in my own privilege — I wasn’t worried about a state-sponsored proctology exam or the assailing of any supposedly inalienable rights, just cat hassles.
But while I was ultimately proven right about how being white Americans would be enough to get us through to Michigan, the ideological litmus test imposed on us by our border agent was a disturbing reminder that the country I’d left wasn’t exactly the same one I was returning to.
We pulled up to the open-air checkpoint booth. The border agent — clad entirely in black body armor and sporting a pair of cop shades wholly unnecessary for the purple-and-amber sunset — swiveled in his chair to face us.
Elijah handed over his passport, but the guard was nonplussed.
“You’ve been waiting for how long, and you don’t have all your passports ready?” he chided. “What I want to happen is for all of you to hand your passports to the driver, and for the driver to hand me four passports.”
Simple enough; we did as ordered.
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“I wasn’t familiar with the protocol,” Elijah said.
The guard began to interrogate Elijah about our relationships to one another. I jumped in to try to explain how we’re all connected, and the agent quickly shut me down.
“I’m not talking to you,” he said. “I’m talking to the driver. Keep quiet until I ask you a direct question.”
I complied. The agent collected our passports in silence and placed them somewhere out of sight inside of his booth. Why isn't he looking at them, I wondered. Was there some kind of hold-up? My pulse quickened; sweat pushed through my pores.
With his black-gloved hands clasped atop his lap, the agent swiveled his stool around to face us and launched into an unsolicited primer on the ills facing our nation, borders and new president.
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"I've been a cop for all my life," he started. "I joined the border after the 9/11 terrorist attacks."
So began a bizarre and angry tirade more informed by the likes of Breitbart and the Facebook Fake News brigades than bureaucratic best practices: He railed against liberals, whom the agent accused of trying to undermine our president and who beat up his supporters without any reason; an activist liberal professor who failed his kid over a pro-Trump essay; and an entire religion, Islam, which he said is dedicated to killing those who uphold Western society. America, it was clear, has enemies both abroad and at home.
The agent paused. We thought he was done.
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"Do you know what I mean?" he asked.
At first, the question seemed rhetorical. He leaned in toward Elijah's open window to get a better look at the four of us.
"Yes," Elijah said, breaking the silence. "It's a, uh, really terrible, what they're doing to us."
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The rest of us nodded in agreement, acquiescing to his repugnant alt-right bullet points. We were starting to realize that our travel documents might not be enough to get us back into the U.S. Maybe this wasn't just one paranoid government agent's screed against enemies, foreign and domestic; maybe it was a litmus test we'd have to pass, or else.
I thought of grainy footage of the McCarthy hearings, how much better they'd have looked in HD. Would Elijah, with his thick-framed glasses and mussed hair, appear every bit the Red he is in 4K resolution vs. black-and-white?
I resisted the urge to exchange eye-rolls with my companions and swallowed a groan. To do either under the scrutiny of the agent’s all-seeing, all-American, reflective shades felt like it could become grounds for tossing Elijah's car, or worse. I looked straight ahead at the off-ramp, which now seemed very far away.
“We’re under attack,” the agent told us. “Our values, our way of life. These people want us dead.”
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We nodded and smiled. I felt especially nervous about my abridged copy of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” in the floorboard; had the agent decided to toss our car, such leftist literature would’ve contracted our political alignment. (I hastily prepared a “know thine enemy” alibi just in case.)
When it came time for him to interrogate my girlfriend about the nature of our 11 months in the United Kingdom, he was bemused at her response.
“I received a scholarship to study at Cardiff University,” she said.
“And what were you studying?” he asked.
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“Journalism,” she replied.
“A journalist,” he said, perking up. “So are you one of these fake news people?”
“I hope not,” she said.
“There's a lot of fake news going around,” he said. “If you're not careful, you'll start believing that we're the bad guys.”
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We offered another round of acquiescent nods as the agent went right into another rant. This time, he laid bare a disturbing rationale now made legal by the highest court in the land, and aided largely by that court’s liberal justices.
“You see, America is a free country,” he began. “We’re an inclusive country. We have to be careful, but we are still a welcoming nation. People of all kinds are welcome to come here: White or black or brown, Christian or Jew... ”
We sat there, nodding and waiting for the conclusion of that thought. That ellipsis in the above quote is important for a couple of reasons: One, because of the seemingly deliberate omission of a certain major world religion from his list of acceptable American religiosity; and |
good if you have speed but not if you are just getting started, and dropped from 3 to 5th by the first corner. With little room to pass he spent the race right on the heals of fourth. In the last lap the 3rd place driver made a mistake and let 4th place and Jason, by giving Jason a 4th place finish. Despite being stuck he managed to run the 2nd fastest lap of the race and 3rd fastest of the evening.
Jason has raced at K1 only one other time with more serious drivers on these really short tracks. On non-race days he easily beat the other kids who were driving for fun to the point he has been told to slow down. Now that he was racing, he was frustrated that they didn’t always drive the line, and there was little room to pass. Challenges come in many forms, and this indoor league is a has many of them. Despite this frustration, he rose to meet them and preformed remarkably well, keeping focused on moment and the task at hand.
Special thanks goes to Karen who is a very supportive kart mom even though she does fully understand his passion. Most of the race description came from her and she did a great job of keeping the driver focused on the task. She did a great job with photos and video. BTW, congratulations on your first GoPro face.
The next race will be March 3rd at K1 again. With some hard work we should have the sprint kart back together and ready for the next warm weekend to shake it out and get ready for the season.
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TweetSamadhi is a hot topic in yoga circles. Some practitioners believe samadhi and enlightenment are synonymous. Others think samadhi leads to enlightenment, while yet another group is convinced samadhi makes the mind go blank. Some of those seeking samadhi hope it will fall into their hands if they pray hard enough, and others believe the techniques of yoga and meditation will push them toward samadhi or pull samadhi toward them. In the 30 years of my career as a teacher, I have encountered many students and seekers from different walks of life. I have found them to be good people, very sincere. All of them have an essential qualification in common—a burning desire to have a direct experience of samadhi.
Just as mastery in any field—surgery, physics, music—requires prolonged, systematic preparation, so does attaining the highest goal of yoga.
Trying to attain samadhi without having a clear idea of what it is, without adopting a systematic approach, and without completing the preparatory steps is like trying to build a skyscraper when you have never seen one, do not have a blueprint, and do not know how to lay a foundation. You will waste your time and energy and reach nowhere. Just as mastery in any field—surgery, physics, music—requires prolonged, systematic preparation, so does attaining the highest goal of yoga. This goal is attainable only for those who follow a system.
The Bhagavad Gita, one of the most acclaimed texts of yoga, delineates the key prerequisites. It holds that the practice of yoga is painless for those who adopt a balanced diet, balanced exercise, balanced thinking, balanced sleep, and who perform their actions with balanced understanding. These five elements are essential in laying the foundation for a meditation practice. Those who overeat or indulge in fasting suffer from various diseases. Those who exercise too much or too little suffer from exhaustion or sloth. Those who think too much or who fail to use their mind properly become the victims of anxiety or stupor. Those who sleep too much or too little suffer from inertia or hallucinations. Those who act without a balanced understanding of their actions and the consequences of their actions suffer from doubt and fear. When we design our practice against the backdrop of these five elements, our vitality, endurance, comprehension, freshness, and spontaneity expand. As these qualities expand, so does our capacity to concentrate. It is on this solid foundation that you place the formal threefold practice of yoga sadhana: dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation), and samadhi (spiritual absorption).
These three are like the three stages of a pilgrimage. Let’s say you decide to enhance your understanding of spirituality by making a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash. For several weeks before you set out, your entire focus is on preparing for your journey—gathering the necessary clothes and equipment, packing, and then taking the long flight to Nepal. Once in Nepal, you shift into survival mode for the six-day jeep ride along bumpy dirt roads to Mount Kailash. You can hardly breathe because of the high altitude and the thick dust; the sun is blinding and the shocks on the jeep are so bad you feel like your spinal cord is being shattered. You feel hot all day, cold all night, and weak and tired most of the time. Then comes the slow, arduous climb up around Mount Kailash and back down again. During this three-day hike, you can take only one step, one breath at a time.
At first it takes all your effort, then you find your inner rhythm, and once you do, it’s as if the mountain itself lifts you up and carries you. Upon reaching the summit, you find yourself filled with great delight and a sense of fulfillment. When you return home, it takes almost a month to recuperate. But you remember the exquisite joy you felt when you reached the peak. That sublime feeling stays with you like a sweet whisper calling you to return to your inner Self. That’s what this progressive threefold practice entails: first comes concentrated effort, known as dharana; second, the effortless flow of being there with full awareness of yourself and your entire surroundings, known as dhyana; and third, becoming one with that state of experience brought about by this effortless flow. This is known as samadhi.
The Yoga Sutra, the central text of yoga philosophy and practice, calls these three steps samyama. By stringing dharana, dhyana, and samadhi together, the technical term samyama tells us that there is a natural process of starting our practice and reaching the goal of the practice. Most aspirants must follow this process. There is a rare exception—one that flows from complete surrender to God, which is not easy to come by. The grace of God has its own selection process. When it comes, it comes. And when it does not come, it does not come. Therefore let us focus on the three elements that depend on our human effort: dharana, dhyana, and samadhi.
Step by Step
The first step, dharana, is loosely translated as “concentration.” The Yoga Sutra gives a specific definition of this word: “to confine the mind or fix it in a well-defined space.” Space is infinite. Because it does not have shape, color, or form, identifying space is very difficult. Therefore, to confine the mind to a space, you have to first separate it from the rest of infinite space by putting a border around it. In discussing concentration, Vyasa, the foremost commentator on the Yoga Sutra, advises bringing the mind to a space that is well defined, such as the area around your navel center, the heart center, the center between the eyebrows, or to a particular external point, such as a flame or a particular image.
The first step, dharana, is loosely translated as “concentration.” The Yoga Sutra gives a specific definition of this word: “to confine the mind or fix it in a well-defined space.”
Once you have decided to bring your mind to the center of your forehead or your heart center, for example, you must then select an object to occupy that space. The object you select—the cross, the Star of David, an image of Ganesha, a yantra, or a mantra—facilitates the mind’s ability to stabilize itself in the confines of that space. Yet when you focus your mind on that object, you’ll soon notice that it is also contacting many other objects in addition to the one you have chosen. In other words, the mind is distracted.
Distraction is the mind’s tendency to contact various objects at a fast speed and forget both the main object it was supposed to be aware of and the space in which it was supposed to be confined. Rather than giving in to the habit of distraction, bring your mind back to the chosen object and allow your mind to focus on that. By repeatedly practicing this process of bringing the mind back, you will develop a habit of maintaining that object in your mind field for a longer period. If the object of concentration stays in your mind for a longer period of time than the objects that distract you, you have achieved a state of concentration. Concentration and distraction flow side by side. The only difference is that one stream—the stream of concentration—is stronger, heavier, fuller than the other. That defines concentration. It’s not that your mind is no longer becoming distracted, but that the object of concentration stays in your mind longer than the distracting objects do.
As concentration matures, it turns into meditation, or dhyana. This is the second step. Meditation begins when the process of focusing your mind on the object occupying that space is not interrupted by any other thoughts, or the mind stays on that object for a long period of time without much interruption. So dhyana is a continuation of dharana; your meditation is a more mature state of your concentration.
Students often wonder at what point the process of concentration turns into meditation. Many saints and yogis say that if your mind remains concentrated on one object for at least 12 breaths, you have achieved a state of meditation. If within that 12-breath period, your mind shifts from one object to another object, you are still at the stage of concentration. Think of oil pouring from one container to another container. Oil is thick and viscous so it pours out in an unbroken stream. The unbroken flow of your stream of awareness is meditation. And when this process of unbroken awareness lengthens further, it matures into the third step, samadhi.
Samadhi dawns when your mind becomes completely absorbed in the object occupying the space to which you have confined it. In samadhi, the process of concentration, the object of concentration, and the mind that is trying to concentrate or meditate all have become one. The mind is no longer focusing on the object in an objective manner. All that remains in awareness is the content, the essence, of that object. In other words, in samadhi you are aware only of the essence and not of the details. For example, if you have been meditating on the cross, you are no longer aware that it is made of the finest ebony or is covered with gold. All that remains is awareness that it is an object laden with a great sense of sanctity and divinity, that it indicates your relationship with that higher divinity. That feeling is there—that is all. And in that feeling it appears as if the object does not have any form of its own. It is totally devoid of any form. All that remains is pure awareness. That’s called samadhi.
Let’s examine the difference between meditation and samadhi. In meditation you are fully one-pointed, but that one-pointedness simply refers to the fact that your mind is focused on one object. When you analyze it, you see that deep down, the mind is not perfectly one-pointed. In meditation you are still aware of yourself as a meditator and at the same time you are aware of the object of meditation and of the process of meditation. So three things are going on continuously in your mind: (1) you know you are meditating, (2) you know on what you are meditating, and (3) you know you are the meditator. However, you have only one mind and that mind cannot be broken into pieces. It’s not that one part of your mind is on yourself, and another part is on the meditative objective. It’s a matter of intensity. When you are meditating you are more intensely aware of the object of your meditation, for example, than you are of either yourself or the process of meditating. So one stream is the major stream flowing in your mind field and the other two streams are secondary.
In samadhi, the process of concentration, the object of concentration, and the mind that is trying to concentrate or meditate all have become one.
As you practice focusing the mind on the object of your meditation, eventually your awareness becomes so focused on that object that not the tiniest part is left to analyze, feel, and think that you are the meditator and this is the process of meditation. It requires an exclusive absorption in the object of your meditation for these three streams to merge. That is why in English samadhi is called “spiritual absorption.” No part of your mind is left to maintain the awareness of anything other than the object of your meditation.
Then neither internal nor external causes distract you. You are simply in a state of deep stillness, tranquility. And that state may last 30 seconds or two minutes (much longer when you become well practiced), and then suddenly you become aware of some external sound, or you think of checking your e-mail, or you remember you have to meet someone, and you slip from samadhi and become outwardly oriented. You realize you are sitting on your meditation cushion and you still have some practice time remaining, so then you start all over again, making an effort to go from concentration to meditation to samadhi.
If you have been practicing for a long time it does not take too long to get back to a heightened state. It may take just a fraction of a second for you to fall from samadhi to concentration, but you can also climb back up very quickly if you have gained maturity in your practice. If not, it may take some time, even though the memory of that joyful state of samadhi is still there, and the passage to reach there is also very fresh in your memory. Your daily practice reinforces the joyful experience of samadhi, making your memory stronger, clearer, and deeper, thus enabling you to retrieve that memory at will. The memory pertaining to the experience of samadhi empowers you to reach samadhi faster and more effortlessly. That is why consistent daily practice is the way to reach and retain the experience of samadhi.
Signs of Spiritual Progress
Before you enter a state of samadhi, there is a thrill of experiencing stillness. And there are experiences which go with stillness that may distract you, such as clairvoyance or extraordinary sensory experiences. These experiences are called siddhis—yogic accomplishments for those who have never experienced samadhi, and obstacles for those who have experienced it. These siddhis, regardless of how profound or shallow they are, how meaningful or meaningless, are signs that you are on your way to samadhi. As a practitioner, you should not be anxious about these signs nor should you have any fear if these signs appear. Simply keep your focus on your destination, your main goal, which is samadhi itself. Furthermore, anxiety regarding when you are going to reach there, doubt about whether or not you will reach there, fear of never reaching there, and worry about what will happen to you and your loved ones if you do reach there are the breeding grounds for distraction. Not making a big deal about samadhi and yet striving to reach it in the most natural manner is the way to protect the mind from all possible distractions. That is why yogis say, “Work hard but take it lightly. Achieve the highest but don’t make a fuss about it.” This attitude, called vairagya (dispassion or non-attachment), is necessary for protecting and nurturing your practice.
You have heard it said that practice makes perfect. But it is important to remember that it is only perfect practice that makes you perfect. Building a practice can be compared with building a house. A house can be small or big, simple or elaborate. A house can be fitted with lots of amenities or can lack even the most basic facilities. Such is the case with a practice. It can be profound or shallow. It can be designed to take us all the way to samadhi or simply conform to cultural expectations. The function of the practice determines the form. The loftier the form and the grander the goal and objective, the more detailed the architectural plan must be.
The most important aspect of this plan is building a foundation that is capable of supporting the structure you wish to erect. The fundamentals of any fruitful practice are those from the Bhagavad Gita delineated earlier: balanced diet, balanced exercise, balanced thinking, balanced sleep, and performing our actions with balanced understanding. Next comes cultivating a conducive posture. The posture most conducive to our practice is one in which the head, neck, and trunk are in a straight line, the shoulders are relaxed, and the breath serene. Then comes uniting our mind and breath with each other. Uniting the forces of our breath and mind allows us to concentrate with the fewest distractions, thus enabling us to concentrate for a longer period of time on our chosen object. Prolonged concentration matures into meditation, and meditation matures into samadhi. The repeated experience of dharana, dhyana, and samadhi deepens our memory of samadhi.
In subsequent practice sessions, this memory both pushes us toward samadhi and pulls samadhi toward us. There comes a time when this process becomes absolutely effortless. This effortless state of samadhi is called dharma megha samadhi, a samadhi laden with a cloud of virtues—spiritually uplifting and enlightening experiences. From this emerges an indescribable state of awareness devoid of all desires, including the desire for any benefit from samadhi other than samadhi itself. This is the state of nirbija samadhi—the highest samadhi, which sages like Patanjali and Buddha experienced. May we, their students, one day also attain this luminous experience.Don Draper is a philanderer. He philanders. And though the reasons for his philandering are varied, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner may have put his finger on it when he said, “I think Don likes longing more than he likes people who love him … His lack of loyalty runs deep because he doesn’t like the people who know him.” That is to say, we hurt the ones we love the most, but Don Draper seems intent upon punishing them. His weapon of choice: an ongoing cycle of adultery. His line of defense: implausible deniability.
As a character, Don is smart, arrogant, incredibly assured. He is wealthy, handsome … the consummate lover. Don is enough of the things that women want and men want to be that, as an audience, we tend to excuse all of his inequities. This, of course, carries over into everyday life – a capitalist culture in which rich, attractive, button-up types tend to walk all over hoi polloi.
Throughout Mad Men‘s six-and-a-half seasons, we’ve gotten to know Don, in large part, as a result of his affairs. We see Don reflected in shattered pieces of the lovers he has left behind. In ranking them, there was no consideration given to platonic relationships (no Joan or Peggy), no exceptions made for one-night stands or supernumeraries. What remains are eight eclectic women, each of them listed below based on intrigue, as well as what level of drama their interaction with Don has provided during the show:
1. Rachel Menken (The Heiress). Rachel Menken is Don Draper’s intellectual equal, and – in many ways – his better. She matches him barb for barb, schooling Don in one beautifully-realized moment on the derivation of Utopia. “The Greeks had two meanings for it,” Menken explains, “eu-topos, meaning ‘the good place,’ and ou-topos, meaning ‘the place that cannot be.’” Menken is self-confident (like Don), business-savvy (like Don), and motherless (like Don). She is also Jewish, representing a major taboo for 1960s America. The couple’s fallout costs Sterling Cooper Menken’s business. Bert Cooper, Mad Men‘s hidden jewel, informs Don of this, reprimanding him for whoring out Receivables: “As a partner, I do not expect your personal preferences to interfere.” When Menken reappears (albeit briefly) during the second season, her presence renders Draper peaked. Rachel – accompanied by her new husband, Tilden Katz – is on her way to see “A Funny Thing Happened”. Don, on the other hand, is getting day-drunk in Sardi’s with a business associate’s wife.
2. Midge Daniels (The Bohemian). Midge was there at the beginning, screwing Don Draper in the pilot. Her character represents a signpost, indicative of the Village counterculture just before the scene exploded. Sex, drugs, Fidel Castro and the Gaslight, all of them converging along a tiny stretch of Babylon. Before the dust settled, 10,000 hippies wound up waylaid; used up, then torn down, their early optimism removed. By Season Four, Midge is reduced to soliciting charity from the very corporate structure she abhors. Midge has become a junkie, and Don Draper reeks of money. Their final exchange stands as a testament to just how far the 60s experiment has fallen.
3. Suzanne Farrell (The Teacher). At one point Don lies in bed with Suzanne, imagining what it would have been like if he had known her as a child. There is a playfulness between the two. Farrell is poor, and naive, and she lives in a tiny apartment over the top of a garage. She bakes bread for Don, she answers the door wearing a gold star, one of their first meetings takes place inside a classroom, with Suzanne playing the teacher and Don Draper, the role of student. Suzanne is hiding in Don’s Cadillac on the morning Betty confronts Don regarding his identity, ducking like a teenager beneath the dash to avoid being spotted. And then, one phone call later, the entire Suzanne love affair is over, set aside much like Don’s past to ensure a more convenient future.
4. Faye Miller (The Psychoanalyst). Dr. Miller and Don Draper never had a chance. Her insights prove too sharp and her curiosity too deep to keep Don Draper’s skeletons at bay. During their first encounter, Dr. Miller asks Don to fill out a questionnaire regarding his childhood; during their second, Faye refers to Don as a “type”. Don admires Faye, which explains why he cannot risk having her in his life. Dr. Miller displays very little in the way of subservience, and while the character seems tailor-made for heightened tension, almost none of that materializes. Within a year of meeting Faye, Don gets engaged to his secretary – a development which Faye predicted during the week that she and Don first met. “I hope [Megan] knows you only like the beginning of things,” Faye tells Don over the phone. As usual, her assessment eventually proves to be correct.
5. Betty Draper (The Cotillion Queen). Betty Draper has one gear, and while it’s consistent with Don’s preferences, it also sucks the air out of a room. As Season One evolves, it becomes clear Betty is suffering from some form of arrested development (among other things). What remains unclear is how much Don has exacerbated the situation. When Betty first married Don, she was an aspiring model with a gorgeous house out in the suburbs. By the point of their divorce, she’s been reduced to little more than an ornament. Perhaps most hurtful is the fact that Don sent Betty to a psychiatrist, who reported all his findings back to Don. Add that to the frequency and audacity of Don’s lies and it just might be enough to drive any woman insane.
6. Megan Draper (The Actress). Whether it’s planning a surprise party, or serenading Don to “Zou Bisou Bisou,” or perhaps even welcoming a third party into the bedroom, one is consistently confronted with the notion Megan Draper (nee Calvet) doesn’t really get her husband. And that Don, in turn, views Megan’s attempts at doing so as desperate. Don’s second marriage is indicative of his constant need to find a mother, if only to belittle her until she turns away. Once Megan’s career begins to blossom (thanks to Don), it’s as if he’s competing to see who can abandon who first. “That’s what happens when you help someone,” Don tells Peggy toward the end of Season Five. “They succeed and move on.” This from a man whose entire freedom hinges upon one widow’s decision to stand by him, despite the fact he has stolen her missing husband’s identity.
7. Bobbie Barrett (The Whore). One immediately gets the sense Don Draper is fighting Bobbie Barrett every step of the way, that – at least for him – any physical relationship with an aging, former stripper equates to slumming it, regardless of her current status. It is Bobbie who comes on to Don, Bobbie who continues the pursuit, Bobbie who initiates sex in Don’s office during business hours. Bobbie Barrett is a passing fancy, yet inserting her into Don’s schedule allows for one of the most grating insults Don Draper has ever been made to endure. “You’re garbage, and you know it,” Bobbie’s husband tells Don during a black-tie function. It is the only point in the series when we get to see an angry spouse confront Don, and it illuminates a point of view that’s overwhelmingly ignored.
8. Sylvia Rosen (The Neighbor). As Don stumbles toward mid-life, his choice of mistress suggests a need to injure those who are closest, most notably his second wife. What’s more, the deeper Sylvia – Don and Megan’s downstairs neighbor – falls for Don, the more cruelly Don treats both women in return. It is only when Sylvia breaks off the affair that Don realizes he is in love. Operating on unprecedented levels of self-loathing, Don eventually winds up getting caught with his pants down.A veteran Dutch journalist was detained for the second time by Turkish authorities early Sunday, news outlets in the Netherlands reported, indicating a further tightening of the government’s tight-fisted control of the press. Fréderike Geerdink was arrested while in southeastern Turkey covering the People’s Democratic Party, or HDP, a Kurdish opposition faction.
The arrest comes just a week after two journalists for Vice News, Jake Hanrahan and Philip Pendlebury, were detained while reporting on clashes in southern Turkey between government forces and Kurdish rebels. At the time, Geerdink offered her support on Twitter.
i just wish @Jake_Hanrahan a fast release, then he can give the accurate account of his detention. gecmis olsun colleague! — Frederike Geerdink (@fgeerdink) August 28, 2015
Domestic reporters regularly face restrictions and imprisonment over reporting the Turkish regime deems off-limits. But in recent months, more and more foreign journalists have also been targeted. The country has been one of the top 10 jailers of journalists in the world in each of the last three years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a press freedom organization.
Geerdink had been previously arrested in January on charges of disseminating “terrorist propaganda” in her coverage of the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK. The political group has fought for autonomy from Turkey since the late 1970s and is considered by the government -- as well as the United States -- to be a terrorist organization.
Geerdink faced up to five years in prison for the charges, which were dropped in April. Yet she opted to remain in Turkey.
“It makes me very unhappy sometimes -- but I have chosen this life and if I want it to be different I can go back to my own country,” Geerdink told the Telegraph in February. “But for the Kurds, they have not been able to live their identity for more than a century now, being suppressed.”
Tensions have increased in recent months between the Turkish government and Kurdish opposition parties. In late July, the Turkish air force bombed PKK positions in Iraq, along with the ISIS fighters that the Kurds have been effective in fending off.This article is about the cookbook. For the folk-rock band, see Joy of Cooking (band)
Joy of Cooking, often known as "The Joy of Cooking", is one of the United States' most-published cookbooks. It has been in print continuously since 1936 and has sold more than 18 million copies. It was published privately during 1931 by Irma S. Rombauer (1877-1962), a homemaker in St. Louis, Missouri, after her husband's suicide the previous year. Rombauer had 3,000 copies printed by A.C. Clayton, a company which had printed labels for fancy St. Louis shoe companies and for Listerine mouthwash, but never a book. Beginning 1936, the book was published by a commercial printing house, the Bobbs-Merrill Company. With eight editions, Joy of Cooking is considered the most popular American cookbook.[1]
Background [ edit ]
Born to German immigrants in 1877, Irma Starkloff was born and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. She married Edgar Rombauer, a lawyer, during 1899. Edgar committed suicide after a severe bout of depression during 1930, widowing Irma at age 52, and leaving her with $6,000 in life savings.
Rombauer's children, Marion Rombauer Becker and Edgar Roderick ("Put") Rombauer, Jr.,[2] encouraged her to compile her recipes and thoughts on cooking to help her cope with her loss. Rombauer spent much of the summer of 1930 in Michigan, creating the first drafts that would later become Joy of Cooking. With the help of her late husband's secretary, Mazie Whyte, Rombauer began writing and editing recipes and commentaries while searching for more recipes in St. Louis. During the autumn of 1930, Rombauer went to the A.C. Clayton Printing Company, a printer for the St. Louis shoe manufacturers. She paid them $3,000 to print 3,000 copies of The Joy of Cooking: A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat in November 1931.[3]
Editions [ edit ]
First edition (1931) [ edit ]
During 1931 Rombauer self-published The Joy of Cooking: A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat with more than 500 tested recipes and related commentaries.
The book was illustrated by Rombauer's daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, who directed the art department at John Burroughs School. Working during weekends during the winter of 1930-31, Marion designed the cover,[4] which depicted Saint Martha of Bethany, the patron saint of cooking, slaying a dragon. She also produced silhouette cutouts to illustrate chapter headings.[5] By 1932, a majority of the 3,000 copies printed by A.C. Clayton were sold. [6] Rombauer began to look for a new publisher in 1932.
Second edition (1936) [ edit ]
After searching for a publisher and being rejected many times, the Bobbs-Merrill Company published an expanded (640 page) second edition on May 1, 1936.[7] The company had limited experience with publishing cookbooks, and Irma Rombauer, similarly inexperienced in dealing with publishers, performed the negotiations herself without an agent or lawyer. The resulting contract, in which Bobbs-Merrill was granted the copyright not only for the 1936 edition but for the original 1931 version as well, resulted in many years of conflict between the author and the publisher.[8]:151–153
The 1936 edition differed from other commercial cookbooks of the era by its retention of the author's folksy comments and anecdotes, and its new layout for the recipes.[8]:153–154 Instead of listing the ingredients for a dish at the top with preparation directions following, the recipes in Joy (1936) were presented by narratives, with the ingredients indicated as the need for them occurred, with each placed in boldface on a new indented line — thus preserving a conversational style throughout the recipe. This method came to be known as the "action method".[9] These innovations, along with an aggressive marketing effort by Bobbs-Merrill, resulted in good sales.[8]:159–161 Joy reached the best-seller list in St. Louis and promoted as "the famous private cookbook" in the New York Times.[10][11] By the end of 1942, the second edition had had six printings, and 52,151 copies had been sold.[7]
Third edition (1943/1946) [ edit ]
During 1939, Rombauer published Streamlined Cooking, a collection of recipes that could be prepared in less than 30 minutes, with an emphasis on use of canned and frozen foods. This book was not a commercial success,[8]:166–169 but many of the recipes it contained became part of a new edition of Joy of Cooking published during 1943. This edition also included material intended to help readers deal with wartime rationing restrictions, including alternatives to butter in some recipes.[12] Sales of this edition were phenomenal: from 1943 through 1946 a total of 617,782 copies were sold, surpassing sales of Joy of Cooking's principal competitor, Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book.[8]:172
During 1946, a minor revision of the 1943 edition was published. While substantially the same as its predecessor, the 1946 revision omitted the material related to wartime rationing and incorporated additional recipes from Streamlined Cooking.[7]
Fourth edition (1951) [ edit ]
Irma Rombauer was 69 years old when the 1946 edition of Joy was published, and her health was beginning to decrease.[8]:194–195 She was concerned about the future of her book, since Bobbs-Merrill (which owned the copyright for the original publication) might have selected an author of their own choosing for future editions once Rombauer was unable to continue. To ensure that the book remained a family project, Rombauer negotiated with the publisher a clause in her contract naming her daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, as her sole successor in any future revision.[8]:201
Relations between Rombauer and Bobbs-Merrill, never cordial, worsened during the late 1940s, and in the fracas Marion Becker gradually assumed increasing responsibility, at first regarding the book's design, and eventually its content. Partly for legal reasons, the 1951 edition was published with Marion Rombauer Becker listed as co-author, and she received 40% of the royalties.[8]:chap 8The authors strongly resisted the publisher's wish to illustrate the book with photographs and instead embellished the book with simple, functional line drawings by Ginnie Hoffman, a friend of Becker's.[8]:262–270
Becker was a passionate advocate of healthy eating, and the 1951 edition was marked by an increased emphasis of such topics as whole grains and fresh produce. Many of the old "can-opener" recipes from Streamlined Cooking were eliminated. This edition also was the first to introduce the use of the blender and other modern household items into its recipes. The number of recipes had increased to more than 4,000.
Because of the time taken by the protracted legal arguments, final editing of the 1951 edition was done hastily. The same edition was reprinted during 1952 with some errors corrected, and again during 1953 with a revised index.[7]
Fifth edition (1964) [ edit ]
During 1962, the year of Irma Rombauer's death, a revised edition of Joy of Cooking was published. This edition was released without Marion Becker's consent. Subsequent releases of the book during 1963 and 1964 were essentially massive corrections, and Becker arranged for the publisher to exchange copies of the 1962 edition for later corrected versions upon request.[8]:342
The foreword of the 1962 edition explains that Becker's favorite recipes include "Cockaigne" in the name, (e.g., "Fruit Cake Cockaigne"), after the name of her country home in Anderson Township, near Cincinnati, Ohio.[13][14]
This edition was also published in paperback format (most notably, a two-volume mass market paperback edition); it is still widely available in used bookstores. The 1964 edition was also released as a single-volume comb-ring bound paperback mass-market edition starting in November 1973 and continuing into the early 1990s.[15]
Sixth edition (1975) [ edit ]
The 1975 edition was the last to be edited by Becker and remains the most popular, with more than 6 million copies sold.[16] More than 1,000 pages long, and with over 4,300 recipes, it became a standard in kitchens throughout the country. The book included sections concerning backpacking, hiking, and substitutions, and though many sections may seem antiquated to contemporary fashion, many home cooks still use it.[16]
Seventh edition (1997) [ edit ]
After the 1975 edition, the project was unchanged for about 20 years. During the mid-1990s, publisher Simon & Schuster, which owns the Joy of Cooking's copyrights, hired influential cookbook editor Maria Guarnaschelli, formerly of William Morrow, and editor of works by Jeff Smith and others. Guarnaschelli, supervised by Rombauer's grandson Ethan Becker, managed the creation of the edition of 1997, published by Simon & Schuster's Charles Scribner's Sons division. The new edition kept the concise style of its predecessors, but it eliminated the conversational first-person narration. Much of the edition was ghostwritten by teams of expert chefs instead of the single dedicated amateur Irma Rombauer had been when she created the book. The 1997 version is fairly comprehensive; however, it no longer contains much information about ingredients or frozen desserts.
Upon its publication during January 1997, the edition was titled The All-New, All-Purpose Joy of Cooking; during November of that same year, it was reissued with the title The 1997 Joy of Cooking.[17][18]
Other special editions and printings [ edit ]
During 1995, a hardbound edition illustrated by Ginnie Hofmann and Ikki Matsumoto was released.[citation needed]
During 1998, a reproduction, described as "a perfect facsimile of that original 1931 edition", was released.[6]
Eighth edition (2006) 75th Anniversary Edition [ edit ]
During 2006, Scribner published a 75th anniversary edition, containing 4,500 recipes, that reproduced much of Rombauer's |
But shortly thereafter, he moved to withdraw the plea again. In a handwritten letter to the judge dated July 20, 2015, he wrote:
The judge denied his request. The Albanian was sentenced to 16 years in prison and ordered to be deported back to Albania upon the conclusion of his incarceration. Hasbajrami's lawyers have filed notice of their appeal in the 2nd Circuit but have yet to file their opening brief. It will likely come sometime in 2016.Swinney named Bobby Dodd national coach of the year
CU Athletic Communications by
Clemson, SC—Clemson Head Football Coach Dabo Swinney Dabo Swinney
Head Coach
View Full Profile has been named the winner of the Bobby Dodd Award as the FBS National Coach of the Year. The announcement was made tonight at halftime on ESPN at the Chick-Fil-A Bowl game between Auburn and Virginia.
Swinney is the first Clemson football coach to win a National Coach of the Year honor since 1981 when Danny Ford was named National Coach of the Year by the American Football Coaches Association and the Football Writers Association.
Ford coached Clemson to the National Championship during that 1981 season with a 12-0 record, including a 22-15 win over Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. Now Swinney will coach the Tigers in the Discover Orange Bowl on Wednesday night. It is Clemson’s first visit to the Orange Bowl since that game at the conclusion of the 1981 season.
“This is a great honor,” said Swinney. “I accept this award on behalf of our players, coaches and everyone affiliated with our program at Clemson. I am proud of what we have accomplished this year and we hope to add to that this week.
“It is an honor to win an award named after the legendary Bobby Dodd, who did so much for college football. I am humbled to be the recipient of this award.”
Swinney is the first Clemson coach in any sport to win a national coach of the Year honor since Larry Penley was the unanimous National Coach of the Year of college golf in 2003 when the Tigers golfers won the National Championship.
Year Coach Sport 1981 Chuck Kriese Men’s Tennis 1981 Danny Ford Football 1986 Chuck Kriese Men’s Tennis 1992 Bob Pollock Men’s Indoor Track 2003 Larry Penley Men’s Golf 2011 Dabo Swinney Football
This season Swinney has coached Clemson to its first ACC Championship in 20 years, its first 10-win season in 21 years, and its first bid to the Orange Bowl since 1981. The Tigers have a 10-3 record entering Wednesday’s Discover Orange Bowl game against West Virginia.The Tigers have four wins over top 25 teams this year, a school record for one season and tied for second most in the nation this year. The Tigers could gain a fifth with a victory over the Mountaineers. Included in the list of wins over ranked teams are a pair of wins over Virginia Tech, a 23-3 victory in the regular season over a 10th ranked Virginia Tech team in Blacksburg, and a 38-10 win over the third ranked Hokies in the ACC Championship game on December 3. That victory tied for the highest ranked team Clemson has defeated in its history.Clemson is ranked 14th in AP and 14th in USA Today entering the bowl season and had a #15 ranking in the final BCS poll, tying Clemson’s best final ranking in the BCS.The Bobby Dodd Coach of the Year Award is annually presented to the Football Subdivision head coach whose team excels on the field, in the classroom and in the community. The award is named for Bobby Dodd, the longtime head coach at Georgia Tech. It was established in 1976 to honor the values that Dodd exemplified. The Dodd selection committee is composed of college football media experts, and previous winners.Clemson Coaches to Be Named National Coach of the YearHALIFAX – Nancy Rose’s main muses are squirrels.
Her hobby of taking wildlife photos has developed into a small business and the Bedford woman’s work is getting attention around the world.
Most nature photographers want their subjects in wild settings, but not Rose. She wants her squirrels to be a bit more anthropomorphic. The photographer often waits long hours to capture the squirrels in the right moment poking around the miniture props she sets up on her back deck.
But squirrels aren’t always creatures of habit.
“Peanuts!” Rose calls to the squirrels.
“The neighbours probably think I’m crazy. They know I’m nuts, ” she says as she tries to coax a squirrel out of a tree to her deck for more pictures.
Snapping squirrels all started by chance says Rose.
“One day I had a pumpkin out and a squirrel stood on top of it and he had his little paw and the stem of the pumpkin and he just looked like a little pirate on his boat and I thought ‘well that’s kind of cool, maybe I could find him a boat’,” she says.
One photograph has a squirrel wearing a yellow rain hat. “For that one I actually used a thread and I had a back drop and a little stick hanging out and a thread to hold the hat and some peanuts taped up inside the hat. I made the raincoat to go with it.”
Peanuts and peanut butter are regular shopping items.
Rose says peanuts attract the squirrels to many unusual and funny situations. “Hanging the clothes on the line getting a little fresh air, so of course the peanut was clung to a little blanket,” says Rose.
She’s made calendars from her squirrel pictures as gifts and shares her pictures on Flickr. “All my Flickr friends said ‘ah that’s so cute’, that’s so great and the pictures then tended to show up on a lot of other websites.”
She’s been featured on television in Europe and in the Washington Post and she’s reaping the benefits. “An agency in the U.K. contacted me and wanted to distribute the pictures to U.K. publications,” says Rose who has also been in touch with calender companies.
Rose says after she retires from her job as a high school guidance counselor, she’ll likely turn her hobby into a part-time job.tech2 News Staff
Apple is still refusing to allow the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) anti-spam Do Not Disturb app on the App Store. The app purportedly fights spam, by reporting such messages and calls directly to TRAI, and is available on the Play Store.
Apple has been refusing to allow the app on the App Store citing privacy violations. TRAI claims that the app violates no privacy norms. Bloomberg quotes TRAI chairman Ram Sewak Sharma as saying that, “It is a ridiculous situation, no company can be allowed to be the guardian of a user’s data.”
The TRAI DND app requires access to a great deal of user data, including location information, access to call and message logs, the ability to read messages, access to the media library, Device ID, full network access, etc. While a number of third-party apps on the App Store and Play Store ask for and receive most of these permissions, the DND app’s requirement for text message data is likely violating Apple’s privacy policies.
Bloomberg reports that Sharma has claimed that Apple’s Privacy Policy allows for the sharing of data with Apple’s affiliates and strategic partners, but not with third parties.
Sharma states that TRAI has engaged in talks with Apple numerous times on this issue, to no avail. The report adds that TRAI is now floating a consultation paper on “users’ control over their personal information and rules on the flow of data through telecommunications networks.” Sharma says that the rules could be formed based on the findings and that they could be incorporated as “part of the telecom licensing process.”
It must be noted that the TRAI DND 2.0 app on the Play Store isn't particularly good. With a rating of just 2/5 and 836 out of 1231 reviews going for a one-star rating, TRAI has a lot to fix.
Primarily, the reviewers complain that the app is buggy, doesn't connect to the internet and that the reporting process is as good as useless.
Apple is yet to officially comment on the matter.
Tech2 is now on WhatsApp. For all the buzz on the latest tech and science, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Tech2.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.Speeches by Sacco and Vanzetti to the Court at the Time of Sentencing
(April 9, 1927 at the Dedham Court House)
VANZETTI & SACCO BOARDING BUS FOR COURT HOUSE
WHERE THEY WILL RECEIVE DEATH SENTENCE (APRIL 9, 1927)
CLERK WORTHINGTON: Nicola Sacco, have you anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon you?
NICOLA SACCO: Yes, sir. I am no orator. It is not very familiar with me the English language, and as I know, as my friend has told me, my comrade Vanzetti will speak more long, so I thought to give him the chance.
I never knew, never heard, even read in history anything so cruel as this Court. After seven years prosecuting they still consider us guilty. And these gentle people here are arrayed with us in this court today.
I know the sentence will be between two classes, the oppressed class and the rich class, and there will be always collision between one and the other. We fraternize the people with the books, with the literature. You persecute the people, tyrannize them and kill them. We try the education of people always. You try to put a path between us and some other nationality that hates each other. That is why I am here today on this bench, for having been of the oppressed class. Well, you are the oppressor.
You know it, Judge Thayer--you know all my life, you know why I have been here, and after seven years that you have been persecuting me and my poor wife, and you still today sentence us to death. I would like to tell all my life, but what is the use? You know all about what I say before, that is, my comrade, will be talking, because he is more familiar with the lan-guage, and I will give him a chance. My comrade, the kind man to all the children, you sentenced him two times, in the Bridgewater case and the Dedham case, connected with me, and you know he is innocent.
You forget all this population that has been with us for seven years, to sympathize and give us all their energy and all their kindness. You do not care for them. Among that peoples and the comrades and the working class there is a big legion of intellectual people which have been with us for seven years, to not commit the iniquitous sentence, but still the Court goes ahead. And I want to thank you all, you peoples, my comrades who have been with me for seven years, with the Sacco Vanzetti case, and I will give my friend a chance.
I forget one thing which my comrade remember me. As I said before, Judge Thayer know all my life, and he know that I am never guilty, never--not yesterday, nor today, nor forever.
CLERK WORTHINGTON: Bartolomeo Vanzetti, have you anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon you?
BARTOLOMEO VANZETTI: Yes. What I say is that I am innocent, not only of the Braintree crime, but also of the Bridgewater crime. That I am not only innocent of these two crimes, but in all my life I have never stolen and I have never killed and I have never spilled blood. That is what I want to say. And it is not all. Not only am I innocent of these two crimes, not only in all my life I have never stolen, never killed, never spilled blood, but I have struggled all my life, since I began to reason, to eliminate crime from the earth.
Everybody that knows these two arms knows very well that I did not need to go into the streets and kill a man or try to take money. I can live by my two hands and live well. But besides that, I can live even without work with my hands for other people. I have had plenty of chance to live independently and to live what the world conceives to be a higher life than to gain our bread with the sweat of our brow.
My father in Italy is in a good condition. I could have come back in Italy and he would have welcomed me every time with open arms. Even if I come back there with not a cent in my pocket, my father could have give me a position, not to work but to make busi-ness, or to oversee upon the land that he owns. He has wrote me many letters in that sense, and as another well-to-do relative has wrote me letters in that sense that I can produce.
Well, it may be said to be a boast. My father and my aunt can boast themselves and say things that people may not be compelled to believe. People may say they may be poor when I say that they are in good condition to give me a position any time that I want to settle down and form a family and start a settled life. Well, but there are people maybe in this same court that could testify to what I have said and that what my father and my aunt have said to me is not a lie, that really they have the means to give me a position any time that I want.
Well, I want to reach a little point farther, and it is this that not only have I not been trying to steal in Bridgewater, not only have I not been in Braintree to steal and kill and have never stolen or killed or spilt blood in all my life, not only have I struggled hard against crimes, but I have refused myself of what are considered the commodity and glories of life, the prides of a life of a good position, because in my consideration it is not right to exploit man. I have refused to go in business because I understand that business is a speculation on profit upon certain people that must depend upon the business man, and I do not consider that that is right and therefore I refuse to do that.
Now, I should say that I am not only innocent of all these things, not only have I never committed a real crime in my life--though some sins but not crimes--not only have I struggled all my life to eliminate crimes, the crimes that the official law and the moral law condemns, but also the crime that the moral law and the official law sanction and sanctify,--the exploitation and the oppression of the man by the man, and if there is a reason why I am here as a guilty man, if there is a reason why you in a few minutes can doom me, it is this reason and none else.
There is the best man I ever cast my eyes upon since I lived, a man that will last and will grow always more near to and more dear to the heart of the people, so long as admiration for goodness, for virtues, and for sacrifice will last. I mean Eugene Victor Debs.
He has said that not even a dog that kills chickens would have found an American jury disposed to convict it with the proof that the Commonwealth has produced against us. That man was not with me in Plymouth or with Sacco where he was on the day of the crime. You can say that it is arbitrary, what we are saying from him, that he is good and he applied to the other his goodness, that he is incapable of crime, and he be-lieved that everybody is incapable of crime.
Well, it may be like that but it is not, it could be like that but it is not, and that man had a real experience of court, of prison and of jury. Just because he wanted the world a little better he was persecuted and slandered from his boyhood youthness to his old age, and indeed he was murdered by the prison.
He knew, and not only he knew, but every man of understanding in the world, not only in this country but also in other countries, men to whom we have provided a certain amount of the records of the case at times, they all know and still stick with us, the flower of mankind of Europe, the better writers, the greatest thinkers of Europe, have pleaded in our favor. The scientists, the greatest scientists, the greatest statesmen of Europe, have pleaded in our favor.
Is it possible that only a few, a handful of men of the jury, only two or three other men, who would shame their mother for worldly honor and for earthly fortune; is it possible that they are right against what the world, for the whole world has said that it is wrong and I know that it is wrong? If there is one that should know it, if it is right or if it is wrong, it is I and this man. You see it is seven years that we are in jail. What we have suffered during these seven years no human tongue can say, and yet you see me before you, not trembling, you see me looking you in your eyes straight, not blushing, not changing color, not ashamed or in fear.
Eugene Debs said that not even a dog--something like that--not even a dog that kill the chickens would have been found guilty by an American jury with the evidence that the Commonwealth have produced against us. I say that not even a leprous dog would have had his appeals refused two times by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts--not even a leprous dog.
They have given a new trial to Madeiros for the reason that the Judge had either forgot or omitted to tell the jury that they should consider the man innocent until found guilty in the court, or something of that sort. That man has confessed. The man was tried on his confession and was found guilty, and the Supreme Court gave him another trial. We have proved that there could not have been another Judge on the face of the earth more prejudiced, more cruel and more hostile than you have been against us. We have proven that. Still they refuse the new trial. We know, and you know in your heart, that you have been against us from the very beginning, before you see us. Before you see us you already know that we were radicals, that we were underdogs, that we were the enemy of the institutions that you can believe in good faith in their goodness--I don't want to discuss that--and that it was easy at the time of the first trial to get a verdict of guiltiness.
We know that you have spoken yourself, and have spoke your hostility against us, and your despisement against us with friends of yours on the train, at the University Club of Boston, at the Golf Club of Worcester. I am sure that if the people who know all what you say against us have the civil courage to take the stand, maybe your Honor--I am sorry to say this because you are an old man, and I have an old father-- but maybe you would be beside us in good justice at this time.
When you sentenced me at the Plymouth trial you say, to the best of my memory, of my good faith, that crimes were in accordance with my principle--something of that sort--and you took off one charge, if I remember it exactly, from the jury. The jury was so violent against me that they found me guilty of both charges, because there were only two. But they would have found me guilty of a dozen of charges against your Honor's instructions. Of course I remember that you told them that there was no reason to believe that if I were the bandit I have intention to kill somebody, so that they should take off the indictment of attempt to murder. Well, they found me guilty of what?
Also of an attempt to murder. And if I am right, you take out that and sentence me only for attempt to rob with arms,--something like that. But, Judge Thayer, you give more to me for that attempt of robbery than all the 448 men that were in Charlestown, all of those that attempted to rob, all those that have robbed, they have not such a sentence as you gave to me for an attempt at robbery.
I am willing that everybody that does or does not believe me that they can make commission, they can go over there, and I am very willing that the people should go over there and see whether it is true or not. There are people in Charlestown who are professional robbers, who have been in half the prisons of the United States, that have stolen, or injured men or shot them. Most of them guilty without doubt, by selfconfession, and by confession of their own partners, and they got eight to ten, eight to twelve, ten to fifteen. None of them has twelve to fifteen, as you gave me for an attempt at robbery. And besides that, you know that I was not guilty; that I had not been in Bridgewater attempting to steal. You know that my life, my private and, public life in Plymouth, and wherever I have been, was so exemplary that one of the worst fears of our prosecutor Katzmann was to introduce proof of our life and of our conduct. He has opposed it with all his might and he has succeeded.
You know that if we would have had Mr. Thomp-son, or even the brothers McAnarney, in the first trial in Plymouth, you know that no jury would have found me guilty. My first lawyer has been a partner of Mr. Katzmann, as he is still now. The first lawyer of the defense, Mr. Vahey, has not defended me, has sold me for thirty golden money like Judas sold Jesus Christ. If that man has not told to you or to Mr. Katzmann that he knew that I was guilty, it is because he can-not, it is because he knew that I was not guilty. That man has done everything indirectly to hurt us. He has made a long speech to the jury about things that do matter nothing, and on the point of essence to the trial he has passed over with few words or with complete silence. This was a premeditation in order to give to the jury the impression that my own defender has nothing good to urge in defense of myself, and therefore is compelled to go around the bush on little things that amount to nothing and let pass the essential points either in silence or with a very weakly resistance.
We were tried during a time whose character has now passed into history. I mean by that, a time when there was a hysteria of resentment and hate against the people of our principles, against the foreigner, against slackers, and it seems to me--rather, I am positive of it, that both you and Mr. Katzmann have done all what it were in your power in order to work out, in order to agitate still more the passion of the juror, the prejudice of the juror, against us.
I remember that Mr. Katzmann has introduced a witness against us, a certain Ricci. Well, I have heard that witness. It seems that he has nothing to say. It seemed that it was a foolishness to produce a witness that has nothing to say. And it seemed as if he were called by the Commonwealth to tell to the jury that he was the foreman of those laborers who were near the scene of the crime and who claimed, and who testified in our behalf, that we were not the men, and that this man, the witness Ricci, was their foreman, and he has tried to keep the men on the job instead of going to see what was happening so as to give the impression that it was not true that the men went towards the street to see what happened. But that was not very important. The real importance is what that man said and that was not true, that a certain witness who was the water boy of the gang of the laborers testified that he took a pail and went to a certain spring, a water spring, to take water for the gang--Ricci testified it was not true that that man went to that spring, and therefore it was not true that he saw the bandit, and therefore it was not true that he can tell that neither I nor Sacco were the men. But Ricci was introduced to show that it was not true that that man went to that spring, because he knew that the Germans had poisoned the water in that spring. That is what he, Ricci, said on that stand over there. Now, in the world chronicle of the time there is not a single happening of that nature. Nobody in America--we have read plenty things bad that the Germans have done in Europe during the war, but nobody can prove and nobody will say that the Germans are bad enough to poison the spring water in this country during the war.
Now, this, it seems, has nothing to do with us di-rectly. It seems to be a thing said by incident on the stand between the other things; why, whereas, that is the essence here. Because the jury were hating us because we were against the war, and the jury don't know that it makes any difference between a man that is against the war because he believes that the war is unjust, because he hate no country, because he is a cosmopolitan, and a man that is against the war because he is in favor of the other country that fights against the country in which he is, and therefore a spy, an enemy, and he commits any crime in the country in which he is in behalf of the other country in order to serve the other country. We are not men of that kind. Nobody can say that we are German spies or spies of any kind. Katzmann knows very well that. Katzmann knows that we were against the war because we did not believe in the purpose for which they say that the war was fought. We believed that the war is wrong, and we believe this more now after ten years that we studied and observed and understood it day by day,--the consequences and the result of the after war. We believe more now than ever that the war was wrong, and we are against war more now than ever, and I am glad to be on the doomed scaffold if I can say to mankind, "Look out; you are in a catacomb of the flower of mankind. For what? All that they say to you, all that they have promised to you--it was a lie, it was an illusion, it was a cheat, it was a fraud, it was a crime. They promised you liberty. Where is liberty? They promised you prosperity. Where is prosperity? They have promised you eleva-tion. Where is the elevation?"
From the day that I went in Charlestown, the misfortunate, the population of Charlestown, has doubled in number. Where is the moral good that the war has given to the world? Where is the spiritual progress that we have achieved from the war? Where are the security of life, the security of the things that we possess for our necessity? Where are the respect for human life? Where are the respect and the admiration for the good characteristics and the good of the human nature? Never before the war as now have there been so many crimes, so much corruption, so much degeneration as there is now.
In the best of my recollection and of my good faith, during the trial Katzmann has told to the jury that a certain Coacci has brought in Italy the money that, according to the State theory, I and Sacco have stolen in Braintree. We never stole that money. But Katzmann, when he told that to the jury, he knew already that that was not true. He knew already that that man was deported in Italy by the federal police soon after our arrest. I remember well that I was told that the federal policeman had him in their possession--that the federal policeman had taken away the trunks from the very ship where he was, and brought the trunks back over here and look them over and found not a single money.
Now, I call that murder, to tell to the jury that a friend or comrade or a relative or acquaintance of the charged man, of the indicted man, has carried the money to Italy, when he knows it was not true. I can call that nothing else but murder, a plain murder.
But Katzmann has told something else also against us that was not true. If I understand well, there have been agreement of counsel during the trial in which the counsel of defense shall not produce any evidence of my good conduct in Plymouth and the counsel of the prosecution would not have let the jury know that I was tried and convicted another time before in Plymouth. Well, it was masterly called a one-sided agreement by someone very competent. In fact, even the telephone poles knew at the time of this trial at Dedham that I was tried and convicted in Plymouth; the jurymen knew that even when they slept. On the other side the jury have never seen I or Sacco and I think we have the right to incline to believe that the jury have never approached before the trial anyone that was sufficiently intimate with me and Sacco to be able to give them a description of our personal conduct. The jury don't know anything about us. They have never seen us. The only thing that they know is the bad things that the newspaper have said on the Plymouth trial.
I don't know why the defense counsel have made such an agreement but I know very well why Katzmann had made such agreement; because he know that half of the population of Plymouth would have been willing to come over here and say that in seven years that I was living amongst them that I was never seen drunk, that I was known as the most strong and steadfast worker of the community. As a matter of fact I was called a mule and the people that know a little better the condition of my father and that I was a single man, much wondered at me and say, "Why you work like a mad man in that way when you have no children and no wife to care about?"
Well, Katzmann should have been satisfied on that agreement. He could have thanked his God and estimate himself a lucky man. But he was not satisfied with that. He broke his word and he told to the jury that I was tried before; he told it to this very court. I don't know if that is right in the record, if that was taken off or not, but I heard with my ears. When two or three women from Plymouth come to take the stand, the woman reached that point where this gentleman sits over there, the jury were seated in their place, and Katzmann asked these women if they have not testified before for Vanzetti, and they say, yes, and he tell to them, "You cannot testify." They left the room. After that they testified just the same. But in the meanwhile he told the jury that I have been tried before. That I think is not giving justice to the man from one who is looking after the truth, and it is with such insuperable frameups with which he has split my life and doomed me.
It was also said that the defense has put every obstacle to the handling of this case in order to delay the case. That sounds weak for us, and I think it is injurious because it is not true. If we consider that the prosecution, the State, has employed one entire year to prosecute us, that is, one of the five years that the case has lasted was taken by that prosecution to begin our trial, our first trial. Then the defense makes an appeal to you and you waited, for I think that you were resolute, that you had the resolution in your heart from even when the trial finished that you will have refused every appeal that we will put up to you. You waited a month or a month and a half and just lay down your decision on the eve of Christmas--just on the eve of Christmas, eve of Christmas. We do not believe in Christmas, neither in the historical way nor in the church way. But, you know, some of our folks still believe in that, and because we do not believe in that, it don't mean that we are not human. We are human, and Christmas is sweet to the heart of every man. I think that you have done that, to hand down your decision on the eve of Christmas, to poison the heart of our family and of our beloved. I am sorry to be compelled to say this, but everything that was said or done on your side since then has confirmed my suspicion time after time until that suspicion has changed to certitude.
Then the defense, in presenting the new appeal, has not taken more time than you have taken in answer to that. Then there came the second appeal, and now I am not sure whether it is the second appeal or the third appeal where you waited eleven months or one year without an answer to us, and I am sure that you had decided to refuse us a new trial before the hearing for the new appeal began. You took one year to answer it, or eleven months,--something like that. So that you see that out of the five years, two were taken by the State from the day of our arrest to the trial, and then one year to wait for your answer on the second or the third appeal.
Then on another occasion that I don't remember exactly now, Mr. Williams was sick and the things were delayed not for fault of the defense but on account of the prosecution. So that I am positive that if a man take a pencil in his hand and compute the time taken by the prosecution in prosecuting the case, and the time that was taken by the defense to defend this case, the prosecution has taken more time than the defense, and there is a great consideration that must be taken in this point, and it is that my first lawyer betrayed us,--the whole American population were against us.
We have the misfortune to take a man from California, and he came here, and he was ostracized by you and by every authority, even by the jury, and is so much so that not even Massachusetts is immune from what I could call a universal prejudice,--the belief that each people in each place of the world, they believe to be the better of the world, and they believe that all the other people of the other places of the world are not so good as they. So of course the man that came from California into Massachusetts to defend two of us, he must be licked if it is possible, and he was licked all right. And we have our part, too.
What I want to say is this: Everybody ought to understand that the first beginning of our defense has been terrible. My first lawyer did not try to defend us. He has made no attempt to collect witnesses and evidence in our favor. The record in the Plymouth court is a pity. I am told that they are part or almost one-half lost. So that later on the defense have had a tremendous work to do in order to collect some evidence, to collect some testimony to offset and to learn what the testimony of the State had been. And in this consideration it must be said that even if the defense take double time of the State about delays, double time than they (the State) delayed the case, it would have been reasonable just the same, whereas it took less than the State.
Well, I have already say that I not only am not guilty of these two crimes, but I never committed a crime in my life,--I have never stolen and I have never killed and I have never spilt blood, and I have fought against crime, and I have fought and I have sacrificed myself even to eliminate the crimes that the law and the church legitimate and sanctify.
This is what I say: I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low and misfortunate creature of the earth--I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for myself; but I am so convinced to be right that you can only kill me once but if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already.
I have finished. Thank you.
JUDGE THAYER: Under the law of Massachusetts the jury says whether a defendant is guilty or innocent. The Court has absolutely nothing to do with that question. The law of Massachusetts provides that a judge cannot deal in any way with the facts. As far as he can go under our law is to state the evidence.
During the trial many exceptions were taken. Those exceptions were taken to the Supreme Judicial Court. That Court, after examining the entire record, after examining all the exceptions,--that Court in its final words said, "The verdicts of the jury should stand; exceptions overruled." That being true, there is only one thing that this--Court can do. It is not a matter of discretion. It is a matter of statutory requirement, and that being true there is only one duty that now devolves upon this Court, and that is to pronounce the sentence.
First the Court pronounces sentence upon Nicola Sacco:
It is considered and ordered by the Court that you, Nicola Sacco, suffer the punishment of death by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning on Sunday, the tenth day of July, in the Year of our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Twenty-seven. This is the sentence of the law.
Then upon Vanzetti:
It is considered and ordered by the Court that you, Bartolomeo Vanzetti...
VANZETTI: Wait a minute, please, your Honor. May I speak for a minute with my lawyer, Mr. Thompson?
THOMPSON: I do not know what he has to say.
JUDGE THAYER: I think I should pronounce the sentence....... Bartolomeo Vanzetti, suffer the punishment of death.....
SACCO: You know I am innocent. Those are the same words I pronounced seven years ago. You condemn two innocent men.
JUDGE THAYER: by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning on Sunday, the tenth day of July, in the year of our Lord, One Thousand Nine Hundred and Twenty-seven. This is the sentence of the law.
[The next day Vanzetti passed to friends the notes of what he had additional remarks he had intended to make to Judge Thayer when he interrupted the pronouncement of sentence. The additional remarks included these comments about his co-defendant:]
I have talk a great deal of myself but I even forgot to name Sacco. Sacco too is a worker from his boyhood, a skilled worker lover of work, with a good job and pay, a bank account, a good and lovely wife, two beautiful children and a neat little home at the verge of a wood, near a brook. Sacco is a heart, a faith, a character, a man; a man lover of nature and of mankind. A man who gave all, |
first tested it in Inbox, a mobile e-mail app. It allows users on the go to select one of the answers and reply with a single tap. With Allo, Google went one step further, blending Smart Reply with image recognition, so it can suggest responses to photos sent via message. Send your friend a picture of yourself skydiving and Allo may suggest replies like "awesome," "brave" or "scary;" send a picture of a kid or pet, and it may suggest "cute." In Allo the Google assistant might also pop up in the middle of a conversation to help you book a restaurant or plan a trip.
Google's rivals are also rushing into an AI-powered world. Microsoft has an initiative similar to Google Brain that involves pushing machine-learning techniques into scores of products; its CEO, Satya Nadella, recently showcased conversational bots built atop its Cortana digital assistant. Facebook's Zuckerberg has quickly built a team of hundreds of AI researchers who have made breakthroughs in image recognition and language understanding, and he's demonstrated bots built atop Messenger. Amazon's Bezos has more than 1,000 people working on the family of products tied to Alexa, the conversational interface that powers the Echo smart speaker. Apple is busy expanding Siri's capabilities and is expected to open it up to third-party developers soon.
Pichai is convinced Google is further along than its competitors. He cites AlphaGo, which recently defeated the world's best Go player--and may someday be applied to more practical problems--as the kind of investment that will keep it at the head of the pack. "When you look at machine learning and AI, there are things you can do now, some in two to three years and some that are deeper and will take more time to do," Pichai says. Observers like Yoffie, the Harvard professor, agree that Google is well-positioned to lead the transition to an AI-powered world. "Sundar is jumping on the right categories and making a lot of good decisions," Yoffie says. Then he adds: "But he hasn't really been tested yet."ABC’s Castle is having a changing of the guard.
Creator Andrew Marlowe is stepping down as showrunner for season 7, while executive producer David Amann will take over the writers’ room. We’re told Marlowe will continue to maintain a presence on the show, and will develop new projects as part of his overall deal with ABC Studios.”Over the past four seasons, David has proven himself to be a tremendous leader and a great steward of our show’s unique voice,” Marlowe said in a statement. “I’m excited to continue our creative collaboration as he assumes his new responsibilities.”
The Monday night procedural drama, starring Nathan Fillion as a mystery author/crime solver, finished this season No. 2 in its time slot, but having posted gains over season 5 among adults 18-49 and total viewers. In fact, the season was the most-watched season ever, with a viewership total that’s significantly boosted by DVR playback. But the show’s most recent finale — which teased Beckett and Castle’s wedding all season only to throw in a last-minute delay — really annoyed fans. (Check out the comments on our react for proof.)American actor, singer, and director
Scott Stewart Bakula (; born October 9, 1954)[1] is an American actor, singer and director best known for his lead roles in two science-fiction television series: as Sam Beckett on Quantum Leap (for which he received four Emmy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award), and as Captain Jonathan Archer on Star Trek: Enterprise.
Bakula starred on the comedy-drama series Men of a Certain Age, and guest-starred in seasons two and three of NBC's Chuck as the title character's father Stephen J. Bartowski. From 2014 to 2015, he played entrepreneur Lynn in the only two seasons of the HBO show Looking. In 2014, he began playing Special Agent Dwayne Cassius "King" Pride on NCIS: New Orleans.
Early life [ edit ]
Bakula was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Sally (née Zumwinkel) and J. Stewart Bakula, a lawyer.[1][2][3] He has a younger brother and a younger sister.[4] His surname comes from partial Czech ancestry.[2][5][6] He attended Jefferson College,[7][8] followed by the University of Kansas for a time, but left, saying:
...because I was offered a tour of Godspell, a national tour that was from St. Louis. I thought that sounded great, and I went to my parents and I said "I want to do this tour", and they said, "Go ahead, maybe it will get it out of your system. And you come back to school in a year or two, you come back." The tour was gonna start in August and the tour never started and school did, and then the tour fell apart, and there I was sitting at home. So I was left holding the bag, basically, and then had to decide where to go from there. And I applied, was applying to other schools. I was gonna go to a Mormon theatrical kind of school, and the more I looked at it the more I spent time examining the school side of it. I just realized what I really needed to do was just pick up, pack up and go to New York.[4]
Career [ edit ]
Bakula moved to New York City in 1976, where he made his Broadway debut playing baseball legend Joe DiMaggio in Marilyn: An American Fable, and appeared in the well-received Off-Broadway production Three Guys Naked from the Waist Down; he would later appear in its Pasadena Playhouse production.[9] The success of Three Guys Off-Broadway brought him attention, and when his next show, the musical Nightclub Confidential, which co-starred his wife Krista Neumann, moved to Los Angeles, he moved there at the urging of his California agent, Maggie Henderson, and his New York agent, Jerry Hogan. As Bakula recalled in 2000,
I call [Henderson] up and said I got a show, I'm gonna be out there, I'm coming out in January. So it'll work out because it's time for pilot season and I'll be doing something so people can come and see me.... And then I coincidentally had done a Disney Sunday Night ABC movie that was gonna come out some time in the winter. It was the time to go. Came out here on New Year's Day, 1986. The show I did turned out to be a big hit out here. It got me a lot of attention out here and I jumped onto the TV sitcom Designing Women in the beginning and was able to do that pilot... and things kind of took off.[10]
He was cast in two short-lived series: Gung Ho and Eisenhower & Lutz. During a Hollywood writers' strike, he returned to New York to star in Romance/Romance,[10] and then afterward landed the lead role opposite co-star Dean Stockwell in the science fiction television series Quantum Leap (1989-1993). Bakula played time traveler Dr. Sam Beckett, who was trapped by a malfunction of his time machine to correct things gone wrong in the past.[11] His performance in the show earned him a Golden Globe Award (along with three nominations) and four Emmy Award nominations for Best Actor, as well as five consecutive Viewers for Quality Television Awards for Best Actor in a Quality Drama Series.[citation needed]
In 1995, Bakula appeared on the cover of Playgirl. He voiced Danny Cat in the animated film Cats Don't Dance (1997), singing in one number with Natalie Cole. He played the aging veteran pitcher Gus Cantrell in Major League: Back to the Minors (1998), the final movie in the Major League trilogy. He also played Jim Olmeyer, the same-sex partner of Sam Robards' Jim Berkley, in the film American Beauty (1999).
Bakula played Jonathan Archer, the captain of Earth's first long-range interstellar ship, on Star Trek: Enterprise from 2001 to 2005. In 2006, he reprised the role of Archer for the Star Trek: Legacy PC and Xbox 360 video games as a voice-over.
Bakula starred in the musical Shenandoah, a play which also provided his first professional theatrical role in 1976, at Ford's Theatre, in 2006. Bakula is heard singing "Pig Island" on Sandra Boynton's children's CD Philadelphia Chickens, which is labeled as being "For all ages except 43." Scott Bakula said that he might be starring as Sam in a Quantum Leap film as stated in TV Guide Magazine along with Dean Stockwell. At Comic Con 2010, he announced that a script was being worked on and that while he would be in the movie, he would not have the main role.[12]
Bakula performed various songs from his career for a one-night-only performance entitled An Evening with Scott Bakula at Sidney Harman Hall on January 18, 2008, as a benefit for the restoration of the historic Ford's Theater.[13] Bakula had three appearances in 2008. He appeared as Atty. Jack Ross in an episode of Boston Legal, "Glow in the Dark", which aired on February 12, 2008 on the ABC network.[14] From March 4 – April 20, he starred as Tony Hunter in the world premiere of Dancing in the Dark at The Old Globe in San Diego, California. Dancing in the Dark is based on the movie The Band Wagon (1953), which starred Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse.[15] Bakula appeared as the character Chris Fulbright in the five-episode run of the Tracey Ullman sketch comedy series State of the Union on Showtime.
Bakula appeared in the dark comedy film The Informant! (2009) as Brian Shepard, an FBI agent working with the title character Mark Whitacre, (played by Matt Damon).[16] In April 2009, he began a recurring role on the television series Chuck as Stephen J. Bartowski, the eponymous character's long-lost father. From July 31 to August 2, 2009, he starred as Nathan Detroit in three performances of Guys and Dolls at the Hollywood Bowl. Beginning in December 2009, Bakula began appearing as Terry, one of the three lead characters, along with Ray Romano (Joe) and Andre Braugher (Owen), in TNT's hour-long comedy/drama Men of a Certain Age.
In 2011, Bakula performed a voice cameo in the film Source Code as a slight nod to his character on Quantum Leap, with his catchphrase of "Oh, boy."[17] and appeared in the feature-length documentary The Captains, which was written and directed by William Shatner, Bakula is interviewed by the original Star Trek captain about his life and career leading up to his performances as Captain Jonathan Archer in Star Trek: Enterprise. In the movie, Shatner interviews Bakula at his ranch in California where the pair ride horses and discuss the pitfalls that come with a career in television.[18]
In September 2011, Bakula starred in Terrible Advice by Saul Rubinek at the Menier Chocolate Factory.[19][20] In April to May 2012, he guest starred in the last five episodes of Desperate Housewives as Bree Van de Kamp's criminal defense lawyer and third husband. In April 2013, he made a guest appearance on Two and a Half Men as a car dealer. In August 2013, it was announced Bakula would have a recurring role in the first season of HBO's new series, Looking.[21] He also appeared in the film Geography Club (2013).
In February 2014, Bakula was cast as the lead in a backdoor pilot for the current NCIS spin-off series, NCIS: New Orleans, which began as a two-part episode of its parent series in the spring season of 2014.[22] The third season of NCIS: New Orleans premiered on September 20, 2016.
In 2016 Bakula appeared as a guest judge on the HGTV show Brothers Take New Orleans with Property Brothers Jonathan and Drew Scott.[23]
He made a cameo appearance on the season 12 opener of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia as himself.
Personal life [ edit ]
Bakula married Krista Neumann in 1981 and had two children, Chelsy and Cody. They divorced in 1995.[1] He married actress Chelsea Field in 2009 and they have two children, Wil Botfield and Owen Barrett.[1]
Bakula says he was "...hardly ever home for four and a half seasons" of Quantum Leap, so he chose to prioritize his family life on later projects. His Star Trek: Enterprise contract required that filming be completed by 6 PM every Wednesday so he could have dinner with his family. During filming of NCIS: New Orleans, he returns home to Los Angeles every weekend to spend time with his wife.[24]
Filmography [ edit ]
Film [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]
Awards and nominations [ edit ]Ferrets are one of the more popular exotic pets and perhaps also one of the most misunderstood. Surprisingly to many people, ferrets are illegal to keep as pets in many areas, including New York City and California.
Reasons for banning ferrets include concerns about biting, as well as rabies, and escapees colonizing and threatening native wildlife. Is there truly a threat or is this just hype? There are families all over the country that have this pet with no incidents. So, what is the truth of the matter?
A Misunderstood Animal
Many people have a negative view of ferrets. Perhaps it is their appearance since they do superficially resemble weasels (and are part of the weasel family). As with some other exotic and domestic pets, some bad press has hurt their reputation.
It all comes down to responsible pet ownership. Ferrets must be provided with proper care, training, safety, and supervision. They should also have vaccinations for rabies and distemper (ferret approved vaccines only). They are not low maintenance pets and need attention and training to prevent behavior problems, just like most other pets that do not live strictly in a cage. That being said, most ferret owners will tell you they are wonderful pets and they do not deserve the bad reputation or to be banned.
Raimund Linke / Getty Images
New York City Ban
In June 1999, New York City's Health Department decided to uphold its ban on ferrets. This is a quote from the Health Department's press release explaining the decision:
"Ferrets are known for their unpredictable behavior, and they are prone to vicious, unprovoked attacks on humans. Ferret attacks reported nationwide over time have become notorious for their severity and capriciousness, causing serious injuries to some infants and young children in particular... In New York City's multiple dwelling residences, which are not natural habitats of ferrets, a ferret could crawl through holes in walls or travel along risers or ducts to other apartments, with potentially tragic consequences for the neighbor of a ferret owner." —New York City Department of Health
This description paints a picture of vicious creatures just looking for a chance to escape and wreak havoc on the city, while others consider this animal an adventurous, cuddly animal that has been domesticated for hundreds (perhaps thousands) of years.
Other places that have banned ferrets include the states of California and Hawaii, Washington, DC, Dallas, Texas, and Columbia, Missouri.
Darren Baker / Getty Images
Ferrets and Children
Unfortunately, there have been reported incidents of injuries to infants and children. Such incidents are extremely rare, however, especially compared to the estimated millions of dog bites every year in the U.S. Comparatively, the risk of ferret bites is very small.
Ferrets, though, may not be the best choice for families with small children, a topic discussed in "A Ferret in the Family." The reasons why, though, are the same for all pets. Small children can be excitable, unpredictable, and rough at times. These behaviors may, in turn, excite or startle a ferret, causing it to nip the child. Just as important, small children might inadvertently injure a ferret. Of course, children should not be left unsupervised with any pet.
Children handling ferrets must be supervised. Diane Macdonald / Getty Images
Escaping Ferrets
Ferrets are pretty flexible and do have the ability to fit through small spaces. The responsible owner must ferret-proof their home to prevent ferrets from harming themselves or escaping from their safe environments. Ferrets can be caged part of the time, as long as they are let out of that cage as often as possible (at least a few times a day) for exercise and fun.The National Security Agency announced Friday that it would be implementing new measures to prevent classified information from leaking.
The measures follow former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations regarding the massive surveillance programs run by the intelligence agency.
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The head of the NSA, Keith Alexander, said that the agency was implementing a "two-man rule," which would ensure analysts could only access classified information in the presence of a colleague.
Server rooms will also be locked and require two people to open them. Data will be better encrypted, fewer users will have access and data will be segmented so that it cannot easily be taken all at once.
Alexander said that the new measures would take time to be implemented across the agency.
"Some of your sites are small... and you only have one system administrator, so you've got to address all of those, and we are working our way through it," Alexander said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, according to the Associated Press.
Security measures will also be undertaken at the Pentagon and other intelligence agencies.
Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said that the new measures were to protect the system from an "aberrant individual."
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“So when it comes to nuclear weapon[s]… we don't let people all by themselves do anything. Nobody ever touches a nuclear weapon by him or herself,” Carter said, according to RT.
US government officials have claimed that Snowden's leaks damaged national security, but there remains a debate as to how true this is.
John C. Inglis, the deputy director of the NSA, told the House Judiciary Committee this week that Snowden's disclosures may be very harmful, but "it's too soon to tell whether, in fact, adversaries will take great note of the things that he's disclosed," according to the Associated Press.
During the Aspen Forum, Alexander told the audience that the NSA's spying programs were not classified because the government was trying to hide shady activities, but rather "it's to hide it from those who walk among you and are trying to kill you."
Advertisement:Despite a plethora of reports to the contrary, legendary Brazilian playmaker Ronaldinho will not be donning a New York Red Bull uniform — or that of any other MLS side for that matter.
Sources tell EOS that the 34-year-old enganche was never seriously considered for the Red Bulls. While team officials did meet with representatives from Ronaldinho’s camp in Brazil during the World Cup, the discussions were of an amicable nature and never involved the possibility of bringing the Miniero midfielder to New York.
The topic, sources tell us, was never even broached.
Ronaldinho’s agents did contact MLS about a possible move. However, monetary concerns and a general lack of interest or funds from big money clubs quickly quelled that momentum.
The endless waves of reports linking Ronaldinho to New York is likely a consequence of an internet echo chamber following a Goal.com piece first establishing contact between the Red Bulls and Ronaldinho. The Brazilian legend has been a target of MLS for years, but neither have been able to find common ground in that time.
A league source says his “gut feeling” is Ronaldinho joins either newly promoted Premiership side, Queens Park Rangers or Boca Juniors of the Argentine Primera. The 34-year-old playmaker has also been linked to Fluminense and the A-League as well.
According to his agent, Ronaldinho will reveal his future destination this Wednesday.Former Tory chancellor Norman Lamont has urged his successor Philip Hammond to keep faith with public sector pay cuts and told nurses whinging about austerity that they ain’t seen nothing yet.
The Tories are keen to stress that they are “in listening mode” at the moment, but Lamont basically advised ministers to stick their fingers in their ears and hum Jerusalem until it all blows over.
The man who oversaw Black Wednesday, which cost the British economy more than £3 billion, told the Today programme:
“What concerns me is that there seems to be growing in the Conservative party a feeling that because the electorate disliked austerity, that this is the message that has come back, and therefor it ought to be discarded. “People are talking about austerity as thought it was an issue of too many repeats on television or they’d got tired of watching Poldark and wanted a better programme. “This is not a choice, it is unavoidable that we have restraint on public spending… “Austerity is just another word for living within ones means. It’s not really austerity.”
Asked whether he would be prepared to tell that to the nurse who famously asked Theresa May for a pay rise on Question Time, he said:
“Public sector pay is on average higher than in the private sector. “I would say in the NHS, where there is an issue of recruitment, if there is a shortage, yes you’ve got to look at that. “What I’m objecting to is the more general pressure that is being applied, the idea that we should abandon restraint on public expenditure. “The control on public sector pay is extremely important. It’s roughly half of current expenditure and its about 30% of total public expenditure, comes to £200bn plus a year. You’ve got to have a restraint on that.”
Responding to news that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove have spoken out against the pay freeze, Lamont added:
“I think it is not right for cabinet ministers to gang up on the Chancellor in this way. I think it is making his position, which is always very difficult, very, very awkward indeed and I do think that, just to say because a lot of voters in the election objected to what was called austerity, we must abandon it.”
Laughably, Lamont blamed the Tories poor general election campaign on their failure to “make the case” for austerity and said the party would reap the rewards at the next election if they level with the public about the need for more cuts.
Bring it on…DURHAM, N.C. — North Carolina will not retry a white police officer who killed an unarmed black man who had just survived a car crash, state officials said Friday. The officer’s trial ended in a hung jury.
Officer Randall Kerrick killed 24-year-old Jonathan Ferrell at 2:45 a.m. on Sept. 14, 2013, shooting at him 12 times and hitting him 10 times on a dark street in a Charlotte subdivision. Officer Kerrick was charged with voluntary manslaughter. His trial ended this month in a mistrial, with four jurors wanting to convict and eight to acquit.
“In consideration of the jurors’ comments, the evidence available to the state and our background in criminal trials, it is our prosecutors’ unanimous belief a retrial will not yield a different result,” a North Carolina senior deputy attorney general, Robert C. Montgomery, wrote to the district attorney for Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.
Mr. Montgomery said that the charges against Officer Kerrick would be dismissed.
Mr. Ferrell’s mother, Georgia, said by telephone from her home in Tallahassee, Fla., that state prosecutors had called her around 9:30 a.m. on Friday to tell her they doubted they could win a second trial.THE Attorney-General has been accused of "pure hypocrisy" in his defence of VLAD laws.
Nicklin independent Peter Wellington has called out Jarrod Bleijie on a speech the then opposition justice spokesman gave to Parliament in 2009 in which he spoke critically of the Bligh Government's proposed Criminal Organisation Bill.
The criticism of that legislation rings close to that the Attorney-General is now receiving for his own Orwellianly-labelled Vicious Lawless Association Disestablishment laws.
Mr Wellington said yesterday Mr Bleijie had gone from talking about the right to a fair trial and the freedom of association to introducing "the most extreme legislation in Australia's history''.
On November 25, 2009, Mr Bleijie in Parliament described the Criminal Organisation Bill as "an attack on the right of freedom of association".
>> NEWMAN WILL DITCH VLAD LAWS... BY 2016
"While it is currently intended for motorcycle gangs, once again this bill does not mention the term 'bikie' or'motorcycle gang' and this piece of legislation could be used against any group that may fall into disfavour regardless of the purpose of their gathering,'' Mr Bleijie said.
"While I agree that people need to be protected from organised crime, there must also be the protection of personal liberties such as the freedom of association."
Similar criticism has been levelled at the VLAD laws which were rushed through Parliament last year and were subject to three revisions.
Hansard from 2009 shows Jarrod Bleijie opposing laws similar to VLAD.
Three Sunshine Coast men who met for a beer at the Yandina Hotel on November 1 have been imprisoned in solitary confinement since before Christmas, charged with the crime of association.
In 2009, Mr Bleijie was adamant that attempts to restrict the right to association were an attack on everyone's freedom.
"I say to the people of Queensland that, with this government, they do have something to fear,'' he said in 2009.
"This Bill encroaches on their personal freedoms and liberties.
"A government that tries to remove these freedoms and liberties is a government that is to be feared."
Mr Wellington said Mr Bleijie's questioning of his stance on the issue was disgraceful, given the level of the Attorney-General's "pure hypocrisy".
Mr Bleijie responded with a statement.
"The criminal gangs forced us to draw a line in the sand when an innocent woman was shot in broad daylight in a shopping centre and when scores of Bandidos rioted in front of families on a busy dining strip,'' Mr Bleijie said. "They were increasingly stomping on the rights of innocent people through drugs, intimidation and violence and we had to take necessary action.
"We didn't like doing it but we are not going to get cold feet, unlike people like Peter Wellington who supported our laws in Parliament.
"Labor's legislation captured no one in five years and criminal motorcycle gangs flourished.
"Specific gangs are named in parts of our legislation but we deliberately allowed it to also capture other criminal groups such as paedophile rings.
"The groups that have been listed have been identified by the police and the Crime and Misconduct Commission as criminal gangs who are involved in drugs, extortion, violence, car thefts and break and enters.
"They have long and many tentacles and they are involved in a huge range of illegal activity.
"We have implemented safeguards such as requiring a jury to determine if an offender is a vicious lawless associate and a statutory review in three years. It is also a defence if an alleged offender can prove that the organisation they are a member of is not a criminal organisation.''Psychology Today had an interesting post on its website in honor of June being Pride Month: Pyschotherapist Melissa Ritter laid out the argument that Grindr, the ubiquitous geo-social hookup app, is a wonderful example of how far the gay-male community has come.
Uh, really?
How extraordinary that wherever a gay man lives or travels, he can instantly find other gay men. He need never feel alone, that he is the “only one.” He’s not forced to search out the often marginalized gay ghettos that continue to offer much needed comradarie and support. The Grindr screen display is a riotous grid of various photos of men—smiling, open faces, as well as lots of body shots–arranged from nearest to farthest away. Tap on a picture and the user receives a brief profile, including the precise distance from that person provided in increments of feet or miles. There are options to chat, send pictures and share location. There is an immediacy and intimacy this app offers that distinguishes it from internet sites providing gay men with access to one another. A few taps and you’ve got a whole group of guys who are hanging out in both your cyber and actual neighborhood.
Sure it’s nice that gay men no longer have to hide in shame, but has Ritter actually seen how most men use Grindr? We’re not meeting up to play trust games or form a drum circle.
In her essay, Ritter shares anecdotes from her patients: One who checks Grindr on a road trip with his partner, just to know “they were not the only two gay men around.” And another who told her about a board-game night where everyone logged on, just to see who was “cute.”
“No one had any intention of leaving the gathering to hook up and no one did,” she explains. “But they were able to feel part of a larger gay community, and to talk playfully and frankly about sex.”
Thanks Dr. Ritter, but gay men have been able to talk playfully and frankly about sex long before hookup apps came on the scene.
Look, we enjoy Grindr as much as the next ‘mo, but its hardly a shining example of how much we’ve accomplished. Not to mention we kind of suspect Ritter’s patients aren’t being totally honest with her about when and why they check the site. How many of us have felt ignored as our buddies stared blankly at a screen checkered with ab shots?
And with all of her talk of the “furtiveness and fear” surrounding homosexuality—and the supposed impossibility of courtship and marriage—it kind of sounds like the good doctor is trapped in the 1970s, when even having gay sex was a political statement.
Today, it’s pretty much just sex.
Grindr is about many things. Sex is one of them, an important one of them. But it is also a place to make friends, combat loneliness, diminish shame and to celebrate gay male identity. Sadly, a part of that identity sometimes includes some self-reproach. Nonetheless, a defiant openness and optimism prevails. And that’s what Gay Pride is about.
Sorry, Doc: There’s nothing wrong with using Grindr—or Manhunt, any other tool to help you land a guy—but as we approach full equality on all fronts, we’d like to think gay men have accomplished more than figure out how to hook up faster and more often.Recording Dog Barking Sound Effects by Andre Philips in Belgium!
These free dog barking sound effects coming from André Philips! He recorded his dog and other dogs in the neighborhood and he contribute these sounds to the FreeToUseSounds community royalty-free and license-free!
Who Is André Philips?
So let’s talk about André! He is a Sound Designer, a Boom Operator who worked on many film projects especially in Belgium and the Netherland! The sound of the donkey and the dogs are not the last one from him and I am super excited to put them up!
Thank you so much, André, for this very special sound and I really appreciate that!
André on IMDB!
Andrés Homepage Philipsfilmsound!
André on Facebook!
Download Dog Barking Sound Effects On Dropbox
These sound effects are free of charge!!!
If you have already access to my “Complete Library” you will find these recordings in the “Belgium Category”!
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RelatedNEW DELHI: The search engine giant Google and HTC have entered into a long term partnership for manufacturing Nexus devices, according to a new report.According to a report by MyDrivers, the Taiwanese manufacturer has signed a three year contract with Google in order to manufacturer Nexus smartphones. This highlights that HTC will be manufacturing upcoming Nexus handsets starting from 2016.In January, a report from LlabTooFeR also suggested that HTC will be making two Nexus devices which are codenamed as T50 and T55. In 2014, HTC made its first Nexus smartphone dubbed as Nexus One. The company also made a Nexus tablet in 2014 called as Nexus 9.This is the first time when Google has partnered with an OEM for three years for the Nexus Program. However, this is just a rumour and none of the companies has confirmed the news.In 2015, LG and Huwaei made the Nexus smartphones called Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P respectively. Last month, LG backed out from the Nexus program and also stated that it will not be making a successor of Nexus 5X.This partnership can turn out be fruitful for HTC as the company is struggling hard to grab a fair share in the smartphone market.Slowly, and without much fanfare, urban areas have become overgrown by a tangle of sensors: cameras snapping pictures at red lights, microphones triangulating the sound of gunshots, sensors tracking foot traffic through malls, stadiums, and airports. But every once in a while something happens that illustrates not only how pervasive these surveillance networks are, but how freely they operate and how little say the public has in where they’re put and how they’re used.
On Monday, New York City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications killed a pilot project that involved installing hundreds of sensors in phone booths across Manhattan. The Bluetooth-enabled sensors, called beacons, were used by marketing companies to send commercial messages to people walking by via a smartphone app they had downloaded.
Why did the city shut down the project? Because it hadn’t authorized the sensors to be used this way.FILE - In this Sept. 13, 2012 file photo, presidential candidate Virgil Goode Jr. works the campaign trail in downtown Lynchburg, Va. Goodes presidential run is under the Constitution Party banner with his name on the ballot in a couple dozen states and as a qualified write-in candidate in several more. (AP Photo/Don Petersen, File) less FILE - In this Sept. 13, 2012 file photo, presidential candidate Virgil Goode Jr. works the campaign trail in downtown Lynchburg, Va. Goodes presidential run is under the Constitution Party banner with his... more Photo: Don Petersen Photo: Don Petersen Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Possible spoiler riles GOP ranks 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
POWHATAN, Va. — Virgil Goode has absolutely no chance of winning the presidency. But here in his home state, his quixotic quest for the White House as the Constitution Party candidate could peel votes away from Mitt Romney, and that is making some Republicans nervous.
"Why would you do this?" Susan Ferreri, a small-business owner, asked Goode recently when he dropped by an Italian restaurant in this Richmond suburb to hand out leaflets and rustle up votes. "I'm against Obama, and I will go with Romney, and I just really hope you don't upset it."
Goode, 66, a former congressman who is a staunch opponent of immigration and is a fiscal and social conservative, politely defended himself and moved on.
"I have heard that argument before," he said later in his distinctive Southern drawl.
Indeed he has. In many states, Republicans have worked to suppress Goode's candidacy. He is on the ballot in 26 states and is running as a write-in candidate in an additional 14. Republicans succeeded in blocking him in Pennsylvania; Goode says that it would have cost him $100,000 to fight to have his name included and that he did not have the money.
But the efforts failed here in the swing state of Virginia, where President Barack Obama and Romney are running neck and neck in the battle for 13 electoral votes. In the latest Fox News poll in Virginia, Goode is backed by 1 percent of likely voters.
Silver-haired and lanky, Goode has roots as a country lawyer in the bucolic southwestern town of Rocky Mount, where he is a household name and has a base of regional support.
"The problem for Romney is he is culturally so opposite from most voters in Southside Virginia that there is an area for Virgil Goode to win votes," said David Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. "In 2008, there were close to 40,000 votes cast for third-party candidates in Virginia. What if Virgil Goode took 25,000 votes? That could be a potential difference maker."
The Romney campaign says it is not worried. "This election is a very clear choice between two candidates," said Rich Beeson, Romney's political director. "We are running a campaign that will ensure Mitt Romney wins regardless of who is in the race."
But Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia, is more cautious. "I don't think his candidacy is helpful," Davis said of Goode.
To say Goode is running his campaign on a shoestring would be an understatement. He does not take money from political action committees and refuses all donations over $200. So far, he has spent about $200,000 — including, he said, $65,000 to $70,000 of his own money.
His platform is fairly simple. His jobs plan is to end all illegal immigration — and legal immigration, too, until the American unemployment rate drops below 5 percent.
He also favors ending automatic citizenship for children born in the United States to illegal immigrants and would not allow them to attend public schools.Microsoft has released a new ergonomic split keyboard and mouse combo, and it looks downright weird.
The Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop kit pairs a new keyboard, the Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard, and a new mouse, the Sculpt Ergonomic Mouse. The purpose of both is to encourage you to hold your arms "just so" and keep your wrists healthy.
The mouse has a new, asymmetric shape—no good for lefties, as is so often the case with this kind of thing. Like some of Microsoft's other recent mice, it includes a dedicated Start button so that you can bring up the Start screen or Start menu with, er, just the click of a button.
But the mouse looks pretty conventional compared to the keyboard. Split keyboards have been with us for several decades now, with Microsoft's first ergonomic keyboard shipping in 1994. The shape has changed over the years, but apparently the original design wasn't as healthy as they thought. It's been replaced with a new, domed design, and the keyboards have never looked quite as strange as the new one.
It's all about the split. Past Microsoft keyboards have just filled the gap between the keyboard's two halves with plastic, occasionally adorning it with scroll wheels zoom sliders or buttons. But the new one? It just has... a gap. Empty space.
Microsoft says the keyboard was codenamed Manta Ray, because it apparently looks like a Manta Ray. I think it should have been codenamed Madonna, because it looks |
The MLS club has needed attacking midfielder for years, and a move for the Brazilian star would fill all its needs, especially with news that Thierry Henry may retire.
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NEW YORK — The New York Red Bulls are facing the prospects of losing Thierry Henry this winter and they have also been searching for a quality attacking midfielder for the better part of the past decade.So who better to fill the team's needs and provide the perfect insurance policy than Brazilian superstar Ronaldinho?The toothy playmaker has left Brazilian club Atletico Mineiro, and the Red Bulls would be wise to jump into the fight to land his services before he joins Xavi on the list of star midfielders who MLS let get away this summer.Sources tell Goal USA that while Red Bulls team officials did meet with Ronaldinho representatives during the World Cup, there were no serious conversations about having Ronaldinho join the Red Bulls at that time.The Red Bulls might want to reconsider that stance, if they haven't already.Adding Ronaldinho would address several needs for the Red Bulls, who defeated Arsenal on Saturday in a friendly in Harrison, New Jersey. For one, signing Ronaldinho would give the team a sorely needed attacking midfielder to help take some of the playmaking responsibilities from Henry. Secondly, landing Ronaldinho could help pursuade Henry to sign a new contract, with his current deal set to expire at the end of the season.Henry and Ronaldinho were teammates at Barcelona during the 2007-08 season.Red Bulls head of global soccer Gerard Houllier stated Saturday that he thinks Henry will retire after this season, which would put serious pressure on the club to sign a high-profile star to fill the void Henry's departure would leave. Ronaldinho is the type of player who could do that, both on and off the field.The Red Bulls could also be feeling the pressure to land another big name after New York City FC's recent signings of Frank Lampard and David Villa. With NYCFC set to begin play in 2015, the Red Bulls run the risk of losing a greater share of the New York market if they don't improve the roster.Signing Ronaldinho would do just that.This isn't to say signing the 34-year-old wouldn't have its share of risk. The 2002 World Cup winner is known for his partying lifestyle, and living in New York would offer Ronaldinho plenty of opportunity to enjoy the nightlife, which might not be the best thing for a team investing millions in him. Ronaldinho showed during his time at Atletico Mineiro, and through last year's Copa Libertadores, that he can still work his magic and be an impact player, but his abrupt departure from Atletico Mineiro also has to give the Red Bulls some pause.Ronaldinho also doesn't speak English, which has been virtual prerequisite for the list of stars who have played for the Red Bulls (and previous incarnation MetroStars). It would limit the impact he could have from a marketing standpoint. That said, Ronaldinho does speak Spanish, which would help him provide some marketing muscle into a demographic where the Red Bulls tried and failed to tap into with the signing of Mexican national team captain Rafa Marquez.And it just might be Marquez who has the Red Bulls a bit wary about splashing the cash. They basically wasted $15 million on Marquez's tenure with the club, and would probably have to invest more than that to land the Brazilian playmaker, who doesn't quite have a "can't-miss" label attached to him.Though risky, signing Ronaldinho is one of the few options the Red Bulls have to help offer some tangible insurance for the possibility that Henry retires. Not to mention the possibility that Australian star Tim Cahill could be ready to end his time with the Red Bulls to return to Australia ahead of the 2015 Asian Cup. There have been rumblings about a potential Cahill move, and losing him would be a big blow to the Red Bulls because of what he means to the team from a production and leadership standpoint.Even if Henry and Cahill do return to the Red Bulls in 2015, adding Ronaldinho could still be a masterstroke for a team currently struggling to meet expectations after winning the MLS Supporters' Shield in 2013. Ronaldinho's presence could allow Henry to focus more on scoring goals rather than being the playmaker he has effectively been forced to be the past two seasons, and signing Ronaldinho just might help convince Henry to stick around beyond 2014 rather than retire.With a new rival setting up shop nearby, and two star players who may or may not stick around beyond this year, the Red Bulls would be wise to consider signing Ronaldinho, or regret the missed opportunity.Last week, a cafe in Seattle banned the use of Google Glass, a reflection of the growing concern about the ways this cutting-edge technology might be abused. But the critics are ignoring the technology’s potential to make our lives safer and more democratic. Worse, by stigmatizing its use, the Glass-haters are spawning an entirely new kind of discrimination.
Illustration by Fatal Sweets via Shutterstock
Google Glass, the much heralded wearable computer eyepiece, has yet to be officially launched, yet the hysterics against its use have already begun. The device can, among other things, be used to snap photos and access the Web. People are understandably concerned that they might be filmed or photographed without their knowledge or consent.
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The critics have two primary worries: First, they're concerned that Glass will encourage people to increasingly violate social norms, particularly when it comes to privacy and the enhanced potential for remote presence (like talking to someone else on the phone, which is hardly a new problem). And second, that it’ll allow people to take even more creepy pictures of people.
These concerns are, mostly, reasonable. But what the Glass-haters don't realize is that society will find a way to adapt to these technologies (whether through new laws or social customs) — and we’ll be better off for it.
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There's also no denying that Google-hating is also an important part of the equation; many people can't separate the technology from the company.
Yes, Google is a trailblazer in this area, but its developers are most certainly not the ones who came up with the idea, nor will Glass be the only game in town once the technology becomes fully realized.
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The idea of wearable computing has been around for ages. Back in the 1970s, Toronto professor Steve Mann started to work on his EyeTap device, a clunky attempt at the world’s first head-mounted camera. Today, his device looks almost exactly Google Glass, which is hardly a coincidence.
But Mann was not seeking to develop technologies that would allow him to spy on people or take creepy photographs. His initial idea was far more conceptual — one with his sights set firmly on the future. Mann believed, and still believes, that camera-embedded wearables could be both liberating and empowering. Even democratizing. In a world peppered with security cameras and a sensory-sphere completely dominated by corporate memes, Mann foresaw the wearable computer as a means for individuals to re-take control of their environment and protect themselves.
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His idea was called sousveillance — a way for people to watch the watchers and be at the ready to chronicle any physical assaults or threats.
“Rather than tolerating terrorism as a feedback means to restore the balance, an alternative framework would be to build a stable system to begin with, e.g. a system that is self-balancing,” he wrote. “Such a society may be built with sousveillance (inverse surveillance) as a way to balance the increasing (and increasingly one-sided) surveillance.”
Mann listed some potential benefits:
Good drivers, professors, teachers, government officials, and police welcome sousveillance because it ensures their integrity
Bad drivers, professors, teachers, government officials, and police oppose sousveillance
Sousveillance is necessary to prevent crime, corruption, terrorism, etc.
Building sousveillance infrastructure into a government, a police force, military, or the like, will ensure integrity, and ensure that surveillance is balanced
Societies with surveillance only (e.g. no sousveillance) are unstable and tend toward totalitarianism (e.g. overthrow of government, or takeover, martial law, etc.)
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Last year, in a complete stroke of irony (or validation), Mann was attacked at a McDonald’s in France for wearing such a device — what may have been the first documented cybernetic hate crime. But Mann was able to use his EyeTap to record the attack and the attackers as it happened.
Of course, what many Glass critics also fail to acknowledge is that the entire affair was recorded by McDonald's' very own surveillance cameras. When we’re out in public, we are already being filmed without our permission — and often by private firms who are not looking out for our best interests, but their own. Moreover, state-planted cameras are also starting to appear everywhere. Take the city of London, for example, where there’s virtually no public place hidden from prying eyes.
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There’s no question that we’re headed towards a Vingeian Rainbow’s End, a transparent world that David Brin calls the Surveillance Society. Or what futurist Jamais Cascio calls the Participatory Panopticon. The death of privacy is upon us.
And the whole Google-hating thing is an equally misguided and unfortunate distraction.
Eyeglass devices will eventually be developed by other companies (or even through open source initiatives) and exhibit vastly different features (Glass already has a competitor). Before long, we’ll be able to engage in augmented reality while filtering out annoying objects in our environment, including billboards and other obtrusive eyesores forced upon our visual spectrum. In their place, we’ll add useful things like maps or the weather report or a picture of our cat.
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So instead of being reactionary, cafes like the 5 Point should work to find work-arounds to the problems instead of simply banning them outright. Given the future prominence of wearables, bans are simply not viable long term solutions.
It's also important to not stigmatize the use of wearables and cybernetic technologies in general. Human capacities, and the ways in which we interact with each other, are constantly evolving in step with our technologies. The trick is to normalize them in such a way that no one gets hurt, and no one gets to miss out.
All while using them in an empowering sort of way.
Images: 5 Point Cafe, Google, Steve Mann.The new assignment expression operator := coming in Python 3.8 in late 2019 will support assignment inside of lambda expressions. (This operator can only appear within a parenthesized (...), bracketed [...], or braced {...} expression for syntactic reasons.) For example, we will be able to write the following:
import sys say_hello = lambda: ( message := "Hello world", sys.stdout.write(message + "
") )[-1] say_hello()
In Python 2, it was possible to perform local assignments as a side effect of list comprehensions.
import sys say_hello = lambda: ( [None for message in ["Hello world"]], sys.stdout.write(message + "
") )[-1] say_hello()
However, it's not possible to use either of these in your example because your variable flag is in an outer scope, not the lambda's scope. This doesn't have to do with lambda, it's the general behaviour in Python 2. Python 3 lets you get around this with the nonlocal keyword inside of def s, but nonlocal can't be used inside lambda s.
There's a workaround (see below), but while we're on the topic...
In some cases you can use this to do everything inside of a lambda :
(lambda: [ ['def' for sys in [__import__('sys')] for math in [__import__('math')] for sub in [lambda *vals: None] for fun in [lambda *vals: vals[-1]] for echo in [lambda *vals: sub( sys.stdout.write(u" ".join(map(unicode, vals)) + u"
"))] for Cylinder in [type('Cylinder', (object,), dict( __init__ = lambda self, radius, height: sub( setattr(self, 'radius', radius), setattr(self, 'height', height)), volume = property(lambda self: fun( ['def' for top_area in [math.pi * self.radius ** 2]], self.height * top_area))))] for main in [lambda: sub( ['loop' for factor in [1, 2, 3] if sub( ['def' for my_radius, my_height in [[10 * factor, 20 * factor]] for my_cylinder in [Cylinder(my_radius, my_height)]], echo(u"A cylinder with a radius of %.1fcm and a height " u"of %.1fcm has a volume of %.1fcm³." % (my_radius, my_height, my_cylinder.volume)))])]], main()])()
A cylinder with a radius of 10.0cm and a height of 20.0cm has a volume of 6283.2cm³.
A cylinder with a radius of 20.0cm and a height of 40.0cm has a volume of 50265.5cm³.
A cylinder with a radius of 30.0cm and a height of 60.0cm has a volume of 169646.0cm³.
Please don't.
...back to your original example: though you can't perform assignments to the flag variable in the outer scope, you can use functions to modify the previously-assigned value.
For example, flag could be an object whose.value we set using setattr :
flag = Object(value=True) input = [Object(name=''), Object(name='fake_name'), Object(name='')] output = filter(lambda o: [ flag.value or bool(o.name), setattr(flag, 'value', flag.value and bool(o.name)) ][0], input)
[Object(name=''), Object(name='fake_name')]
If we wanted to fit the above theme, we could use a list comprehension instead of setattr :
[None for flag.value in [bool(o.name)]]
But really, in serious code you should always use a regular function definition instead of a lambda if you're going to be doing outer assignment.E3 2016: The Big List of Confirmed Games
The Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016 (E3 2016), an annual trade show for the video game industry. The 22nd Electronic Entertainment Expo event will be hosted by Entertainment Software Association.
E3 2016 is scheduled to take place at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California from June 14 to June 18, 2016.
You can check out the details about Major E3 2016 press conferences here.
The major exhibitors scheduled to appear:
Bethesda Softworks
Deep Silver
Electronic Arts
Focus Home Interactive
Koei Tecmo
Microsoft Studios
Nintendo
Sega
Sony Interactive Entertainment
Square Enix
Take-Two Interactive
Ubisoft
The list of titles that appeared at E3 2016 (Updated on June 16):
2K Games
Battleborn (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Civilization Revolution 2 Plus (Vita)
Mafia III (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Sid Meier’s Civilization VI (PC)
WWE 2K17 (PC, PS3, Xbox 360, PS4, Xbox One)
505 Games
Abzû (PC, PS4)
Assetto Corsa (PS4, Xbox One)
Portal Knights (PC)
Prominence Poker (PC)
Rocket League (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Activision
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Destiny: Rise of Iron (PS4, Xbox One)
Skylanders: Imaginators (PS4)
Anuman
Moto Racer 4 (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Syberia III (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Yesterday Origins (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Bandai Namco Entertainment
Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
God Eater 2: Rage Burst (PC, PS4, Vita)
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven (PS4)
Mobile Suit Gundam: Extreme Vs-Force (Vita)
Necropolis (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization (PS4, Vita)
Tales of Berseria (PC, PS4)
Tekken 7 (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Bethesda Softworks
Dishonored II (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Doom: Unto the Evil (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
The Elder Scrolls: Legends (PC, iOS, Android)
The Elder Scrolls Online: Dark Brotherhood (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim – Special Edition (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Fallout 4 (PC, PS4, Xbox One, HTC Vive)
Fallout Shelter (PC, iOS, Android)
Prey (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Quake Champions (PC)
Bigben Interactive
WRC 6 (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Capcom
Monster Hunter Generations (3DS)
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (PC, PS4, Xbox One, PSVR)
CD Projekt
Gwent: The Witcher Card Game (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Chucklefish Games
Stardew Valley (PC, PS4, Xbox One, Wii U)
Codemasters
F1 2016 (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Compulsion Games
We Happy Few (PC, Xbox One)
Deep Silver
Agents of Mayhem (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Devolver Digital
Absolver (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Eitr (PC, PS4)
Mother Russia Bleeds (PC, PS4)
Serious Sam VR (Oculus Rift)
Shadow Warrior 2 (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Electronic Arts
Battlefield 1 (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Fe (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
FIFA 17 (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Madden NFL 17 (PC, PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360)
Mass Effect: Andromeda (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
NHL 17 (PS4, Xbox One)
Star Wars Battlefront: X-Wing VR Missions (PSVR)
Titanfall 2 (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Focus Home Interactive
Farming Simulator 17 (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Mordheim: City of the Damned (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Space Hulk: Deathwing (PC)
Styx: Shards of Darkness (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
The Surge (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
The Technomancer (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Vampyr (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
GungHo Online Entertainment
Let It Die (PS4)
Kadokawa Games
Demon Gaze II (Vita)
God Wars: Beyond Time (PS4, Vita)
Project Code: Daten (PS4, Vita)
Root Letter (PS4, Vita)
Koei Tecmo
Attack on Titan (PC, PS3, PS4, Vita, Xbox One)
Nioh (PS4)
Untitled Omega Force Game (TBA)
Konami
Pro Evolution Soccer 2017 (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Marvelous USA
Akiba’s Beat (PS4 / Vita)
Corpse Party (3DS)
Exile’s End (PS4, Wii U, Vita)
Fate/EXTELLA: The Umbral Star (PS4, Vita)
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II (PS3, Vita)
Shantae: Half-Genie Hero (PC, PS3, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One)
Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns (3DS)
Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity (PS4)
Microsoft Studios
Dead Rising 4 (PC, Xbox One)
Forza Horizon 3 (PC, Xbox One)
Gears of War 4 (PC, Xbox One)
Halo Wars 2 (PC, Xbox One)
Inside (PC, Xbox One)
Killer Instinct (PC, Xbox One)
Minecraft (PC, iOS, Android)
ReCore (PC, Xbox One)
Scalebound (PC, Xbox One)
Sea of Thieves (PC, Xbox One)
State of Decay 2 (PC, Xbox One)
Natsume
Harvest Moon: Skytree Village (3DS)
River City: Tokyo Rumble (3DS)
Wild Guns: Reloaded (PS4)
Nintendo
BoxBoxBoy! (3DS)
Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past (3DS)
Ever Oasis (3DS)
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Wii U)
Mario Party: Star Rush (3DS)
Paper Mario: Color Splash (Wii U)
Pokémon Go (iOS / Android)
Pokémon Sun and Moon (3DS)
Rhythm Heaven Megamix (3DS)
Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE (Wii U)
Yo-kai Watch 2 (3DS)
Nordic Games
Battle Chasers: Nightwar (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Elex (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
The Guild 3 (PC)
SpellForce 3 (PC)
Sega
7th Dragon III Code: VFD (3DS)
Persona 5 (PS3, PS4)
Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice (3DS)
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III (PC)
Yakuza 0 (PS4)
Sony Interactive Entertainment
Crash Bandicoot Trilogy Remastered (PS4)
Days Gone (PS4)
Death Stranding (PC, PS4)
Detroit: Become Human (PS4)
Farpoint (PSVR)
God of War (PS4)
Gran Turismo Sport (PS4)
Gravity Rush 2 (PS4)
Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4)
The Last Guardian (PS4)
Spider-Man (PS4)
Square Enix
Black the Fall (PC)
Deus Ex Go (iOS, Android)
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age (PS4)
Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Final Fantasy XV (PS4, PSVR, Xbox One)
Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius (iOS, Android)
Hitman (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
I Am Setsuna (PC, PS4, Vita)
Just Cause 3: Land Mech Assault (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Kingdom Hearts HD II.8 Final Chapter Prologue (PS4)
Nier: Automata (PS4)
Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness (PS3, PS4)
The Turing Test (PC)
Valentino Rossi: The Game (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
World of Final Fantasy (PS4, Vita)
Team17
Overcooked (PC)
Strength of the Sword Ultimate (PC, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox One)
Worms WMD (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Yooka-Laylee (PC, PS4, Wii U, Xbox One)
Telltale Games
Batman (TBA)
The Walking Dead: Season Three (TBA)
Ubisoft
Eagle Flight (Oculus Rift)
For Honor (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Grow Up (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Just Dance 2017 (NX, PC, PS3, PS4, Wii, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One)
South Park: The Fractured but Whole (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Star Trek: Bridge Crew (Oculus Rift)
Steep (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Tom Clancy’s The Division expansions (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Trials of the Blood Dragon (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Watch Dogs 2 (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Batman: Arkham VR (PSVR)
Injustice 2 (PS4, Xbox One)
Lego Dimensions (PS3, PS4, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One)
Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens (PC, 3DS, PS3, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One)
Lego Worlds (PC)We don’t know details yet of the murder of a woman at Vaughan Foods -- an Oklahoma distribution center -- by a co-worker, but we do know that it was a beheading and we do know the alleged suspect -- Alton Nolen, 30 -- was a new convert to Islam.
We also know that other workers at Vaughan say the suspect had tried to convert them to that religion.
Some MSM outlets are emphasizing that the suspect was recently fired (it's workplace violence, doncha know?), but the number of firings that lead to revenge beheadings is minuscule. In fact, I don't know of any previous. But we don't have to look too far back, not more than a day or two, to find a popular motivation for beheadings in general -- jihad.
Was Nolen motivated by jihad or workplace revenge or a cocktail of both? Probably both. He had a checkered past. He had been convicted in January 2011 of “multiple drug offenses, assault and battery on a police officer and escape from detention,” according to state records. He was released from prison in March 2013.
We don’t know the extent to which Nolen’s conversion to Islam occurred in prison, although it is highly likely most of it did. This is surely worth investigating. Such conversions are a monumental powder keg in the process of going off. From Wikipedia:
J. Michael Waller claims that Muslim inmates comprise 17-20% of the prison population in New York, or roughly 350,000 inmates in 2003. He also claims that 80% of the prisoners who "find faith" while in prison convert to Islam.[1] These converted inmates are mostly African American, with a small but growing Hispanic minority.[2] Waller also asserts that many converts are radicalized by outside Islamist groups linked to terrorism, but other experts suggest that when radicalization does occur it has little to no connection with these outside interests.[3][4][5]
Oh, really? Or should I say, “What difference does it make?” Those “other experts” are being naïve or tendentious. It’s not as if the Islamic extremist playbooks are a secret. They are the basic texts of the religion itself, studied by all adherents in or outside prison, in large groups or by themselves. These same texts call for the extermination or, at best, dhimmitude of the infidel who does not convert. So the behavior of the ummah is regulated across borders. You don’t have to be a card-carrying member of ISIL to know how to behead. Anyone can do it.
This makes our prisons veritable training grounds -- petri dishes, if you will -- for fanatic killers of the type of the Oklahoma suspect, not to mention recruitment centers for whatever murderous Islamic sect happens to be in vogue that week or month. The only difference between New York and Oklahoma prisons would be one of scale.The War on Drugs has become the longest and most costly war in American history, the question has become, how much more can the country endure? Inspired by the death of four family members from "legal drugs" Texas filmmaker Kevin Booth sets out to discover why the Drug War has become such a big failure. Three and a half years in the making the film follows gang members, former DEA agents, CIA officers, narcotics officers, judges, politicians, prisoners and celebrities. Most notably the film befriends Freeway Ricky Ross; the man many accuse for starting the Crack epidemic, who after being arrested discovered that his cocaine source had been working for the CIA. AMERICAN DRUG WAR shows how money, power and greed have corrupted not just dope fiends but an entire government. More importantly, it shows what can be done about it. This is not some 'pro-drug' stoner film, but a collection of expert testimonials from the ground troops on the front lines of the drug war, the ones who are fighting it and the ones who are living it.Health Impact News Editor Comments
We have lost the war on cancer. At the beginning of the last century, one person in twenty would get cancer. In the 1940s it was one out of every sixteen people. In the 1970s it was one person out of ten. Today one person out of three gets cancer in the course of their life.
The cancer industry is probably the most prosperous business in the United States. In 2014, there was an estimated 1,665,540 new cancer cases diagnosed and 585,720 cancer deaths in the US. $6 billion of tax-payer funds are cycled through various federal agencies for cancer research, such as the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The NCI states that the medical costs of cancer care are $125 billion, with a projected 39 percent increase to $173 billion by 2020.
The simple fact is that the cancer industry employs too many people and produces too much income to allow a cure to be found. All of the current research on cancer drugs is based on the premise that the cancer market will grow, not shrink.
John Thomas explains to us why the current cancer industry prospers while treating cancer, but cannot afford to cure it.
Cancer Makes Too Much Money to Cure
by John P. Thomas
Health Impact News
My Personal Introduction to Conventional Cancer Treatment Began in 1995
The surgeon pointed his pen at a large tumor on the CAT scan and began to explain the procedure for removing the colon cancer. He then paused for a moment and said to my wife, “This isn’t your biggest problem.” He then began to tap his pen on three small points that were visible on the image of her liver. “These are a much bigger problem, because we can’t remove them with surgery.”
Everyone we met at the University medical center was compassionate and concerned for us. After the surgery, we met with the oncologist. He explained the chemotherapy option. He told my wife, “You have 6 months to one year to live if you do chemotherapy. If you don’t do chemotherapy, then you have 6 months to 1 year to live.” The only positive reason that he could offer us for doing chemotherapy was that if by chance she was in the group that only had 6 months to live, then it might extend her life a few more months. We asked about alternative treatments, and he indicated that none of them have proven beneficial. My wife opted to not do chemotherapy, because she didn’t want to suffer the side effects of the drugs.
Many things were different in 1995 than they are today. At that time, we did not have easy access to information about alternative cancer treatments. We did learn about a few alternatives and tried some of them, but the cancer kept growing. My wife refused to consider any alternative that would require her to make major lifestyle changes. She was willing to try therapies as long as she could keep working and could continue eating the standard American diabetic diet, which was a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet. She only became willing to consider other alternative treatments when she was within a couple weeks of death. She lived for exactly one year from the time of her diagnosis.
Are We Winning the War on Cancer?
In the 2010 documentary titled “Cut Poison Burn,” filmmaker Wayne Chesler presents powerful facts about corruption in the business of conventional cancer treatment in the United States. Consider these seven comments that were taken from the documentary, which show that America is far from winning the war against cancer.
“From 1920 to the present time, we have made little progress in the treatment of adult cancers. So, a person who gets prostate cancer or breast cancer today will live as long as a person who got it in 1920.” (Charles B. Simone, M.MS., M.D., Founder, Simone Protective Cancer Center)
“Why are people terrified when they hear the word cancer? Because they know it [conventional cancer treatment] doesn’t work.” (Dr. Julian Whitaker, M.D. Founder, Whitaker Wellness Institute)
“Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud.” (Dr. Linus Pauling 1986, Nobel Laureate)
In a patent that was designed to steal Dr. Burzynski’s cancer cure, the United States Government, stated, “Current approaches to combat cancer rely primarily on the use of chemical and radiation, which are themselves carcinogenic and may promote recurrences and the development of metastatic disease.” The US Government admits that conventional treatments cause cancer. (Patent No. 5,605,930. “Compositions and methods for treating and preventing pathologies including cancer.” Approved 1997 USA Department of HHS page 56)
“The American Cancer Society is more interested in accumulating wealth than saving lives.” (Chronicles of Philanthropy 1992)
“Breast Cancer Awareness Month was actually initiated by the companies that make Tamoxifen. The devices for mammograms are made by General Electric and General Electric is in a relationship with the people behind Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so there is a huge industry that is invested in breast cancer. Although the goal is noble, to me it is obscene that these companies are using the symbol of the pink ribbon for commercial purposes only. Very few dollars ever make it to really help women.” (Dr. Sherrill Sellman, author of What Women MUST Know to Protect their Daughters from Breast Cancer.)
“I find it very interesting that we have all these walks for the cure for cancer. We got all the risk factors. We got all the donations. We are going to find a cure in this decade. All this money keeps pouring in and it all goes to the same guys. (Dr. Julian Whitaker, M.D. Founder, Whitaker Wellness Institute)
How can this be? Where have all those billions of research dollars gone? Where is the fruit from the war on cancer that began in 1971? Are we really much safer from the ravages of cancer today than we were in the past?
The research dollars have all been devoured by a cancer monopoly – a cartel – consisting of pharmaceutical companies, the American Medical Association, a research system that supports pharmaceutical manufacturers, a system of charities that raise money for cancer research, and various federal agencies such as the US FDA. These groups have little interest in curing cancer, but are fully committed to earning profits for the cancer monopoly that is headed by the pharmaceutical companies.
Cancer is a Metabolic Disease not a Genetic Disease
There is considerable talk these days in the media and among researchers who conduct research for the pharmaceutical industry that is intended to convince us that the cause of cancer is genetic abnormalities.
The belief in a genetic cause for cancer serves the drug companies very well. They want us to believe that the cure for cancer will need to be based on genetics, and individualized drugs will need to be developed to match each person’s genetic profile and their specific type of cancer. The vast excitement about genetics on the part of drug companies and the conventional medical system is based on the fact that conventional medical treatments are unable to cure most cancers. This is a fact they will not admit.
They want us to stop asking the question, “Why has the 40 year war on cancer failed to produce any results?” They want us to stop asking why there are only three approved treatments for cancer (surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy) and why no new cancer therapies have been approved by the US FDA in the last one hundred years. They want us to have hope for a brighter day in cancer treatment while our friends and family die by the thousands every day.
Dr. Thomas N. Seyfried, Ph.D. addresses the metabolic nature of cancer. He is a nationally known researcher in Genetics and Biochemistry. His research program focuses on gene environmental interactions related to complex diseases, such as epilepsy, autism, brain cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Seyfried investigates many of these diseases from the perspective of genetics, lipidomics, and energy metabolism. Much of his work also has direct translational benefit to the clinic for the treating of cancer through the use of the restricted ketogenic diet (KD-R). He is the author of Cancer as a Metabolic Disease, published in 2012.
Dr. Seyfried’s research shows us that once again, the drug companies are on the wrong track when it comes to curing cancer. The current path of drug company research will not lead to a cure for cancer, but will perpetuate their multibillion dollar business model, which earns profits on the basis of withholding curative cancer treatments from the healthcare system.
These are a few of Dr. Seyfried’s findings taken from the conclusion to his book. [1] My comments are in brackets.
1. No real progress has been made in the management of advanced or metastatic cancer for more than 40 years. The number of people dying each year and each day has changed little in more than 10 years.
2. Most of the conceptual advances made in understanding the mechanisms of cancer have more to do with nonmetastatic tumors than with metastatic tumors. [Many cancers are discovered after they metastasize and have already spread to other locations in the body.]
3. Most cancer, regardless of cell or tissue origin, is a singular disease of respiratory insufficiency coupled with compensatory fermentation. [There are not really hundreds of cancer types that need to be studied separately. There is a common mechanism for treating all cancers.]
4. Some factors that can cause respiratory insufficiency and cancer include age, viral infections, hypoxia, inflammation, rare inherited mutations, radiation, and carcinogens. [A very small number of cancers have a genetic origin. Other factors such as toxic exposure create conditions where cancer can develop.]
5. The genomic instability seen in tumor cells is a downstream epiphenomenon of respiratory insufficiency and enhanced fermentation. [In other words, there are genetic abnormalities associated with cancer, however, these are a consequence of cancer and not the cause of it.]
7. The view that most cancer is a genetic disease is no longer credible. [This is a statement made by a researcher who began his career as a genetic researcher.]
8. Cancer cells depend largely on glucose and glutamine metabolism for survival, growth, and proliferation. [They must have glucose, which is a simple sugar, in order to live.]
9. Restricted access to glucose and glutamine will compromise cancer cell growth and survival. [When cancer cells do |
two very different extremes of me. I guess I can't say which one I am more or not. You have to get to know me to really understand."
The Diabotical Kickstarter trades off of Harding's reputation as a bit of an eSports badboy. It even references his firing by Valve and Newell's very public insult.
"He threw me a bit of a bone, I guess," Harding says, turning the narrative on its head. "I'm not going to lie. But that was his call, right? It's more just having fun with it."
Gabe Newell on-stage at The International 6.
Now that Diabotical has been a Kickstarter success, Harding faces the prospect of having to secure a release on Steam. Steam's near monopoly on PC game sales means it's the place to be, unless you're Blizzard. The GD Studio is not Blizzard. It needs to be on Steam.
But Gaben? "So many people I know at Valve, they're just so nice," Harding says, diplomatically. "If the game's good, why shouldn't it be on Steam? Let's assume that it is, okay, and we'll take another conversation if it isn't."
Harding wants to leave the drama with Gabe Newell behind to focus on Diabotical, but he's clued up enough to know it's an incident that will dog him for years to come. He mentions to me that he knew it would come up and is happy to talk about it, which I respect. Better to face the beast than to cower.
Throughout our interview, Harding has been quick to reply to my questions. It's not until I ask him how he would describe himself that there's a pause long enough for me to wonder if he's stumped.
"Someone who loves creating and building awesome things in their own way, not only a product but helpful to certain groups of people," Harding eventually replies.
"I give a shit. That's me. I actually give a shit."We all love drones, and we love to just buy one and go outside and make it fly by itself, this is great. But what is actually going on inside the drone? In this post I’m going to explain a bit how a loiter controller works, with the difference is that I’ll show my controller, share the python code and that I’m using a motion capture system inside my lab. The great MAST Lab.
First things first, you can check the code here. And secondly, I need to explain our setup.
We are using Altax Flight Stack which is a tuple of computers connected with each other and sharing information. The flight controller is a very cheap naze32, running baseflight (but cleanflight will work as well), and the companion computer is a Raspberry Pi (any version will do the work…). The entire script does not consume too much CPU.
The connection diagram is showed above, the motion capture system is connected to a desktop computer and this computer sends the mocap data and the joystick information via a common wireless network (UDP), this information is used by the raspberry pi to know the position and attitude of the vehicle, then the rpi calculates a set of commands (roll angle, pitch angle, yaw rate and throttle) using simplistic PID controllers and then it sends the information to the flight controller.
This outer loop control is working at 100hz, but it can be configured to go slower.
Important to notice that we have crashed lots of times when starting to test/debug this system. Most of the crashes are due to the desktop computer “hanging out”… then the vehicle stops receiving the information and will keep the last command. A auto-landing feature is needed, this feature will be added on version 2.
In the part of the control, we are using angle mode on the inner loop (naze32) and then we calculate the appropriate angle commands (pitch and roll) from desired accelerations (outputs of the controllers) to make the vehicle hold the commanded position in the space.
The most important part of the code is when we calculate desired angle commands from the desired accelerations coming from the PID controllers:
And the proper math:
The rest of the code is just to deal with data, vehicle and make everything work on threads. One thread for the control and another for receiving the data.
The code is extremely easy to understand and to tweak (I hope…). With this setup, the joystick is the one that activates the automatic behavior, if the proper switch is on manual, then you will be able to fly the vehicle using the joystick.
This is by no means the same technique used by Pixhawk in loiter mode. But perhaps is a nice way to start learning about flight modes (and controlling aerial vehicles) so that then you can learn how advanced flight modes developed by the team of PX4 and 3DR work.
The video is here:
More pictures:
Many thanks to my good friend Murray to help me develop the controller, also to my {friend/lab assistant} Kyle and my great {students/camera operators} Hunter and Kenny.
Like this: Like Loading...Hello Backers!
Big thanks to everyone who has pledged to our campaign. We've hit 10% of our funding goal in 24 hrs, and obviously couldn't have done it without you.
We've had a chance to talk with some of you and have already heard lots of great ideas that we can't wait to start putting into action. We're going to continue to stay engaged with you throughout our campaign and ongoing development.
Please head over to forums.playdaysofwar.com or to the Discord channel that BigJay set up https://discord.gg/0rJegGGMYNIYKm5X and continue to let us know what you want to see in Days of War.
Keep the momentum going. Reach out to friends, clan mates, other gamers, and let them we need their support!
Also we are moving up the charts on Steam Greenlight, if you haven't, head over and vote YES
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=633799024Image copyright PA
Citigroup economist Michael Saunders is to replace Martin Weale as one of the nine members on the Bank of England's interest rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), the Treasury has said.
He will take over from Mr Weale, who often favoured higher interest rates, on 9 August.
UK chancellor George Osborne said Mr Saunders would be "a strong addition".
Earlier this week the MPC voted to keep rates at their record low, where they have been for more than seven years.
'First-rate knowledge'
Mr Saunders is currently the head of European economics at the US-based bank Citigroup, where he has worked for more than 25 years.
Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, said: "On behalf of the Bank of England, I am delighted to welcome Michael Saunders to the Monetary Policy Committee.
"He brings first-rate knowledge of the UK economy and a wealth of economic and financial experience."
He also thanked Martin Weale for his work on the MPC over the past six years, which have made him the longest serving member of the rate setting committee.
Mr Weale was known as a hawk on the MPC for being one of its few members to have voted for a rise in interest rates in recent years.
Saunders' outlook
Economists will be keen to assess the position of Mr Saunders on interest rates.
In a research note for Citigroup earlier this year Mr Saunders forecast that the Bank would hold interest rates at 0.5% until the end of 2016.
After that he saw interest rates rising to 1% by the end of 2017, and to 2% by the end of 2018.
Mr Saunders also warned of a "widespread loss of momentum" in the UK's economy since the start of the year.
He said the existing drag from a sluggish world economy has been reinforced by uncertainty about the outcome of the UK's referendum on its membership of the European Union (EU).
Following the publication of the latest minutes of the MPC Mr Saunders said he suspected it "would be willing to go further into unconventional policy if that proved necessary" in the event of a "Brexit" from the EU.A Labour politician was warned that he and his colleagues will be "urinated on" after he criticised Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams's five-star trip to the US, it was claimed.
A Labour politician was warned that he and his colleagues will be "urinated on" after he criticised Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams's five-star trip to the US, it was claimed.
Cork South West TD Michael McCarthy told independent.ie that his office received threatening phone calls and emails following an interview on RTE's 'Morning Ireland' today.
Mr McCarthy, who was defeated in the Labour deputy leadership contest, accused Sinn Fein of hypocrisy over its hosting of a $US500-a plate dinner in Manhattan.
Read more: Gerry Adams 'editor at gunpoint' remark at $500 a plate NY dinner
It's emerged that the Labour backbencher has received a furry of abuse, via phone calls and emails, since he criticised the Sinn Fein leadership.
Mr McCarthy claimed that he was told that he and his party colleagues would be "urinated on" as a result of his criticism.
"Sinn Fein cannot accept criticism either internally or externally," Mr McCarthy said.
"As always, their keyboard warriors and online trolls launch a concerted campaign against people who criticise them. We saw the sickening manner in which abuse victim Mairia Cahill was treated after going public with her ordeal. This is just another example of how Sinn Fein supporters operate," he added.
Read more: Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein are 'living the high life in America' - Joan Burton
Online EditorsBarbra Streisand put her feelings about Donald Trump into song Friday night.
At an LGBT fundraiser for Hillary Clinton Friday, the singer performed a parody of the Stephen Sondheim song "Send in the Clowns" with lyrics about the Republican nominee.
"Is he that rich, maybe he's poor, 'til he reveals his returns, who can be sure?" Streisand sang to an applauding crowd of about 1,000. "Something's amiss, I don't approve, if he were running the free world, where would we move?"
Streisand preformed before a large effusive crowd at the New York City fundraiser. She followed Clinton, who stressed her support for the LGBT community and said, "We all love this woman, either from afar or luckily enough up close."
The event raised money for the Hillary Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee between Clinton's campaign, the Democratic National Committee and state parties. Contributions ranged from $1,200 to over $250,000.
Streisand included renditions of "People," ''Pure Imagination" and "Happy Days Are Here Again."
But her Trump parody clearly stood out. It continued: "And if by chance he gets to heaven, even up there, he'll declare chapter 11. This sad, vulgar clown. You're fired, you clown."While in the past 3 months both the USDJPY and the Nikkei index have soared on the same vague mix of promises (than can never be delivered), and threats (by central bankers, which work only as long as they remain purely abstract and are not acted upon), one security that has barely budged are Japanese bonds: without doubt the fulcrum security that will put a premature end to Abe's latest attempt to reflate an economy, whose total debt is a ridiculous 2000% of annual public revenues, and which will spend half of its annual tax income on interest expense if rates merely double from their record low levels. Until now: Bloomberg reports that Japan's Government Pension Investment Fund: the largest retirement fund in the world overseeing 108 trillion yen ($1.16 trillion), and historically the biggest buyer of Japanese bonds, "will begin talks in April about whether to reduce its 67% allocation to domestic bonds." Read: sell, which may be why we have already seen a rather steep move across the JGB complex overnight, because one the largest player in the space moves, everyone else follows as nobody wants to be the last seller left.
And once the selling begins, logically so does the countdown to the end of Japan's latest reflation attempt, as like it or not, Japan can not afford rising rates, no matter how high it blows the stock market bubble (which by the way is unchanged in non-yen terms), as the alternative is a full blown banking sector crisis, coupled with a public funding crisis.
And also because this time is no different from all the other times Japan has done just this. Only on no previous occasions did Japan have some JPY1 quadrillion in public debt, or nearly 250% in debt/GDP.
From Bloomberg:
The GPIF, as the fund created in 2006 is known, didn’t alter the structure of its holdings during the worst global financial crisis in 80 years or in response to the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster. Talks to shift its positions come as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the Bank of Japan pledge to restore economic growth and spur inflation, which will mean higher interest rates, Mitani said. “If we think about the future and if interest rates go up, then 67 percent in bonds does look harsh,” Mitani, who was an executive director at the Bank of Japan when it bought shares from banks in 2002, said. “We will review this soon. We will begin discussions for this in April-to-May. Any changes to our portfolio could begin at the end of the next fiscal year.” GPIF, one of the biggest buyers of Japanese government bonds, held 69.3 trillion yen, or 64 percent of total assets, in domestic bonds at the end of September, according to its latest quarterly financial statement. That compares with 12 trillion yen, or 11 percent, in Japanese stocks. The asset manager had 9.6 trillion yen, or 9 percent of its portfolio, in foreign bonds and 12.6 trillion yen, or 12 percent, in overseas stocks.
This is a tectonic shift for an asset allocator who has been steadfast in what it buys:
GPIF is the biggest pension fund in the world by assets under management, according to the Towers Watson Global 300 survey in August, followed by Norway’s government pension fund. The portfolio structure has been broadly unchanged since 2006 when it was formulated with an outlook for consumer prices to rise 1 percent annually. Instead, they have fallen. “The portfolio was based on a prerequisite of things such as long-term interest rates at 3 percent on average for the next 100 years,” Mitani said. “Whether this is good will be a possible point of discussion.”
Good luck with that because momentum plays and chasing "hot money flows" always, without fail, end up with a Hollywood ending. As for the "100 year forecast" confusion, it stems from the glaring contradiction that is debt monetization by the BOJ coupled with a government mandate to crush the Yen. The fear is that at least for the time being, if not in the long-term, the latter will overtake the former.
“JGBs were how we made money over the past 10 years,” Mitani said. “The BOJ said that they are increasing buying bonds, but they’re also putting power into lowering interest rates. If the economy gets better, then long-term interest rates like a 10-year yield at less than 1 percent are unlikely.”
Yet where the real comedy is about to begin is that instead of investing people's retirement money in at least modestly safe securities which the BOJ openly monetizes, the GPIF will focus on some riskier assets: "The fund may increase holdings in emerging market stocks and is evaluating alternative assets, he said." Good luck with the former: Japan will be only some 10 years behind the curve. As for "alternative assets", if this includes gold, prepare for liftoff as all other retirement fund managers across the world, who have a blended allocation to gold somewhere between 0% and 0.5%, piggyback on Japan's example.
At the end of the day, however, none of the above matters. Japan's Yen will fall a little more, its equities will rise, but all that matters is when and if the bond tumbles. Once that happens, and once Japan's leaders take a look at the chart below, first presented in "Japan's WTF Chart", everything will be quickly put back in its original place, Abe will be "retired", and this latest experiment in ending Japan's self-sustaining three decade long liquidity trap will be promptly forgotten.discord and flutters originally werent going to be in the picture but I decided they also really made the episode for me XD so I added them in last minute "THEY TOOK FLUTTERSHY?! >:C"
I actually started this ageeees ago - before the episode even aired (I watched the leak) but only now have I decided that my sanity is more important than being happy with absolutely every teeny tiny detail XDI haven't really done any proper fanart for any of the episodes but this season finale utterly convinced me that I had to pay proper tribute. Everything about it was just so amazing for me - I enjoyed how the two episodes completely focused on background characters and I loved how the changelings made a return as opposed to some new mega-evenmoreopthanthelast villain.I'll be honest, I completely did not expect Trixie to be a supporting main but omg im am SO glad she did ;u; before I get any comments - I absolutely DO NOT SHIP these two. The show is about friendship and for once can we just focus on how great a friendship these two have? Despite her nature Trixie was really there for Starlight "even the great and powerful Trixie makes mistakes" oh god.... I'm going to reel myself in before I write a whole book in the comments about this episode but I really hope you guys like this fanart I did for the episode ^u^Just Discord and Fluttershy posted separately ---> fav.me/daq0gkiNetanyahu constantly lives in fear for the same reason a thief panics and trembles when he sees a policeman.
A typical thief actually knows that he is guilty. He knows that his conscience continuously reminds him that he is a criminal. In his subterranean mind, he knows that he deserves to be punished for his immoral actions. On many instances, he tries to rationalize his acts, but that does little to alleviate the guilt that he has.
Why?
Because we are all rational and moral creatures. From our perspective, we were created by a “super intellect,” to use the words of the late famous mathematician and astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle. This “super intellect,” Hoyle said, “has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”[1]
Other astronomers and mathematicians like Robert Jastrow have come to similar conclusions, though some of those people are just afraid to follow their logical deduction all the way. In the last paragraph of his book God and the Astronomers, Jastrow wrote:
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself to the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”[2]
E. Michael Jones rightly says that this super intellect “behaves in ways that sometimes go beyond what human reason can comprehend but never in ways that contradict that reason.”[3] St. Paul adds that “in him we live, and move, and have our being.”
In short, metaphysical reason, the moral and political order and even aesthetic are rooted and grounded in this super intellect, who has imbued every single creature with the capacity to reason and to know and comprehend the moral order and act according to that order.
However, Talmudic Judaism has metaphysically and categorically rejected that moral and political order. This is one reason why people like Benjamin Netanyahu constantly live in fear and inevitably mimic the life of a psychopath. Once they take that illogical steps, their behavior become repugnant to all mankind. They begin to invent evil things, wicked things, and immoral things. Finally, they begin to inhabit a psychopathic character.
Keep also in mind that when psychopaths start imagining weird, crazy and unthinkable things, they start to panic. They start to build their own defense mechanism. They start to act irrationally and crazy. Netanyahu is no exception.
Despite the fact that Iran wants to cooperate with the West with respect to its nuclear program, and despite the fact that Iran is not an enemy of the West, Netanyahu’s psychopathic behavior has already gone through the roof.
“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that he has ‘deep concern’ over a pending nuclear deal the West appears close to signing with Israel’s arch-enemy Iran.
“Netanyahu said that he conveyed those fears to visiting American lawmakers, warning that the looming deal appears to ‘corroborate all our concerns and then some.’”
The psychopath from Tel Aviv has recently declared, “The dangerous accord which is being negotiated in Lausanne confirms our concerns and even worse.”
What concerns? That Iran is building nuclear bombs? That Iran is an existential threat? That Iran supported terrorism in virtually all over the Middle East?
You see, psychopaths cannot go beyond their own inconsistency because they are blind. Their psychopathic thought does not allow them to see the obvious. Here is a man who hides hundreds upon hundreds of nuclear warheads in Tel Aviv,[4] and now he is desperately trying to stop the United States from having a meaningful and respectful dialogue with Iran.
The United Nations did help Netanyahu by saying that Israel, not Iran or North Korea or Syria, is the number one violator of human rights. In other words, Jimmy Carter was right: Israel is an apartheid state. And the psychopath who now rules over the apartheid state is Benjamin Netanyahu.
The psychopath was so immature that he sent his secret agents to spy on officials as soon as he realized that the Iran nuclear deal might not work in his favor.[5]
Meanwhile, it seemed that the Obama administration continues to give Netanyahu the finger. Netanyahu tried to humiliate the administration by going to Congress and deliver his Looney Tunes speech. Obama returned the favor by releasing documents with respect to Israel’s nuclear warheads. Here’s what one Israeli news report said,
“Obama revenge for Netanyahu’s Congress talk? 1987 report on Israel’s top secret nuclear program released in unprecedented move.
“In a development that has largely been missed by mainstream media, the Pentagon early last month quietly declassified a Department of Defense top-secret document detailing Israel’s nuclear program, a highly covert topic that Israel has never formally announced to avoid a regional nuclear arms race, and which the US until now has respected by remaining silent.
“But by publishing the declassified document from 1987, the US reportedly breached the silent agreement to keep quiet on Israel’s nuclear powers for the first time ever, detailing the nuclear program in great depth.
“The timing of the revelation is highly suspect, given that it came as tensions spiraled out of control between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama ahead of Netanyahu’s March 3 address in Congress, in which he warned against the dangers of Iran’s nuclear program and how the deal being formed on that program leaves the Islamic regime with nuclear breakout capabilities.”
The entire declassified documents can be viewed and read online.[6] One could conclude that by doing this, the Obama administration was also trying to show the world that Netanyahu’s psychopathic behavior must be stopped and that the administration was asking for back-up from much of the Western world.
Furthermore, the administration seems to be really exhausted after many years of listening to Netanyahu’s lies. Back in September of last year, Philip Gordon, a White House coordinator for the Middle East, declared,
“How will [the Israeli government] have peace if it is unwilling to delineate a border, end the occupation, and allow for Palestinian sovereignty, security, and dignity?”[7]
The answer to to Gordon’s question is that the Israeli regime is trying to square a circle, which is impossible in this universe.[8] The Western world and much of the Middle East must continue to put pressure on the mad man in Tel Aviv. It must be reiterated that the Obama administration has stirred the political pot, and there is no doubt that the Israeli regime hates him. Perhaps the regime should have read Frankenstein more carefully.
Finally, if some psychopaths eventually turn themselves in, then it would be better for Netanyahu and the Israeli regime if he gives up his tricks, asks for forgiveness, and seeks mental help. He needs to stop looking for comfortable lies and comes to term with himself. If not, he is still going to be a disaster for the Israeli regime.
So far, things are not going well for Netanyahu and his puppets. One writer in the New Yorker has argued that even AIPAC, which seemed to have been unshakable in the past, has been hit by an anti-Zionist storm.
Let us keep the storm going.
[1] Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Engineering and Science, November 1981: 8-12.
[2] Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: Readers Library, 1992), 107.
[3] E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008), 14.
[4] See for example Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Seymour M. Hersh, The Sampson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); Michael Karpin, The Bomb in the Basement: How Israel Went Nuclear and What That Means for the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
[5] Adam Entous, “Israel Spied on Iran Nuclear Talks With U.S.,” Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2015.
[6] http://www.archives.gov/declassification/iscap/pdf/2009-076-doc1.pdf.
[7] Quoted in Connie Bruck, “Friends of Israel: The lobbying group AIPAC has consistently fought the Obama Administration on policy. Is it now losing influence?,” New Yorker, September 1, 2014.
[8] One of my dear friends tries to tell me that weird things can happen in “possible worlds,” where the illogical becomes logical. But that is purely fantasy.American talent Dante Carver seems to have gotten himself into quite the mishap. Not only has it been revealed that he has had an affair, but the woman whom he had an affair with is now pregnant.
On August 2010, Carver married former model Akiko Matsumoto. Their official wedding ceremony was held the following year in April 2011 and the couple have two young children together aged 5 and 3. The trouble started last year when Carver started to fool around with a woman in her 20s. They became antiquated over the summer and she is not affiliated with the entertainment industry, she works at a sports shop. His mistress is now pregnant and is said to be giving birth in the “near future”
Naturally Carver’s wife is furious at the entire situation, upon her learning of the incident it’s been said that he sought refuge at his parents house. A divorce between Carver and Matsumoto is expected to happen but not immediately, seeing as Carver is doing his best to avoid the conflict entirely. His agency tried to damage control the situation by claiming that the couples relationship had already “broken down” years ago, and that divorce talks were happening as early as 2015.
His “sloppy” behavior has apparently been well known among entertainment officials, however this scandal takes things to another level. Previously Carver’s biggest “scandal” was probably when he was caught driving with an expired international driving permit.
Carver achieved nationwide fame in Japan for his Softbank CMs where first he played the “Yoso Guy” and then Aya Ueto’s older brother as part of the fictional “White Family”. In 2008 he was crowned the most popular male actor in a CM by the public, breaking Takuya Kimura’s streak who had previously won the award 8 years in a row.
It’s currently unknown if he will be dropped from Softbank and his other promotional contracts, but he will have to face a considerable amount of penalty moving forward.
(excite & livedoor)According to a respected Old Testament scholar, it may be that the beginning of the Book of Genesis from the Bible has been mistranslated continuously ever since the book was made available in languages other than ancient Hebrew. Professor Ellen van Wolde, who is also a respected author, adds that the sentence “In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not an accurate translation of the meaning in the ancient texts, and that the correct translation would more closely resemble “In the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth.”
She reveals that the Hebrew verb “bara” does not in fact mean “to create,” but rather to “spatially separate.” This would, in turn, imply that the planet was in fact already created before God breathed life onto it, and made the plants, animals and people, as the story in the Bible goes. The new translation, if proven accurate, bears considerable implications for Judeo-Christian theologists and scholars, as it proves that God is not the maker of all things, as it has been painted to be over the ages.
Van Wolde, aged 54, will present her thesis at the Radboud University, in The Netherlands, during a conference. This is the same institution where she teaches, The Telegraph reports. She says that the accurate translation does not imply that the Earth started with God. The beginning of the book of Genesis is merely the introduction in a narration, she reveals. “It meant to say that God did create humans and animals, but not the Earth itself,” the expert explains. Christian scholars currently teach that God created everything around us, including the stars and the planet. This no longer seems to be the case, according to the new translation.
“Something was wrong with the verb. God was the subject (God created), followed by two or more objects. Why did God not create just one thing or animal, but always more?” “There was already water. There were sea monsters. God did create some things, but not the Heaven and Earth. The usual idea of creating-out-of-nothing, creatio ex nihilo, is a big misunderstanding,” the expert says.
She concludes that the Bible is meant to say that God merely separated water from land, the sea monsters from the birds, and the Earth from the Heavens. “Maybe I am even hurting myself. I consider myself to be religious and the Creator used to be very special, as a notion of trust. I want to keep that trust. The traditional view of God the Creator is untenable now,” van Wolde admitts.
“The new interpretation is a complete shake up of the story of the Creation as we know it,” a Radboud University spokesman concludes.I had a cool idea. I spend a small chunk of every day commuting in my car or walking to the trolley station, when I enjoy listening to music but can't read a book or get any work done. What if I could use that time for ear training?
Most of the focused ear training I've done has been at a computer, clicking which chord I thought I heard, transcribing melodic dictation. I've always somehow needed my hands, but certain exercises could be done hands-free. All I need is a voice to tell me what I heard, confirming what I guessed in my head.
So I made mp3s of 5 octaves of MIDI piano notes, each only 2 seconds long with my voice stating the note name after it sounds. I threw them all on my iPod, and I make playlists out of small subsets of notes and listen on shuffle. I started yesterday with one octave of a C major scale. I hear a note and try to say its name in my head before my voice says it on the recording. This ought to help me with recognizing relative pitch intervals, converting those intervals to real note names, and possibly with absolute pitch. (Each type of interval is identified by its absolute notes. While F to A and C to E are both major thirds, they are treated distinctly in this exercise.)
Download the mp3s here.
The zip file linked above is a mere 3MB. If you end up using it, let me know what you think. Leave a comment with your playlist ideas. So far I've just been using different major scales, up to two octaves at a time. That's too easy, so I'll add a few chromatic notes. I keep the challenge small, because I won't improve if it's too daunting (i.e. 5-octave chromatic scale)."PETM" redirects here. It is not to be confused with PETN
Climate change during the last 65 million years as expressed by the oxygen isotope composition of benthic foraminifera. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) is characterized by a brief but prominent negative excursion, attributed to rapid warming. Note that the excursion is understated in this graph due to the smoothing of data.
The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), alternatively "Eocene thermal maximum 1" (ETM1), and formerly known as the "Initial Eocene" or "Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum", was a time period with more than 8 °C warmer global average temperature than today.[citation needed] This climate event began at the time boundary of the Paleogene, between the Paleocene and Eocene geological epochs.[1] The exact age and duration of the event is uncertain but it is estimated to have occurred around 55.5 million years ago.[2]
The associated period of massive carbon injection into the atmosphere has been estimated to have lasted no longer than 20,000 years. The entire warm period lasted for about 200,000 years. Global temperatures increased by 5–8 °C.[3] The carbon dioxide was likely released in two pulses, the first lasting less than 2,000 years. Such a repeated carbon release is in line with current global warming.[2] A main difference is that during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, the planet was essentially ice-free.[4] However, the amount of released carbon, according to a recent study, suggests a modest 0.2 gigatonnes per year (at peaks 0.58 gigatonnes); humans today add about 10 gigatonnes per year.[5][6]
The onset of the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum has been linked to an initial 5 °C temperature rise and to extreme changes in Earth's carbon cycle.[3] The period is marked by a prominent negative excursion in carbon stable isotope (δ13C ) records from around the globe; more specifically, there was a large decrease in 13C/12C ratio of marine and terrestrial carbonates and organic carbon.[3][7][8]
Stratigraphic sections of rock from this period reveal numerous other changes.[3] Fossil records for many organisms show major turnovers. For example, in the marine realm, a mass extinction of benthic foraminifera, a global expansion of subtropical dinoflagellates, and an appearance of excursion, planktic foraminifera and calcareous nanofossils all occurred during the beginning stages of PETM. On land, modern mammal orders (including primates) suddenly appear in Europe and in North America. Sediment deposition changed significantly at many outcrops and in many drill cores spanning this time interval.
At least since 1997, the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum has become a focal point of considerable geoscience research because it probably provides the best past analog by which to understand impacts of global climate warming and of massive carbon input to the ocean and atmosphere, including ocean acidification.[9] Although it is now widely accepted that the PETM represents a "case study" for global warming and massive carbon input to Earth's surface,[3][10] the cause, details and overall significance of the event remain perplexing.
Setting [ edit ]
The configuration of oceans and continents was somewhat different during the early Paleogene relative to the present day. The Panama Isthmus did not yet connect North America and South America, and this allowed direct low-latitude circulation between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The Drake Passage, which now separates South America and Antarctica, was closed, and this perhaps prevented thermal isolation of Antarctica. The Arctic was also more restricted. Although various proxies for past atmospheric CO 2 levels in the Eocene do not agree in absolute terms, all suggest that levels then were much higher than at present. In any case, there were no significant ice sheets during this time.[13]
Earth surface temperatures increased by about 6 °C from the late Paleocene through the early Eocene, culminating in the "Early Eocene Climatic Optimum" (EECO).[13] Superimposed on this long-term, gradual warming were at least two (and probably more) "hyperthermals". These can be defined as geologically brief (<200,000 year) events characterized by rapid global warming, major changes in the environment, and massive carbon addition. Of these, the PETM was the most extreme and perhaps the first (at least within the Cenozoic). Another hyperthermal clearly occurred at approximately 53.7 Ma, and is now called ETM-2 (also referred to as H-1, or the Elmo event). However, additional hyperthermals probably occurred at about 53.6 Ma (H-2), 53.3 (I-1), 53.2 (I-2) and 52.8 Ma (informally called K, X or ETM-3). The number, nomenclature, absolute ages, and relative global impact of the Eocene hyperthermals are the source of considerable current research. Whether they only occurred during the long-term warming, and whether they are causally related to apparently similar events in older intervals of the geological record (e.g. the Toarcian turnover of the Jurassic) are open issues.
Acidification of deep waters, and the later spreading from the North Atlantic can explain spatial variations in carbonate dissolution. Model simulations show acidic water accumulation in the deep North Atlantic at the onset of the event.[14]
Evidence for global warming [ edit ]
LPTM— Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
OAEs— Oceanic Anoxic Events
MME— Mid-Maastrichtian Event A stacked record of temperatures and ice volume in the deep ocean through the Mesozoic and Cenozoic periods.LPTM— Paleocene-Eocene Thermal MaximumOAEs— Oceanic An |
That link will show up in text as:
Use the get() method to make HTTP Get requests.
I want to link to someone else's docs
In your docs/conf.py file, add'sphinx.ext.intersphinx' to the end of the extensions list near the top of the file. Then, add the following anywhere in the file:
# Add the "intersphinx" extension extensions = ['sphinx.ext.intersphinx', ] # Add mappings intersphinx_mapping = { 'urllib3': ('http://urllib3.readthedocs.org/en/latest', None), 'python': ('http://docs.python.org/3', None), }
You can then link to other projects' documentation and then reference it the same way you do your own projects, and Sphinx will magically make everything work.
I want to write the documentation inline in my source code and link to it
Great! I love this as well. Add the'sphinx.ext.autodoc' extension, then write your documentation. There's a full guide to the inline syntax on the Sphinx website; confusingly, it is not listed on the autodoc page.
# Add the "intersphinx" extension extensions = ['sphinx.ext.autodoc', ]
Hope that helps! Happy linking.
Liked what you read? I am available for hire.The rover can travel up to 100m per day, the mission team believes The US space agency is to send its Mars rover Opportunity on a two-year trek to try to reach a crater called Endeavour. The robot will have to move about 11km to get to its new target - a distance that would double what it has already achieved on the planet. Endeavour is much bigger than anything investigated to date, and will allow a broader range of rocks to be studied. Opportunity arrived on Mars in January 2004 on a mission scheduled initially to last just three months. The performance of the rover - like that of its twin, Spirit - has greatly exceeded what anyone had dared hope. The US space agency (Nasa) concedes, however, that the Endeavour assignment will be an extremely tough one. "We may not get there, but it is scientifically the right direction to go anyway," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator for the science instruments on Opportunity and Spirit. "This crater is staggeringly large compared to anything we've seen before." Endeavour is to the southeast of Victoria Crater Opportunity has just emerged from the 800m-wide Victoria Crater. Endeavour by comparison is 22km across. The mission team estimates Opportunity may be able to travel about 100m per day. But even at that pace, the journey could take two years. The rover will stop to study rocks on the way, and in winter months it cannot move because there is not enough sunlight to provide sufficient power for driving. Detailed satellite imagery from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will help pick out the best route ahead; and new software recently uploaded to Opportunity will enable the rover to make its own decisions about how best to negotiate large rocks in its path. At least it does not yet have to cope with the locomotion problems of Spirit. A jammed wheel on the twin means it must now drive backwards everywhere it goes. Since landing on the Meridiani plains, Opportunity has gathered important data about Martian geology, including evidence that parts of it were once soaked by water.
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StumbleUpon What are these?Richard Mack, the former sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, now runs the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a group that promotes the idea that county sheriffs are the highest law officers in the country and thus have the power to arrest federal officials who are enforcing laws they believe are unconstitutional.
Mack gave an example of this theory in an interview last month with Kerry Lutz on his “Financial Survival Network,” when he said that if he were still sheriff, he would arrest Lois Lerner, the former IRS official who Tea Party groups say targeted them in applications for tax-exempt status, charges that are still being investigated by the FBI.
“If you were still sheriff in Graham County and Lois Lerner paid a visit to your county, would you lock her up?” Lutz asked.
“Well, I would in the sense that I would have to first investigate and prove that she had actually done something to somebody in my county. So, primarily I would conduct a proper investigation and if anyone had been abused, like many that testified before Congress, the Tea Party groups and others that had been abused not only by the IRS, but the IRS had complicity from the FBI,” Mack replied.
“So, if I could prove that they had done that to anybody in my county, if she stopped by, I most definitely would, and hopefully get the support of the county attorney to actually prosecute,” he said.
Mack is currently running for office in another Arizona county, which he hopes to populate with likeminded voters and elected officials, creating his version of a “constitutional” paradise.This evening I had a great chat with a guy named David. He’s a 9th grade science teacher in Minnesota. He’s working on a project called Growing Communities Of Scientists in his school. He plans to use a set of “computer enabled science classrooms” which embed thin clients into a student group workspace. David’s also got a great blog where he’s been journalling his experience. This means students have access to computers without interfering with they’re normal learning/social area. A common sight I’ve seen in most computer labs is individual students with hardly any working space and fairly isolated from each other and the instructor. It’s sort of like a cubicle effect. For sciences were you’re trying to get a lot of hands on instruction it’s rather difficult.
So, back to Edubuntu. While David’s been working on the hardware of his computer enabled science classroom he’s also been working on getting LTSP set up along with Ubuntu/Edubuntu software he needs to manage his classroom and teach his students. He’s run up against a problem that is fairly common to educators but is pretty difficult to work with on Linux systems. Simply, he needs to control access to applications. He wants to implement a rewards system where students gain computer privileges (getting to use Firefox, etc.) based on being responsible with current privileges. One of the things that’s great about Linux OSes is that you can install software system-wide and is supposed to be multi-user friendly. However, in this case, that freedom is a problem. I’d love to hear some suggestions on how to accomplish an application whitelist system in Ubuntu.
OK, but back to the title, why we need Edubuntu to succeed. The reason I say that is that Ubuntu and Linux/FLOSS in general needs advocates on behalf of students, educators, and the next wave of technolgy users. People generally tend to stick with the OS they first learn so one of the best ways to make Linux maintstream is to get it into schools.
The problem is that most software development in FLOSS is not centered around education. There are education-specific applications out there (Sugar, gcompris, KDE Edu) for sure, but the OS itself is not always education-friendly. I’ve seen a lot of educators trying to deploy LTSP servers in their schools struggle with applications that don’t behave well with multiple users, even common ones like Firefox and OpenOffice.org. On top of that key needs such as practical user and group management for educators is almost non-existent.
In many ways, one of the primary jobs of Edubuntu is to provide an advocate for educators and students to Ubuntu and upstream software developers. It’s not just about a making a way to install Ubuntu educational software easier, it’s about it’s about listening to educational user’s needs and trying to make some of those dreams reality. If Ubuntu can’t be “Linux for learning human beings” I’m not sure it can really make it mainstream. I’ll go out on a limb and say, as we start 2009, forget the “Year of the Linux Desktop” and look towards the “Year of Linux in Education” 🙂Pittsburgh Penguins center Evgeni Malkin, Tampa Bay Lightning center Steven Stamkos and New York Rangers goaltender Henrik Lundqvist have been named as nominees for this year's Ted Lindsay Award.
Formerly known as the Lester B. Person Award, the trophy is given annually to the NHL's "most outstanding player," with members of the National Hockey League Players' Association voting for the winner. Daniel Sedin of the Vancouver Canucks won the award last year.
Last week, Lundqvist, Malkin, and Stamkos were all named finalists for the Hart Trophy, which is awarded annually "to the player adjudged to be the most valuable to his team."
Stamkos and Malkin are already guaranteed to see the podium at the 2012 NHL Awards, which will take place June 20 at the Encore Theater at Wynn Las Vegas. Stamkos clinched the Maurice Richard Trophy as the League's top goal scorer, while Malkin will receive the Art Ross Trophy as the League's leading scorer. Lundqvist will also be vying for the Vezina Trophy, given annually to the League's top goaltender.
Lundqvist is coming off a standout season in an already-noteworthy career. In 62 games, he led the Rangers to their best season point total since the team's Stanley Cup season in 1993-94. Along the way, Lundqvist set career highs for wins (39), goals-against average (1.97) and save percentage (.930). His eight shutouts also ranked third this season. Should he win, the man with the moniker of "King Henrik" would become just the third goaltender to earn the award, after Mike Liut in 1981 and Dominik Hasek in 1997 and 1998. He is the first goaltender to be nominated for the award since Roberto Luongo in 2007.
Forced to lead a club ravaged by a number of high-profile injuries, Malkin turned in a historic season. The 25-year-old Russian scored 50 goals and led the League with 109 points, the highest total since Henrik Sedin had 112 points in the 2009-10 season. Previously nominated for the award in 2008 and 2009, Malkin also led the League with 339 shots and tied for fourth with nine game-winning goals. If he wins, Malkin will become the fourth member of the Pittsburgh Penguins to win the award after Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr, and Sidney Crosby.
In the NHL's goal-scoring race, there was Stamkos and then there was everyone else. Malkin's 50 goals ranked him second in the League, well behind Stamkos' 60. It marked the second time in his career that the 22-year-old led the League in goals and the first time he has reached the 60-goal plateau, making him just the 19th player in NHL history to record 60 goals in a season. Stamkos also finished second behind Malkin with 97 points, and his 12 game-winning goals tied him for the League lead with Radim Vrbata. Stamkos finished second in last year's voting for the "Most Outstanding Player" award behind Sedin.
The three nominees could potentially join a prominent list of 13 players who have won both the Hart and Lindsay in the same season. That list includes Guy Lafleur, Wayne Gretzky, Lemieux, Hasek, Joe Sakic, Crosby, and Alex Ovechkin.Starting today, library patrons and Amazon e-book lovers have no reason to needle each other over which source of books is superior. Or at the very least, they have a comfortable meeting place where they can (quietly) exchange both book recommendations and spirited taunting.
As announced in April, Amazon now supports borrowing e-books from local libraries. Library-lent books will work on both Kindle e-readers and Kindle smartphone or tablet apps.
Library books, though temporary, work just like any other Kindle e-book:
When you borrow a Kindle public library book, you'll have access to all the unique features of Kindle books, including real page numbers and Whispersync technology that synchronizes your notes, highlights, and last page read. After a public library book expires, if you check it out again or choose to purchase it from the Kindle store, all of your annotations and bookmarks will be preserved.
Facebook and Twitter integration works too. I'm presuming Amazon's own kindle.amazon.com social platform does as well, although the release notes don't specify so, and I haven't yet been able to verify it.
Here's one tricky part that turns out to not actually be so tricky. Naturally, you can't check out books through Amazon.com. But you also can't search to see if a book is available for library lending on Amazon's home page, or see whether your local library is participating in Amazon's program.
If you know and regularly patronize your local library and its web page, this is no real problem. Simply go to your local library's web site and find the digital book catalog. Use your library card (and if you don't have one, get one) to check out the book, then click "Get for Kindle." You'll have to sign in to your Amazon account and have your device connected either to the internet over Wi-Fi or to your computer through a USB cable. If you're on a 3G Kindle, smartphone, or tablet, your book won't be delivered.
What if you don't know whether your library offers e-books at all, let alone the new Kindle books? Here it's helpful to know that Amazon's library lending is mediated by a third party: Overdrive. Overdrive manages digital rights for e-books in nearly every format.
Plenty of other e-reader manufacturers and e-book sellers have been working with libraries to make books available already. Nearly all of them use Overdrive as a partner for its robust DRM. It mediates between the e-book manufacturers and many different kinds of institutions, particularly libraries. Your library's web site may even have an "Overdrive" branded link rather than a Kindle one; you would then have to select which e-book format you want.
Unlike Amazon, Overdrive actually does have a global search engine. It's particularly useful for checking to see if your local library supports e-book lending for Kindle, or any other e-book format. You can search for individual books by title, author, keyword or ISBN, or search and/or browse lists of libraries and bookstores that use Overdrive for e-books. If you don't know the name of your library or library system, you can search by city or zip code. Advanced search allows you to specify individual formats — like "Kindle Book (BETA)."
That's about it. It's a good thing for readers, because they've got access to more free content. It's a good thing (I hope) for libraries, who can reach or reconnect with a wide range of patrons in different media. (Let's hope whatever deal they struck with Amazon doesn't prove ruinous, or gets slashed back by budget-busting administrative and government crusaders.)
It's also a good thing, I think, for Amazon. When the Kindle was introduced, there were many people who argued that Amazon was only trying to preserve one kind of reading — direct individual purchase of popular new books — and grind every other model to dust.
Now, Amazon's much more eclectic. Whether it's book borrowing between users, textbook rentals, libraries lending books to local patrons, or (potentially) subscription content for Amazon Prime customers, they're experimenting with a wide range of approaches to connecting their customers to books.
This partly shows Amazon's confidence: It's willing to engage in almost any business field or model, because it knows part of its strength is its position as an omnibus retailer who can offer anything and everything, physical and virtual.
Still, this kind of experimentation, especially from a market leader, is welcome in a new market like e-books where nothing, not even Amazon's continued role as the market leader, is certain just yet.
See Also:- Amazon’s Future Is So Much Bigger Than a TabletYour browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
I don’t find myself thinking about the structure of a movie as often as I should. But after seeing this video from CineFix explain the different structures used in movies, I probably will. There’s a lot of information to unpack and a lot of movies get mentioned and a lot of their picks for the 10 best structured movies are a tad insufferable but it’s still fun for me to watch because the movies get broken down from a different perspective.
A lot of movies simply follow a three act structure with a set up, confrontation, and resolution. Others tell their stories in multiple timelines or in reverse order or with the ending revealed in the beginning. Sometimes stories are linear, sometimes they’re not but the best movies use their structure to better tell their story. Here is CineFix’s list of the 10 best:
The Mirror (oneiric) The Sweet Hereafter (nonlinear) Before the Rain (circular narrative) Rashomon (repetition) Irreversible (backwards) Citizen Kane (ending first) Ajami (hyperlink cinema) Godfather II (multiple timeline) High Noon (single uninterrupted stream) Die Hard (three act)STORM OF SEDITION – “Decivilize” LP
Are you prepared to brave the storm?…
Brace yourself for one of the most uncompromising hard hitting and politically outspoken records of this era. STORM OF SEDITION are an anti-civilization anarchist crust punk band based out of Victoria BC. Sharing members with the mighty ISKRA you can definitely expect some serious blackened crust, and yes a huge metal influence is prevalent however STORM OF SEDITION are a bit more reminiscent of bands like CONTRAVENE & NAUSEA. “Decivilize” brings a heavy anarcho punk dynamic to the table combined with over the top blackened crust grind thats littered with blistering solo’s, insanely powerful drumbeats, and thought productive lyrics that challenge our current state of human civilization. All in all this is an absolute monster of a release!
Comes with a 12 page booklet containing lyrics, notes, and song explanations.
STORM OF SEDITION WILL TOURING THE WEST COAST THIS SUMMER!!!
Keep you eye’s peeled for a list of tour dates soon!
Listen to the song “Disconnect” here…
https://profanexistence.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/storm-of-sedition-decivilize-05-disconnect.mp3
Living a domesticated existence
Starves people of meaning in their lives
Everyone feels the void beneath the surface
Of everyday activities and routines
Miserable, exploited, mass populations
Feeding the industrial systems endless hunger
Treated like machines, living beings
Enslaved and kept passive in a technological noose
We live in these cages
Made of concrete, glass, and steel
A functioning human made hell
Complete with natural scenery
Yet there is no community
Deprived of connection with real people
Technology perpetuates alienation
But promises to connect us
And fill the void in our lives
In constant need of escape and distraction
From this fucking ugly world
Technology creeping into our lives
Pop culture, pacifying shit
Endless distractions to curb dissent
A society of lonely domesticated beings
Attempting social interaction behind a digital screen
Clinging to the feeling of connectedness
Personalized profiles, mass communication tools
Monitored and funded by pigs
Spying on people, on movements
While corporations profit off government control
Microsoft, apple, fedbook
Endless lists of corporations
Infiltrating our everyday lives
The NSA, the CSE
Databases created from what you share
Information for incrimination
Millions of people on terrorist watch lists
Technology’s a weapon used against us
Its function is to propel their ability
To efficiently exploit us and the natural world
While doing so capitalizing off selling us
Gadgets to distract us from the lives we live and hate
Turn off that shit, enter the real world
You are not connected
You are alone staring into a fucking a screen
Get outside, meet with real people!
Even if we use these tools
We must never forget
Technology is a system created by and for those in power
And it will only exist with
Division of labor, exploitation, and death
Becoming connected through technology
Is a sick fucking joke
PROFANE EXISTENCE RECORDS – PO BOX 647 – HUNTINGTON WV – 25711 – UNITED STATES
WWW.PROFANEEXISTENCE.COMFounded by pro-labour workers, public employees, doctors, engineers, workers’ families, academics, lawyers and journalists, Workers’ Health and Works Safety Assembly (WHSA) issued a comprehensive report demonstrating that at least 1970 workers were murdered in 2016 in Turkey
Workers’ Health and Works Safety Assembly (WHSA) issued a comprehensive report, which indicates that at least 1970 workers were murdered in 2016 in Turkey.
Founded by pro-labour workers, public employees, doctors, engineers, workers’ families, academics, lawyers and journalists, WHSA calls itself an assembly independent from the state and capital with the aim of coordinating struggle for safety and healthy workplaces. WHSA’s report suggests that the term of “work accident” is a capitalist approach which considers occupational murders as destined or natural developments and that the terms such as “work-related murder” or in short “work murder” should be used instead.
The report shows that the workforce consists of 30 million workers in Turkey, the rate of men is 71,9% while of women is 31,8%. The distribution of sectors: 20,14% in agriculture, 20% in industry, 7,6% in construction, and 52% in the service sector.
AT LEAST 1970 WORKERS MURDERED IN 2016
Under the light of updated data gathered from labour organisations, work-related murders in 2016 are as follows by month:
In January at least 119,
In February at least 144,
In March at least 160,
In April at least 172,
In May at least 127,
In June at least 210,
In July at least 176,
In August at least 206,
In September at least 150,
In October at least 169,
In November at least 196,
And in December at least 141 workers lost their lives...
At least 1970 workers were murdered in 2016!
Demonstrating that the rate of work-related murders has largely increased under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the report states: “In 2016, the distribution of work murders by types of employment is as follows: among 1970 labourers who lost their lives in 2016, 1682 of them are wage earners in private&public sectors, and 288 of them are independent workers working on his/her own behalf, 210 being farmers/small land owners and 78 being merchants.”
END STATE OF EMERGENCY IMMEDIATELY
There is an important point in the graph: Work related murders before the date of declaration of the state of emergency, on July 21 with blue colour, and after that to the end of the year with red. The real situation is obvious: Workers’ health and work safety conditions were already bad but became worse. After the declaration of the state of emergency work murders have increased by 9%.
DEMOGRAPHIC FIGURES ON OCCUPATIONAL MURDERS
The WHSA report shows that 110 female and 1860 male workers were murdered in 2016. Indicating to the situation of women workers, the report states: “Women mainly work in agriculture, health, education, office, food, textile, aviation, municipality, and domestic sectors. Another factor is that work-related murders of women are either kept secret or they are made invisible since they work in the informal economy.”
The report demonstrates that 56 of the murdered workers in 2016 were child/young workers under the age of 18. The workers’ murders largely took place in industrial cities: “262 workers died in İstanbul; 89 workers died in Kocaeli; 81 workers died in Bursa; 74 workers died in İzmir, 72 workers died in Ankara; 70 workers died in Antalya; 61 workers died in Konya, and 56 workers died in Manisa.”
According to the report, “442 workers died due to traffic and shuttle accidents; 355 workers died due to collapses and crushes; 323 workers died due to falls; 217 workers died due to heart attack or brain haemorrhage; 159 workers died due to armed attack-shooting; 91 workers died due to electric shocks; 90 workers died by suicide…”
The rate of work-related murders has largely increased under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP).
INCREASING SUICIDE RATES AMONG WORKERS
Underlining that the rate of suicide largely increased in Turkey under the rule of the AKP and that 90 workers committed suicide in 2016, the report puts forth:
“As a result of the neoliberal capitalist policies during the reign of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) with the growing precariatization of public teachers, an important number of teachers have not been appointed to their jobs by the government although they have already graduated from their colleges. The education has been a commodity by itself bought and sold including the teachers' labour force. On the other hand, these suicides happen not only among teachers. Among bank workers, security workers, farmers, construction workers..., a lot of suicides happened last year and do happen every year. However about what they call ‘conspicuous suicide attempts’ and what we call work-related murders, there is not one single theoretical study or written research in Turkey, let alone a practical struggle.”
CHILD LABOUR SHOULD BE BANNED
Showing that at least 56 child workers were murdered in 2016, the report says:
“There is a considerable number of child workers in metal, construction, accommodation, public works, trade, food, and textile sectors … children are either encouraged to go to the vocational high schools to supply cheap technical staff to the capital, or pushed out of education to join the unskilled labour force.”
The report also indicates to the EU’s hypocrisy: “the European Union is a collaborator of the state policies regarding child labour. EU officials praise the government’s efforts to improve the conditions of child labour. An aspect to be underlined regarding migrant child labour is that there was no finding on migrant child worker death in 2013; however, five Syrian immigrant children were killed in work-related murders in 2014, twelve Syrian children in 2015, and twenty-four immigrant children, including 6 Syrian and 1 Afghan, in 2016. This situation is a direct reflection of the above-mentioned Turkey-EU policies.”
‘RESIST, WORKER! IN ORDER TO SURVIVE’
The WHSA report concludes that they are calling workers for joining unions against work-related murders:
“Workers’ participation is the prerequisite for prevention of work-related murders and ensuring healthy and safe work. Workers can only achieve this by way of unionisation. All kinds of pressure on the freedom of unionisation should be eliminated! End to subcontracting and hired labour! We want secure employment! The bosses, bureaucrats, and politicians who are responsible for work-related murders should be prosecuted and punished! These demands are the most basic rights of workers’ health and work safety. Our task is to persist on creating movements across the country for implementation of our demands.”The U.S. House of Representative voted once again today to pass the GOP tax bill, but protesters tried their hardest to get a word in on the telecast.
The audio in the live proceedings was cut repeatedly today as protesters who opposed of the bill shouted throughout Paul Ryan's speeches. Reporters on the scene say that citizens in the room were yelling and chanting things like, "Kill the bill, don't kill us!"
In the video below, House Speaker Paul Ryan seems totally unperturbed as his floor time is interrupted by a woman shouting "You lie! You lie! You starve America!"
The audio cuts out for nearly 30 seconds as the person yelling is escorted from the room. Paul Ryan and others in the room laugh as they get back to business.
“They control the audio, that’s what they do,” said John King on CNN after the audio was cut on protesters on the network today.
The tax reform bill was passed at 12:56 p.m. today, with polls showing that it had the support of less than 33 percent of the American people. The approval rating is even lower than the House of Representatives' last attempt to raise taxes.
The bill passed the House yesterday as well, though the Senate determined that it violated the budget rules of reconciliation. The senate reconvened at 1 a.m. this morning to pass the bill, leaving only a the second vote by the House this afternoon.
President Trump has referred to the bill as his "Christmas gift" to the American middle class.
No Democrats voted for the bill in either the Senate or the House.California's report said $440 million. New Jersey's said $600 million. In Pennsylvania, the tally is $700 million. Those Wall Street fees paid by public workers' pension systems have kicked off an intensifying debate over whether such expenses are necessary. Now, a report from an industry-friendly source says those huge levies represent only a fraction of the true amounts being raked in by Wall Street firms from state and local governments.
"Less than one?half of the very substantial [private equity] costs incurred by U.S. pension funds are currently being disclosed," says the report from CEM, whose website says the financial analysis firm "serve(s) over 350 blue-chip corporate and government clients worldwide."
Currently, about 9 percent — or $270 billion — of America's $3 trillion public pension fund assets are invested in private equity firms. With the financial industry's standard 2 percent management fee, that quarter-trillion dollars generates roughly $5.4 billion in annual management fees for the private equity industry — and that's not including additional "performance" fees paid on investment returns. If CEM's calculations are applied uniformly, it could mean taxpayers and retirees may actually be paying double — more than $10 billion a year.
Public officials are overseeing this massive payout to Wall Street at the very moment many of those same officials are demanding big cuts to retirees' promised pension benefits.
"With billions of public worker and taxpayer dollars put at risk in the highest-cost, most opaque investment schemes ever devised by Wall Street for a decade now, investigations that hold Wall Street profiteers accountable are long, long overdue," said former Securities and Exchange Commission attorney Ted Siedle.3w
Private equity firms have argued that their fees are worth the expense, because they supposedly deliver returns for investors that beat low-fee index funds, which track the broader stock market. But those private equity returns are typically self-reported by the firms over the life of those longer-term investments, meaning there are few ways to verify whether the returns are real. Indeed, a recent study from George Washington University argued that private equity firms are using their self-reporting authority to mislead investors into believing their returns are smoother and more consistent than they actually are.
In a 2014 speech, the SEC's top examiner, Andrew Bowden, sounded the alarm about undisclosed fees in the private equity industry, saying the agency had discovered "violations of law or material weaknesses in controls over 50 percent of the time" at firms it had evaluated.
To date, however, the SEC has taken few actions to crack down on the practices, but some states are starting to step up their oversight.
In New Jersey, for instance, pension trustees announced a formal investigation of Gov. Chris Christie's administration after evidence surfaced suggesting that the Republican administration has not been disclosing all state pension fees paid to financial firms.
In Rhode Island, the new state treasurer, Seth Magaziner, a Democrat, recently published a review of all the fees that state's beleaguered pension fund has paid. The analysis revealed that the former financial firm of Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo is charging the state's pension fund the highest fee rate of any firm in its asset class.
In Pennsylvania, the new Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf used his first budget address to call for the state "to stop excessive fees to Wall Street managers."
These moves are shining a spotlight on one of the most lucrative yet little-noticed Wall Street schemes. With so much money at issue - and with pensioners retirement income on the line — that scrutiny is long overdue.
David Sirota is a senior writer at the International Business Times and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future." Email him at [email protected], follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.Former San Leandro cop charged with sex with teen
Marco Becerra, 26, was charged with three counts of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor he met while working as an instructor for the San Leandro Police Department’s Explorer program. He has since resigned from the force. less Marco Becerra, 26, was charged with three counts of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor he met while working as an instructor for the San Leandro Police Department’s Explorer program. He has since... more Photo: Alameda County Sheriff’s Office Photo: Alameda County Sheriff’s Office Image 1 of / 28 Caption Close Former San Leandro cop charged with sex with teen 1 / 28 Back to Gallery
A San Leandro police officer faces criminal charges after admitting to having sex with a 17-year-old girl he met while working as an instructor in his department’s Explorer program for young people interested in pursuing law enforcement careers, court records show.
Marco Becerra resigned in late October after he “confessed to being in a sexual relationship with the victim,” a city police sergeant wrote in a court declaration. On Nov. 8, Alameda County prosecutors charged Becerra, 26, with three felony counts of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, known as statutory rape.
“I am upset and disappointed by the unethical and criminal behavior of one of our officers,” Police Chief Jeff Tudor wrote in a statement to The Chronicle, which learned of Becerra’s arrest through a confidential source. “These actions are absolutely inconsistent with the ethical standards of the San Leandro Police Department and we will not tolerate this type of behavior.”
The department has suspended its Explorer program while it conducts an internal review, the chief said. The program is designed to give young people, ages 14 to 19, a head start in a career in law enforcement through training and community work.
Reached by phone Monday, Becerra — who was once a San Leandro Explorer himself — declined to comment on the charges, saying he needed to speak with his lawyer. The attorney, Michael Rains, said his client “came right out and admitted there had been a relationship” after he was confronted.
“This relationship in every sense was consensual,” Rains said. “There were strong emotional feelings by both parties, and despite that she was just shy of 18, the law says it was illegal.
“As a law enforcement officer he knows he’s not above the law,” Rains said. “He accepted responsibility. He wanted to do the right thing.”
The department was tipped off to the alleged crimes Oct. 13, officials said, thanks to a call from a worker with the Alameda County Social Services Agency, who learned about the relationship and was required to notify authorities under the state’s mandatory reporting laws.
Investigators then spoke to the victim, who is referred to in court papers as Jane Doe. She said she became friends with Becerra through the Explorer program and corresponded with him on the phone and through social media, police Sgt. Dan Leja wrote in a court declaration.
Leja, who heads the department’s special victims unit, said Becerra and the victim met “at a location in San Leandro” on at least three occasions — Sept. 11, Sept. 26 and Oct. 12 — and had sexual intercourse. In each case, officials said, the officer was off-duty.
Becerra, who had been with the department for three years and was a member of the SWAT team, was placed on administrative leave after the victim’s interview. He confessed to the relationship Oct. 20 and resigned five days later, police said.
Becerra has pleaded not guilty and is free on $25,000 bail. He is due back in court Jan. 10 for a pretrial hearing.
San Leandro police officials said they did not make the case public out of concern for the victim and her family.
“They had to deal with the investigation already,” Lt. Isaac Benabou, a department spokesman, said Monday. “We decided we weren’t going to expose them to any more pain by publicizing this story.”
Explorer programs are offered by a number of Bay Area police agencies. San Leandro’s city website says its initiative is “designed to prepare students to be active in the community, learn more about a law enforcement career, obtain valuable work experience, and take on more responsibility as a young adult.”
Those in the program attend weekly meetings, help out at city festivals and other events, and act as role players in SWAT and hostage negotiation drills.
Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffskyOne of our new students, YANG Meng, is making her way around the internet in a great feature by The Forward, which details her experience learning Yiddish this summer in Tel Aviv. Meng worked with one of her language instructors to translate a well known Chinese song into Yiddish.
Meng re-titled the song “Chinese Moon Over Tel Aviv” for her translation, and did a beautiful performance of the piece this past summer. We are proud to welcome Meng to our newest cohort, not just because of her musical talents, but because her dedication to bringing Holocaust education to China inspires us to keep our program great. We are glad she decided to join us, and hope that by the end of her time here with us there will be a Chinese-Yiddish song about Haifa as well!
Interested in applying for our MA in Holocaust Studies Program? You can find the application and more information at our website: http://holocaust-studies.haifa.ac.il/
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from Finland, the two sides aren’t even remotely close to making a deal…
Looking at what the Canucks are allowing to walk out the door, we can get a sense of what holes the club will need to fill over the summer.
Andrew Ebbett is a depth forward, but he’s a particular type of depth forward in that he’s a replacement level guy who can fill in effectively and produce some offense in your top-six. He basically replaced Jeff Tambellini this past season, and if he re-signs elsewhere over the next week the team will need to find a "top-six depth guy" over the course of the summer. Or they could hand the keys to Jordan Schroeder.
Aaron Rome, Marc-Andre Gragnani and Sami Salo are defensive depth. All played a few games in the top-four over the past season, but mostly they’re best suited to playing third pairing minutes on a really good team. The Canucks will need to find some defensive depth this summer, whether or not it comes from within the organization (Connauton and Sauve strike one as ready to contribute in limited minutes) or on the open market is the question.
Samme Pahlsson never really worked out in his short post-deadline stint with the Canucks, but the fact that the team brought him in indicates that they require another center who can handle tough minutes, and allow Kesler and the twins to play under better circumstances. Malhotra wasn’t as effective last season as he was the season previous, and for whatever reason the team doesn’t seem to like Maxim Lapierre playing regularly in the top-9. Both could be serviceable third line options, but based on Gillis’ comments over the past few weeks: the club’s need for a center is one that team management sees as particularly glaring.
Mike Duco and Byron Bitz are fourth line grinders and pugilists, plain and simple. The team has retained Dale Weise with a qualifying offer, still has Zack Kassian on an entry-level deal and recently re-signed Aaron Volpatti as well. It’s also possible that Steve Pinnizotto, who missed all of last year with injury, could get another shot with the team. Generally speaking, these sorts of players are the easiest to find on the open market.
Beyond those team needs, the club requires another top-4 defenseman, as they really struggled once Salo’s effectiveness in that role diminished. It’s possible that Chris Tanev will grow into being a legitimate, shut-down top-four defenseman – but he wasn’t ready for those minutes last season. Expecting him to be an everyday top-four guy starting in October is a bit of a gamble, but considering the exorbitant cost of bringing in a guy like Garrison or Carle, it might be a worthwhile gamble to make.
In summary, the team is in a good spot heading into July 1st. All of their roster holes can probably be addressed in-house if necessary, and the only glaring slot that the club both needs to address, and that will be difficult to address, is finding a steady top-4 defenseman. Beyond that, the Canucks only really need depth and ideally another defensive centreman.
Who to Target on the Market
Defensive Centreman
When we wrote about the team’s need for a third line centreman a month ago, we included names like Stoll and Slater who have since been taken off of the market. The guy we believed to be most suitable for the team, however, will be available tomorrow, and that guy is Jay McClement.
McClement was shunted onto the fourth line in Colorado last season, more because the Avalanche are deep at centre (O’Reiley, Stastny, Duchene), than because he’s lost his fast ball. McClement remains one of the single best penalty-killing forwards in the league, and he’s the sort of defensive centreman that the Canucks tend to like – in that he can soak up tough minutes and win a lot of defensive-zone draws. Among all defensive centreman who remain on the market, McClement seems like the guy who could most convincingly fill the "enabler" role Malhotra held down in the 2010/11 season.
Paul Gaustad will also hit the market tomorrow, and while he brings more size and more offense than a guy like McClement does, in my view he’s a high-end fourth line centre. He’s generally posted positive possession numbers, but he’s never been tasked with matching up against top-comp, and I think he would struggle if given Malhotra-type minutes. I’m just not sure that Gaustad fits in with Vancouver’s usual M.O. – though Gillis has seemingly prioritized "size" over the past few seasons.
Another name available is Torrey Mitchell, who had something of a rough season for San Jose last year. Mitchell’s underlying numbers cratered, and his PDO went through the floor (thanks Antii Niemi!) so he could be an intriguing "buy-low" option. He’s had positive possession numbers in three of the past four seasons while facing moderately difficult competition, and starting more often in the defensive zone. I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if the Canucks pursued him, and I must say I really like his game.
There are a few available options like Dominic Moore and Kyle Wellwood who are reasonably effective – especially Wellwood – but would never sign in Vancouver for their own respective personal reasons. Keith Aucoin and Zenon Konopka are fourth line centreman who appeal to me for a variety of reasons (Aucoin can drive play, and draws an outrageous amount of penalties, while Konopka is tough, drives play and wins faceoffs like a mad man), but they’re not really third liners.
A Top-four defenseman
Could the Canucks take a serious run at Ryan Suter tomorrow? I’m sure they’ll make him an offer, and they should, but realistically Suter is a white whale and is going to sign with a team that offers him something like 9 million per. I just can’t see the Canucks making him their highest paid player.
We’re big Jason Garrison fans around here, and while his goal totals from last season are a percentage driven mirage, if you’re going to "buy high" on a player: Garrison is the right guy to do it with. Yes his offensive output is unsustainable, but he’s posted excellent underlying numbers for two years in a row. Beyond that he’s exceedingly versatile, something Vancouver has lacked on their blueline over the past two seasons. In 2010/11 Garrison played on Mike Weaver’s left side, and the twosome were one of the leagues single best shutdown defensive pairings. In 2011/12 he played a more offensive role on Brian Campbell’s right side. Garrison is not a 5 million dollar defenseman, but if the Canucks paid him that much and shipped Keith Ballard out – that would be a big net win for the team.
Matt Carle has been a positive possession player in each of the past four seasons, and has exceeded 35 points in three of those campaigns. He’s an offensive defenseman who has occasionally been tasked with playing difficult minutes. Unfortunately, he generally plays the left side. While he’s a skilled player who could potentially bump over to the right-side and do a convincing Christian Ehrhoff impression, he’s not really an ideal fit for the Canucks despite being an excellent defenseman.
If the Canucks can’t find a white whale, lose out on Schultz derby (Update: they did lose out on the Schultz Derby) and also fail to re-sign Sami Salo, then one guy who makes a fair bit of sense as "Tanev insurance" would be former Babe Pratt Trophy winner Adrian Aucoin. Adrian Aucoin isn’t an ideal top-four defenseman, but he plays the right side and is more suitable for that role than the likes of Kuba, Salvador, Kubina or Bryan Allen.
Top-Six Winger
We really liked Lee Stempniak as a cheap, top-six option before he re-signed with Calgary, and David Jones looked alright too – even though 4 million is way, way too much to pay for his services. Both of those players have re-signed now, and the market is absurdly thin.
Shane Doan has become available however, and the Canucks are known to be extremely high on the Coyotes captain. I would keep his name in mind, because I would be very surprised if the Canucks didn’t take a serious run at Doan. Doan is a positive possession player, who has consistently put up points with very little offensive talent around him. There’s no telling what he could do in Vancouver, playing on a team with a top-PP unit and playing with a pivot like Ryan Kesler.
Another top-six winger who seems to fit in with what the Canucks like to do is P.A. Parenteau. Parenteau has posted spectacular underlying numbers, and has produced counting stats as well on some really bad Islanders teams over the past couple of seasons. While some would say he’s benefitted from spending his ice-time with Matt Moulson and John Tavares, the WOWY numbers indicate that he’s been of more help to them, then they’ve been to him. Parenteau’s agent is Alan Walsh who, you might remember, got sub-average NHL goaltender Ondrej Pavelec a five year deal with a 3.9 million dollar cap-hit. Many expect Parenteau to get seriously paid this summer and while it’s possible that he’ll be too rich for Mike Gillis’ blood, cost aside – he’d be a great fit in Vancouver.
Beyond those two big names, Jeff Angus suggested the Canucks bring in Jiri Hudler and Mikael Samuelsson as "second line playmakers" to help set up Booth and Kesler this week, and both players would be sensible additions at the right price.
Top-six Depth
My wager is that Jordan Schroeder will basically fill this role next season, and he looks NHL ready. But, if the Canucks look to the open market for a new Jeff Tambellini/Andrew Ebbett type, then the available names are generally unsexy. Chris Conners, Gilbert Brule, Ryan Shannon and Erik Christensen would seem to fit this basic mold.
Defensive Depth
We’ve gone on at length about Dylan Reese, who seems like an ideal Alain Vigneault third-pairing defenseman. Fingers crossed the Canucks can get him under contract, because while he’s not a particularly physical defenseman, he looks likely to be the best Aaron Rome replacement on the market.
Other options like Scott Hannan, and Greg Zanon would fit in well enough, but it’s Dylan Reese and Adrian Aucoin who are the real depth defenseman "prizes" in my view.
Gillis on July 1st
Generally speaking, the Canucks have been quiet on the first day of free-agency during Gillis’ tenure. In 2008, Gillis leaked the details of the two year, twenty million dollar contract that he offered to Mats Sundin, but didn’t make a splash until a couple of days later when he signed Pavel Demitra. In 2009, Gillis’ big move came hours before the market opened, when he got both Sedin twins under contract. On July 1st itself all he did was sign Aaron Rome. Last year, the only major move the Canucks made was to sign Marco Sturm to a one year, two million dollar deal that really didn’t work out.
The big exception is July 1st 2010 when Gillis signed Dan Hamhuis and Manny Malhotra for a combined 7 million on the first day of free-agency. Those two signings represent some of his finest work as General Manager.
So will this July 1st resemble 2008, 2009 and 2011, or will Gillis make a 2010 level splash? Looking at the fundamentals this year, the Canucks don’t need to add much, prices are likely to be insane, and the talent pool is exceptionally shallow. As such, I’d expect July 1st to be relatively quiet for the Canucks. While Gillis may take a run at the likes of Shane Doan or Jason Garrison, and may dot some i’s and cross some t’s by getting at the agents for Jay McClement and Dylan Reese – I wouldn’t expect fireworks from the Canucks tomorrow.
Some of the team’s needs could be addressed by a Luongo trade, whenever that is finally completed, while others could be addressed in-house. If the team goes into next season with Maxim Lapierre as their third line centre, and Chris Tanev in the top-four – they’re still an elite team. Mike Gillis and the management team have to be well aware of this, and I’d expect them to be conservative tomorrow as a result. Hopefully I’m wrong though, and the team surprises me with some serious "bold moves!"Get the latest news and videos for this game daily, no spam, no fuss.
Heads-up for those that may still be contemplating purchasing the Fallout 4 season pass: the price goes up from $30/£24.99 to $50/£39.99 on March 1 (tomorrow), so if you want it for the cheaper price you'll have to get it today.
As previously announced, the price increase is a result of Bethesda's "expanded DLC plan." The studio has said it will now deliver "more than $60 worth of new Fallout adventures and features" in 2016.
The first three Fallout 4 expansions are Automatron (March; $10), Wasteland Workshop (April; $5), and Far Harbor (May; $25). On top of these these paid expansions, Bethesda has promised to support Fallout 4 with more free updates.
In Automatron a character called the Mechanist releases a "horde of evil robots" into post-apocalyptic Boston, one of which is the "devious Robobrain." Players will have to track them down and use their parts to build their own robot.
"Choose from hundreds of mods; mixing limbs, armor, abilities, and weapons like the all-new lightning chain gun," Bethesda said. "Even customize their paint schemes and choose their voices."
Wasteland Workshop, meanwhile, lets players "design and set cages to capture live creatures--from raiders to Deathclaws," then "tame them or have them face off in battle, even against your fellow settlers. The Wasteland Workshop also includes a suite of new design options for your settlements like nixi tube lighting, letter kits, taxidermy, and more."
Far Harbor is the most expensive of the three, priced at $25. In it, you take on a mission from the Valentine's Detective Agency to find a young woman and a secret colony of synths.
"Travel off the coast of Maine to the mysterious island of Far Harbor, where higher levels of radiation have created a more feral world," Bethesda explained.
"Navigate through the growing conflict between the synths, the Children of Atom, and the local townspeople. Will you work towards bringing peace to Far Harbor, and at what cost? Far Harbor features the largest landmass for an add-on that we've ever created, filled with new faction quests, settlements, lethal creatures and dungeons. Become more powerful with new, higher-level armor and weapons. The choices are all yours."
In other Fallout 4 news, Bethesda has announced official mod support will be rolled out after the first DLC is released in March.A prototype is a preliminary model of something. Projects that offer physical products need to show backers documentation of a working prototype. This gallery features photos, videos, and other visual documentation that will give backers a sense of what’s been accomplished so far and what’s left to do. Though the development process can vary for each project, these are the stages we typically see:
About
VIVA LE STORAGE MEDIA REVOLUTION!!
I am creating a Storage media device using revolutionary new technology, which I have developed from fields outside of the tech industry.
I have personally always tried to think of new solutions to problems in our world. Being an electrical and electronic engineer I naturally want to solve problems in these fields. Storage media falls under this.
Seagate recently announced that humanity is likely to need several Exabytes of storage over the next 10-15 years & I wish to help reduce the burden of storing this vast amount of information and data we produce.
There are many issues with current storage media devices, be they Optical, magnetics or Solid State. These include the following:
Instability - SSDs only have a certain amount of write operations before you need to reformat them, or your information will often go corrupt or missing!
Mechanical Failure - HDDs & magnetic tape readers can fail mechanically. Almost anyone that has used laptops and desktops for years, and used HDDs will have had a failure or issue with them at some point. From head crashes to motor failures, this is a core weakness of HDDs.
Poor shelf life - While all electronics age and degrade with time, this is especially noticable with Optical Storage. The discs can warp in higher temperatures, easily end up scratched & in some cases the disc format ends up unreadable.
My Device attempts to address these above issues. It is a magnetic storage device with not much in the way of moving parts, with the storage capacity of traditional Hard Disk Drive Platters, but it utilises an innovative new way of Reading and Writing information to the platters themselves, making it a more stable system overall.
It doesn't have the write limitations of an SSD nor the poor shelf life of optical media. I came up with this idea, in a spur of a moment, by bringing my knowledge of certain military hardware & applying the technology to consumer level technology.
It is a truly revolutionary way & reading and writing data. With this new method, the internals of the drive are slimmed down slightly too, allowing slightly larger surface areas on the platters so you can store more data! My technology incombination with Shingled Magnetic Recording and or Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording, will lead a storage revolution! So join me on my journey to improve the world, bit by bit! (pun intended)I’ve seen woo on HuffPo before, but @EllenGraceJones takes the cake. Guess what? Darwin was wrong, and we need to update our model of evolution, she says. That’s a remarkable claim; you might be wondering who this person is who sees so far beyond what mere scientists have found.
She’s a fashion editor.
An interesting experiment and indeed correct in that we are still evolving, however to attribute it to the Victorian, matter-based, Darwinian model of evolution is backward-thinking and flawed given the recent leaps and bounds in metaphysical sciences and physical historical evidence disproving linear evolution. The ideology we randomly mutated from ocean slime to our knuckle-dragging neanderthal long-long lost cousins to our current incarnation is one that’s been dogmatically accepted into mainstream evolutionary hegemony without challenge until recent years.
“Linear evolution”? “Metaphysical sciences”? WTF? So she makes up a bizarre caricature of evolution and claims it’s been disproven (true; I don’t know anyone who believes that BS), and then credits metaphysics with providing evidence against it? Weird, but a typical egotistical creationist.
If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering how long it will take her to bring up Hitler. The answer is 5; it’s in the fifth paragraph.
“If you take Darwinian theory, make a ‘scientific’ principal out of it, put it into political action, then you have something like Nazi Germany” states the pioneering Dr Bruce Lipton, author of Spontaneous Evolution. Lipton believes it’s ‘cooperation not competition’ which are the hallmarks of most natural orders.
Who the hell is Bruce Lipton? A totally fruitloops goonybat: you can get a good overdose here, in an hour and a half on Coast to Coast, the radio show where reason goes to die. He believes that epigenetics is magic that will bring about a new age, and that it supplants the old paradigm of mere genes. Here’s a shorter summary; it’s all quantum, unsurprisingly.
But back to Ellen Grace Jones. If you read her piece, I should warn you that every link tosses you into a rabbit hole of pure lunacy, so forgive the brief detour.
The latest science suggests we are intelligently designed – not by some sentient humanistic being from on high – moreover a higher, energetic, source intelligence. Einstein’s Unified Field theory equation was completed in 2007. The breakthrough proves everything: matter (which derives from energy, which is what we’re made from) all natural laws and processes link to one underlying, unifying consciousness – aka, God, Source, Allah, Yaweh – pick your favourite.
I’m sure physicists will all be pleased and a little bit surprised to learn that we’ve had a unified field theory for the past 5 years. I’m sorry to disappoint you all, but it was discoverd by John Hagelin, “leading particle and quantum physicist” — yep, it’s another rabbit hole. Hagelin’s obsession is transcendental meditation. This “unifying consciousness” nonsense ain’t physics or math…it’s religion. Skip it.
There is no wooish bullshit that Ellen Grace Jones won’t mistake for creme brulee. Marrying Mayan numerology to Aquarian utopianism? You betcha.
One explicit way in which mankind is evolving for sure is in terms of our consciousness. From the Arab Spring, to #Occupy, to other measured dissent, there is a huge global shift and awakening to the corrupt, control system matrix we’ve been locked into for so long. The Maya, who were acute astronomers, mathematicians and scientists knew this and their precise Long Count calendar not just tracked time, but evolution of consciousness. The much discussed end of it being December 21st 2012. Contrary to Hollywood fear-mongering, it doesn’t connote the ‘end of the world’, moreover the transition into a more enlightened, evolved age.
Vibrations and signals from space? Of course!
Everything is energy – including us. Life is the interaction of magnetic vibrational fields and our evolution is subject to the cosmos, not random selection. There have been peak sunspot emissions and coronal mass ejections in 2012 so it’s little surprise humankind is awakening.
Mangled history and crackpot archaeology? It’s all here!
Off the coast of Yonaguni Japan, India and Cuba there are giant sunken megalithic sites and pyramidal structures. In Bosnia Europe’s first pyramid was discovered and dated to 10,000 years plus. Geologist Dr Robert Schoch has accurately dated the Sphinx to be 7-9,000BC – throwing our mainstream historical timeline into chaos and in need of serious re-writing.
I’ve been saying it for a long time, but I’ll repeat it for you again: the Huffington Post is a mega-sleazy slushpile of credulous crap and unedited stream-of-consciousness burbling from idiots. It is evolving, though: it’s evolving to fill the niche left behind by the demise of Weekly World News.
Send Ellen Grace Jones back to the runway, where sometimes fatuous idiocy might get mistaken for creativity, and where pretense and arrogance can masquerade as taste.Terror group Islamic State have claimed responsibility for a horror attack on a German Christmas market which killed 12 and left up to 50 injured.
Terror group Islamic State have claimed responsibility for a horror attack on a German Christmas market which killed 12 and left up to 50 injured.
Berlin terror attack: ISIS claim responsibility for market horror crash as new manhunt gets underway
A news agency linked to the group have said the so-called Islamic State or IS has claimed responsibility for the truck crash as a new manhunt is underway for the suspect or suspects in the attack.
The executor of the operation.. in Berlin is a soldier of the Islamic state and he executed the operation in response to calls to target nationals of the coalition countries," the militant group's AMAQ news agency said on Tuesday
German authorities have released a man who was arrested in the wake of the attack, saying they do not have enough evidence to build a case.
Police have admitted that a suspect or suspects may still be at large.
However, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said investigators are now following several leads.
"We just heard about the supposed claim of responsibility by this so-called Islamic State that is in fact a gang of terrorists," de Maiziere told ARD broadcaster.
"There are several leads that investigators are following now," the minister added.
De Maiziere added that "nobody will rest until the perpetrator or the perpetrators are caught".
Islamic State has claimed the Berlin truck attacker is an IS soldier "targeting citizens of the Crusader coalition".
A Pakistani asylum-seeker was arrested shortly after the horrifying incident but police said he may not be the attacker, and the real perpetrator could still be on the run before his release this evening.
Prosecutors noted in a statement that witnesses were able to follow the truck's driver from the scene but lost track of him. The man arrested matched witness descriptions of the truck driver, but investigators have not been able to prove he was in the truck's cab at the time of the attack.
Under German law, prosecutors have until the end of the calendar day following an arrest to seek a formal arrest warrant keeping a suspect in custody.
The German Interior Minister has said it is not yet known how many foreigners are among the victims of the Christmas Market crash but there are no children among the dead.
Earlier BKA chief Holger Muench said authorities are not sure if the suspect they have in custody was the driver of the truck, adding that the man denies being involved.
He said police have also not yet found a pistol believed to have been used to kill a Polish truck driver who was supposed to be delivering steel beams with the truck when it went missing.
Police stand near the Christmas market in Berlin, Germany December 19, 2016. REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski Police work near the site of an accident at a Christmas market on Breitscheidplatz square near the fashionable Kurfuerstendamm avenue in the west of Berlin, Germany, December 19, 2016. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch A truck is seen near the Christmas market in Berlin, Germany December 19, 2016. REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski Police secures the area at the site of an accident at a Christmas market on Breitscheidplatz square near the fashionable Kurfuerstendamm avenue in the west of Berlin, Germany, December 19, 2016. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch A truck is seen near the Christmas market in Berlin, Germany December 19, 2016. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch Paramedics work at the site of an accident at a Christmas market on Breitscheidplatz square near the fashionable Kurfuerstendamm avenue in the west of Berlin, Germany, December 19, 2016. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch Paramedics work at the site of an accident at a Christmas market on Breitscheidplatz square near the fashionable Kurfuerstendamm avenue in the west of Berlin, Germany, December 19, 2016. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch A truck is seen near the Christmas market in Berlin, Germany December 19, 2016. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch Police and emergency workers are at the site of an accident at a Christmas market on Breitscheidplatz square near the fashionable Kurfuerstendamm avenue in the west of Berlin, Germany, December 19, 2016. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch Police work at the site of an accident at a Christmas market on Breitscheidplatz square near the fashionable Kurfuerstendamm REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
Germany's top prosecutor Peter Frank told reporters the attack on the market outside the landmark Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was reminiscent of July's deadly truck attack in Nice and appeared to follow instructions published by Islamic State (IS).
Mr Frank said: "There is also the prominent and symbolic target of a Christmas market, and the modus operandi that mirrors at least past calls by jihadi terror organisations."
German chancellor Angela Merkel insisted the attack cannot change Germans' way of life.
She said in a televised statement: "Twelve people who were still among us yesterday, who were looking forward to Christmas, who had plans for the holidays, aren't among us any more.
"A gruesome and ultimately incomprehensible act has robbed them of their lives."
Witnesses saw only one man flee from the truck after it rammed into the crowded Christmas market on Monday evening. It smashed through the market, travelling 200-250ft before finally coming to a halt.
Six of those killed have been identified as Germans, and the man found shot and killed in the truck's passenger seat was Polish. The other five people killed have not yet been identified, and 18 people are still said to be suffering from serious injuries.
Interior minister Thomas de Maiziere said the man detained shortly after the attack was a Pakistani citizen. He had entered Germany as a migrant on December 31 last year and arrived in Berlin in February.
Berlin police urged people to remain "particularly vigilant" and to report "suspicious movement" to a special hotline.
Nine die in lorry 'attack' on Berlin Xmas market. US tourist Sabrina Glinz witnessed the aftermath of the incident. https://t.co/pOalxq41Oa — Sky News (@SkyNews) December 19, 2016 Horrified by the tragic loss of life in Berlin. Irish citizens in area: please follow advice of local authorities & consult @dfatravelwise pic.twitter.com/Tw36usXcDr — Charlie Flanagan (@CharlieFlanagan) December 19, 2016
"We may still have a dangerous criminal out there," Berlin police chief Klaus Kandt said.
Mr Merkel, who has been criticised for allowing in huge numbers of migrants last year, directly addressed the possibility that an asylum-seeker was responsible for the carnage.
"I know that it would be particularly hard for us all to bear if it were confirmed that a person committed this act who asked for protection and asylum in Germany," Mrs Merkel said.
"This would be particularly sickening for the many, many Germans who work to help refugees every day and for the many people who really need our help and are making an effort to integrate in our country."
A spokesman for Berlin's office for refugee affairs said police conducted a broad search overnight at a large shelter for asylum-seekers at the city's now-defunct Tempelhof airport. Four men in their late 20s were questioned but nobody was arrested.
The Polish owner of the truck said he feared the vehicle may have been hijacked. Ariel Zurawski said he last spoke with the driver, his cousin, around noon on Monday and the driver told him he was in Berlin and scheduled to unload Tuesday morning.
The driver Lukasz Urban has been named as the "the first victim of this heinous act of violence" by Poland's prime minister, Beata Szydlo.
His cousin told Polish media that it was clear the man 'fought for his life' during the incident.
On Tuesday, Mr Zurawski showed reporters a photo on his phone of his cousin in a kebab bar around 2pm, the last photo known of him still alive.
Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov accompanies Russian President Vladimir Putin (not seen), who disembarks from the Presidential aircraft at Ataturk airport in Istanbul, Turkey, October 10, 2016. REUTERS/Osman Orsal/File Photo Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov (L) accompanies Russian President Vladimir Putin who disembarks from the Presidential aircraft at Ataturk airport in Istanbul, Turkey, October 10, 2016. REUTERS/Osman Orsal/File Photo Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrey Karlov (L) accompanies Russian President Vladimir Putin who disembarks from the Presidential aircraft at Ataturk airport in Istanbul, Turkey, October 10, 2016. REUTERS/Osman Orsal/File Photo The Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov speaks a gallery in Ankara Monday Dec. 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) Turkish police secure the area near an art gallery where the Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov was shot in Ankara, Turkey, December 19, 2016. REUTERS/Umit Bektas A man gestures near to Andrei Karlov, the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, on the ground, at a photo gallery in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, Dec. 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) The Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov speaks a gallery in Ankara Monday Dec. 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) An unnamed gunman holds the gun after shooting the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, at a photo gallery in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, Dec. 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) An unnamed gunman gestures after shooting the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, at a photo gallery in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, Dec. 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) A man gestures near to Andrei Karlov on ground, the Russian Ambassador to Turkey at a photo gallery in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, Dec. 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) A man gestures near to the body of a man at a photo gallery in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, Dec. 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) An unnamed gunman gestures after shooting the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, at a photo gallery in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, Dec. 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) The Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov speaks a gallery in Ankara Monday Dec. 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) The Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov speaks at a gallery in Ankara, moments before the fatal attack (AP/Burhan Ozbilici)
Alert
The truck smashed into wooden huts serving mulled wine and sausages at the foot of the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church, one of west Berlin's most famous landmarks, at about 8 p.m. on Monday. Forty-eight people were injured, 18 severely.
News of the arrest of the 23-year-old Pakistani led politicians in Germany and beyond to demand a crackdown on immigration.
Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters: "There is much we still do not know with sufficient certainty but we must, as things stand now, assume it was a terrorist attack."
She added: "I know it would be especially hard for us all to bear if it were confirmed that the person who committed this act was someone who sought protection and asylum."
In a dramatic twist, police later said the suspect had denied the offence and might not be the right man.
"According to my information it's uncertain whether he was really the driver," Police President Klaus Kandt told a news conference.
Berlin police tweeted that they were "particularly alert" because of the denial. "Please be alert," they added.
Die Welt newspaper quoted an unnamed police chief as saying: "We have the wrong man. And therefore a new situation. The true perpetrator is still armed, at large and can cause fresh damage."
German media said the arrested man had jumped out of the driver's cab and run down the street towards the Tiergarten, a vast park in central Berlin. Several witnesses called police, including one who chased the suspect while on the phone, constantly updating officials on his whereabouts.
The chief prosecutor has said it is not known yet if the perpetrator was being instructed from elsewhere.
The attack fuelled immediate demands for a change to Merkel's immigration policies, under which more than a million people fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere have arrived in Germany this year and last.
"We must say that we are in a state of war, although some people, who always only want to see good, do not want to see this," said Klaus Bouillon, interior minister of the state of Saarland and a member of Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU).
Horst Seehofer, leader of the CDU's Bavarian sister party, said: "We owe it to the victims, to those affected and to the whole population to rethink our immigration and security policy and to change it."
The record influx has hit Merkel's ratings as she prepares to run for a fourth term next year, and boosted support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD). Senior AfD member Marcus Pretzell blamed Merkel for the attack on Twitter.
AfD leader Frauke Petry said Germany was no longer safe and "radical Islamic terrorism has struck in the heart of Germany".
The incident evoked memories of an attack in Nice, France in July when a Tunisian-born man drove a 19-tonne truck along the beach front, mowing down people who had gathered to watch the fireworks on Bastille Day, killing 86 people. That was claimed by Islamic State.
The temporary arrested suspect denies the offense.
Therefore we are particulary alert.
Please be also alert.#Breitscheidplatz — PolizeiBerlinEinsatz (@PolizeiBerlin_E) December 20, 2016
The mass influx of migrants and refugees to the European Union has deeply divided its 28 members and fuelled the rise of populist anti-immigration movements that hope to capitalise on public concerns next year in elections in France, Germany and the Netherlands.
Slovakia's Prime Minister Robert Fico said the latest attack would change perceptions of migration. "I think that the cup of patience is beginning to spill over and Europe's public will rightfully expect rather stronger measures," he said.
Nigel Farage of Britain's UK Independence Party tweeted: "Terrible news from Berlin but no surprise. Events like these will be the Merkel legacy."
On Tuesday morning, investigators removed the black truck from the site for forensic examination. People left flowers at the scene and notes, one of which read: "Keep on living, Berliners!" One woman was crying as she stopped by the flowers.
Bild newspaper cited security sources as saying the arrested man was Naved B. and had arrived in Germany a year ago. In legal cases German officials routinely withhold the full name of suspects, using only an initial.
A security source told Reuters the suspect had been staying at a refugee centre in the now defunct Tempelhof airport.
Die Welt said police special forces stormed a hangar at Tempelhof at around 4 a.m. (0300 GMT). A refugee there who gave his name only as Ahmed told Reuters security guards had told him there was a raid at around 4 a.m.
Prosecutors declined to immediately comment on the report.
IRISH IN BERLIN
A young Irish woman has told of the shock in Berlin after the suspected terror attack.
Shauna Sheridan (20) from Blanchardstown, Dublin works in an Irish bar with her boyfriend Alex Gutte (21), who is from Berlin.
The bar is called Irish Pub and is across from the Christmas market where the incident occurred.
She told Independent.ie how they were told they missed the situation by "five minutes".
“So we were on the U-bahn from Alexanderplatz, just doing |
him and his company to anyone interested in superior, professional grade interior formatting. Sebastian Wolfe, I Saw the Fire
What impressed me the most about Phillip was his commitment to the project. Not only did he read the novel—which already puts him in a rare class of designer—but he rose to the myriad difficulties of the project’s design—each chapter more challenging than the last–with the care, personal investment and attention to detail as if the book were his own. A.V. Bach, Eisenstein’s Monster
Phillip is a pure delight to work with. He’s meticulous, professional, punctual, and highly capable. He’s met my exacting demands time and time again, even when under pressure of timeline and budget. He’s my only choice when it comes to laying out a book, and I plan on using him for many more projects to come. Ben Dutter, Sigil Stone Publishing
Phillip and I have worked together for a few years now and with each project he has devoted himself to the task and will not quit until the job is done to satisfaction. Very personable and detailed-oriented, I recommend him highly! Kwasi Konadu, Diasporic Africa Press
Phillip is the miracle worker every author dreams of when it comes to creativity, patience, understanding and collaboration, efficiency and delivery on a book design. He has full command of the design process and is one of the most reliable professionals I’ve worked with. His passion for his work and superhuman turn around time make him an even more exceptional designer. It has been a great experience and delight to have Phillip design my book Desert Mojito, and I look forward to working with him again and again. Nazli Ghassemi, desertmojito.com
Phillip brought unique and creative ideas for my new eBook cover design, Gone Never Forgotten. His professionalism proved he’s willing to listen and tweak ideas best suited for that particular project. It was an easy process and I’m thrilled with the results. Natalie Bright, nataliebright.com
Working with Phillip was great—he gave me high quality work and was a pleasure to interact with. Will certainly hire him again when the opportunity presents itself! Ryan Wilcox, The Freelancer Collective
@phillipgessert has been an absolute delight to work with. He comes highly recommended. The Pass in Review (via Twitter)
I retained Phillip to design the front and back cover and the interior of my first novel, Saving the Karamazovs. He listened to the suggestions from my editor, my publicist, and me and developed several ideas that would capture the theme that I wanted to convey. Phillip is very easy to work with. In addition to being very creative, he is both patient and responsive. I was very satisfied with both the process and the final product. Gary Goldstick, ghgoldstick.com
The best business decision I ever made was to hire Phillip to design and brand my book covers. The second best decision I ever made was to totally trust his instincts. I wanted a totally modern and updated look. He went beyond and took the design into the future. I highly recommend him to all my writing and publishing peers who thank me profusely for introducing them to Phillip. Patsy Rae Dawson, patsyraedawson.com
…words cannot describe the brilliant experience i had in the cooperation with my graphic designer, Phillip Gessert. Purely a cyperspace encounter between Copenhagen and Phillip’s office in Texas, it proved to be one of a most rewarding working relationship. Through countless emails back and forth, he found the right solutions to every question. All in all, a privilege to work together with such a professional, trustworthy and personable designer. I was originally recommended to Phillip by my editor in California. Again proving how it is possible to combine forces through the net… and achieve excellent results. There is no question in my mind, that I will approach him again for my next work; it was a true pleasure! Linda Ruth Horowitz, whilethesandswhisper.com
Phillip is a terrific collaborator and someone who can add value to any creative project. His dedication to understanding the motivations behind the work is impressive, and for me, led to outstanding results. David A. Kalis, davidakalis.com
Whether he’s doing my covers or my interiors, Phillip Gessert never disappoints. In fact, he usually surprises—in a good way. His cover for my book BloodLight took my original idea and punted it into another dimension. I’ve lost count of the number of compliments I’ve received on it—even people who didn’t like the book rave about the cover! He’s just as good with interiors. How many other designers out there take time to read a book from beginning to end—prose or poetry—then try to find just the right font to match the content and theme? Incredibly creative in his own right, Phillip is always receptive to the writer’s ideas and gives them the last word—he’s in no way overbearing. Just an overall fantastic designer for writers who want their books to make an impact from first sight to last page. Harambee K. Grey-Sun, nextpoet.net
I am especially interested in academic works, cultural works, or works relating to preservation. Please do contact me if your project is at all historical in nature.
I appreciate, but do not require, a credit line. A credit line typically appears in your book’s front matter, near your publication details, and takes the form of…
Book formatted for print and ebook by Phillip Gessert (gessertbooks.com)
…this will only appear in your book if you place it in your manuscript. I will not add this to your book without your permission.The TCFD, initiated by Bank of England Governor Mark Carney and Chaired by Michael Bloomberg, is supported by companies like BHP Billiton and Unilever, and financial institutions responsible for assets of $US20 trillion ($26.6 trillion). In December, it released a draft set of recommendations for how companies and investors should disclose a whole manner of climate risks to their business.
Risks fall into two main categories. 'Physical risks' include the impacts of climate change like extreme weather, altered rainfall patterns and sea-level rise, and 'transition risks' which include policy and market changes that are inevitable if we are to maintain a habitable climate.
The principle is compelling. If we're going to meet the goals of the Paris climate change agreement and hold global warming well below two degrees, a rapid decarbonisation of the economy will be required. Asking coal, oil and gas companies to explain just how they plan to be compatible with that future economy is a fair enough question.
The trouble is moving beyond the obvious need for greater disclosure, to investors actually insisting that the TCFD recommendations be implemented. Despite institutional investors and many superannuation funds telling us that engagement is a far better form of action than divesting from a company, their efforts to convince companies to improve disclosure of climate-related risks have been largely unsuccessful. Currently, just two ASX companies disclose analyses of their performance under a scenario where climate change is kept below two degrees - AGL Energy and BHP Billiton. And we can critique the robustness of those analyses on another day.
Why Santos? It's one of Australia's largest pure-play fossil fuel companies and in many ways going backwards on disclosure after deciding to not even produce a sustainability report this year. Santos don't disclose climate change mitigation scenario analysis, they don't have targets to reduce their own emissions, and their discussion of climate-related risks is severely limited. Late last year, investors specifically asked Santos to improve its disclosure, yet six months have passed, and it has delivered nothing.So you want to make a night jump and don't know what to expect? Here is an example of how many dropzones run their night jump procedures and what you need to know before you participate in night jumps.
Before you even sign up for night jumps at a DZ you need to do a few jumps at the location during the day. Open somewhat high on at least one of the jumps looking and examining the potential hazards and outs if you end up in any direction from the DZ at night. Also before the end of the day arrives you need to have at least 1 glow stick and 1 strobe light that can be easily turned on under canopy.
Typically most dropzones will hold a briefing before dark to go over the procedures for the specific location or situation. You will most likely then be asked to sit in a dark room with no lights for a period of time to allow your eyes to adjust to the darkness
Typical things that are covered during night jump briefings include:
Prep work
In plane procedures
Exiting
Opening separation
Under canopy behavior
Landing
Before you can even prepare your eyes for the night skydives you need to prepare your equipment. First take the time to actually do a proper pack job on your main. Last thing you want to add to an already complex skydive is a reserve ride. You need to securely attach a glow stick to your altimeter or use a clearly lighted altimeter. If you are going to use a glow stick it is best to activate it before you start preparing your eyes then cover it with duct tape that is pulled off right before you jump. This insures that your glow stick is not a dud and it also keeps the light from shining on people's eyes. You also need to securely fasten your strobe light to you or to your rig. Attaching it to the rear of your leg, rear of your helmet or back is preferred since as the strobe fires your body will be blocking the light from getting in your eyes, but it is still very visible to everyone else. Some DZ's also require you to attach glow sticks to an arm so you need to listen during the briefing for individual DZ procedures. The most important thing in the preparation of the equipment is for the strobe and light sticks to be securely attached.
One of the most important things you can do to maintain your night vision is to avoid looking at any lights during your climb to altitude. Make sure your jump plane does not have any interior lights on, that no one is using flashlights, or anything else to light up the plane. The only color light that should be used inside the plane is a red light since that does not affect night vision. If there are any other light sources or colors (from jump lights) cover as much of them as possible to maintain your vision and still maintain their functionality.
According to the USPA SIM first time night jumpers are required to do a solo before they do any group night skydives. It is a really good idea to spend your first time in freefall at night looking around to make sure you find the landing area and pulling at your correct altitude. Typically groups are sorted by both group size and wing loading of the people in the skydive. Usually people with higher wing loadings are the first out on night jumps for reasons to be detailed shortly. After the groups and solos have been sorted most good night jump organizers will dictate exit order and pull altitudes. Usually with larger planes such as Caravans, Otters, Skyvans and Casa's two passes are made to allow for a greater horizontal separation then normally is allowed. Discuss with the pilot and S&TA; what the needed delay is for proper night jump separation. Exit on time, but as during the day do not rush the count. Just prior to exiting you need to activate the lights in the altimeter or uncover the glow sticks. DO NOT activate the strobes yet. In the last rewrite of FAR 105.19 the FAA changed the wording so the strobes no longer have to be active in freefall and since the lights of others in the group could affect your vision keep the strobes off. You do need a strobe that's visible under canopy still though.
At most DZ's each night jump group is separated by a solo skydiver. The first group out the door is assigned the lowest pull altitude. 3000 feet is a standard first pull altitude for the first group to allow proper separation and more time to deal with the complexities of night canopy flight but this may change with the group experience and DZ procedures. Each solo or group exiting after the first group is assigned an altitude 500 feet higher then the previous group up to usually 4500 to 5000 feet. Pull at your correct altitude. Do not pull higher then your altitude since the combination of horizontal separation, vertical separation and wing loading separation make for the safest possible night jump environment for you.
Once under a good canopy you need to do a few things differently than you normally would. The first is do not collapse your slider. The flapping noise that it makes can be heard by other canopies that might be getting close to you. You also need to turn on your strobe light. Do not do any spiraling or altitude loosing maneuvers since this will eliminate the vertical separation factor that the assigned pull altitudes established. Remember that. In a lot of cases of near misses on night jumps its usually discovered one jumper spiraled down to the other jumpers' level. Fly a very conservative pattern with no hook turns, S turns or other erratic flying. As you are flying constantly be scanning for the dropzone, outs, hazards and other canopies in the air. Hazards at night are different then hazards in the day since its easier to mistake a river for a road or not see power lines. If you are going to land off, try to avoid landing extremely close to roads since there are probably power lines above them you can not see. Always assume a PLF when landing off at night since you will not be able to clearly see the landing area.
Typically most DZ's will light their landing areas by having the jumper's cars facing into the wind with the headlights on. Jumpers must plan and fly a flight pattern that has them passing over the cars high enough to miss them, but low enough that they do not out fly the lighted safe landing area. Overshooting the landing area is acceptable if the jumpers know the terrain and know of any potential obstacles they need to avoid. Notice the wind direction as you are boarding the plane, in some locations near large bodies of water the winds will change 180 degrees at night as the temperatures change. Take note of the lights and wind direction before you are set up to land. Also to safely land at night the jumpers are best advised to concentrate on the horizon more then looking down. Looking down will distort your vision and cause you to assume you are at the wrong height for flaring.
If you learn nothing else about night jumping learn about the shadow effect. In a lot of situations where the moon is at your back as you are landing you will see a large black canopy rising up on a direct collision course with you. This is your shadow that you are flying into. Lots of jumpers have made avoidance turns only to pound themselves into the ground breaking bones or killing themselves only to find out it was their shadow they were avoiding. As soon as you land depending on the DZ procedures and where you landed, most DZ's either have you walk towards the cars or to the side of the lighted landing area. Others have you stay where you are until your entire pass has landed. Check in with either manifest or the organizer as soon as you land.
Additional safety items to be taken into consideration are to carry a cell phone and the DZ phone number with you. Carry a DZ business card or pamphlet with you to make sure you have the correct local DZ phone number and not just a 1-800 number that redirects to them. This way if you land out you can call to let people know where you are or if you need help. Give your cell phone number out to manifest so that if you do not check in right away they can try to contact you. Leave the ringer set to high so if you are injured the rescue parties can locate you that way. Also a whistle around your neck can be used under canopy to scare away any canopy coming close to you or if you are coming close to them. The whistle is also a great way of assisting responders to find your location if you are hurt at night. As with all jump activity, the use of any alcohol or drugs is not only against the law, it is dangerous to others and STUPID. If you or others are unable to refrain from said activities do not get on an airplane to jump. Also some jumpers go the extra steps of attaching a glow stick to their main risers so in the case of a cutaway it is easier to track and then retrieve from the ground. Discuss the best method of doing this with your rigger or S&TA.; If a jumper lands off field do not rush into a truck to get them, slowly drive towards them with your head lights on high with someone walking in front of the truck to make sure you do not run over an injured jumper.
This article was compiled by Eric Boerger D-26333 with assistance by Keith Laub, Michael Owens and Art Shaffer.This weekend, Dom Dwyer and his Sporting Kansas City teammates were on national TV, hosting the Colorado Rapids on Sunday evening and broke his duck for 2017 with a slick left-footed finish to ice a 3-1 win. According to Opta, Dwyer has struck the second-most goals of any player in MLS since the start of 2014: Bradley Wright-Phillips leads with 70, Dwyer follows at 51 after his goal against the Rapids and Robbie Keane leaves 49 in his MLS wake.
One of those three players is US eligible.
Yes, British ex-pat Dwyer has been naturalized, as of March 16. The 26-year-old could be called in as soon as the next round of US national team competition in June. Perhaps more reasonable, given the stakes of the Yanks' still-wobbly (though stabilizing) World Cup qualifying campaign, is training an eye on the Gold Cup. And Dwyer, who first moved to the States in 2009 for college, could be wearing Red, White & Blue next time he does this:
On a similar path, though not quite all the way to eligibility island, is Columbus Crew SC speedster Kekuta Manneh, who also earned his citizenship earlier this year.
Yet Manneh, without help, won't be an opttion until near the end of the calendar year; a FIFA regulation requires naturalized citizens to have lived in the country they represent for five years after their 18th birthday, and Manneh turns 23 December 30. The waiver application has been submitted, but with no set timeline for an approval, eligibility could come quickly … or not at all.
Though his 2016 campaign was injury-shortened, Manneh's tallied 22 goals and 12 assists in 101 MLS appearances (62 starts). Crew SC paid a pretty penny to acquire the talented youngster, and targeting an extension in the last year of this deal means they're likely to turn him loose.
If you weren't hype yet, here's the highlights:
Also on the domestic front, minus all the eligibility hullabaloo lies an intriguing 26-year-old, Christian Ramirez of expansion club Minnesota United FC. "Superman" has made a slow burn into the national consciousness, and was a hero for the NASL version of the Loons, racking up 50 goals and slipping on a pair of Golden Boots (2014, '16) to go with a trio of Best XI awards for the second-division squad.
But anyone wondering whether the scoring spree would hit a wall in the face of sterner stuff need not worry. It took Ramirez only 10 MLS minutes to find the back of the net, and he's put home another three in four games since:
Ramirez's there-and-back-again teammate, Miguel "Batman" Ibarra notably earned a nod from former US boss Jurgen Klinsmann, and now that Ramirez is – yet again – thriving against whoever lines up across the field, it wouldn't be a shocker for MLS-aware head coach Bruce Arena to tab Ramirez for a trial run sometime soon.
What say you? Which of these three most interests you as a USMNT prospect? And who'd I miss? Drop a line @viewfromcouch.It looks like the Welsh government is seriously considering allowing mountain bikers to ride on footpaths after its latest consultation that was published on Wednesday.
Hidden away on page 38 of the ‘Taking Forward Wales’ Sustainable Management of Natural Resources’ consultaion document, is proposal 10 that says the government is hoping “To enable cycling and horse riding on footpaths to occur under the same conditions as those provided for cycling on bridleways under section 30 of the Countryside Act 1968.”
This is massive news and could open up thousands of miles worth of new trails for mountain bikers to explore.
The push for greater access in Wales has been rumbling on since 2015 and fronted by OpenMTB and Cycling UK. Wednesday’s consultation follows on from the 2015 consultation ‘Improving opportunities to access the outdoors for responsible recreation’, which received 5,796 total responses, with over 4,000 responses backing Cycling UK and OpenMTB’s Trails for Wales campaign.
The proposal could also have been pushed forwards thanks to Brexit. With EU funding gone, Wales will be looking for new opportunities and rural tourism could provide a much needed boom. In Scotland, which already has open access, it’s estimated that off road and leisure cycle tourism contribute between £236.2m and £358m per year.
Commenting on the consultation, Cycling UK Chief Executive, Paul Tuohy said:”This is a landmark step towards increasing the opportunities for cycling, health and tourism, and shows a commendable and forward thinking approach that we have come to expect from the Welsh Government.
“Thanks to the incredible support for our Trails for Wales campaign, the Welsh Government has clearly listened and seen the massive benefit cycling can have. We’re not just talking here about the rural economy, but also the nation’s physical and mental wellbeing.
“Cycling UK will now be looking to put together its response and speaking with other groups such as the British Horse Society and the Ramblers to ensure that the Welsh countryside can be enjoyed by as many people as possible without fear of conflict.”
So, how likely is this to happen? Apparently quite likely. How soon will it happen? That depends on the amount of responses received but we’ve been given a rough estimate of 2020 at the latest… hopefully.
If you want to have a read of the consultation you can do so here and we urge as many of you as possible to respond to it here.A couple have become the first in Britain to have their dead dog cloned and are due to collect their newborn puppies from South Korea on Boxing Day.
Laura Jacques and her partner, Richard Remde, from Yorkshire, were devastated when boxer Dylan died of a heart attack in June, aged eight, after being diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour.
But after learning that South Korean biotech firm Sooam had begun cloning dead dogs for £67,000 they decided to genetically engineer a copy.
“It is a controversial topic and there will be people who don’t agree with it but there will be loads of people that would love to be able to do it” Laura Jacques
Dylan had already been dead for 12 days when the couple managed to get a viable skin sample to the company, and scientists warned them that the technique had never worked on dogs who had been dead for more than five days.
However the procedure was a success, producing not just one but two puppy embryos. The dogs are due to be born to a surrogate on Boxing Day.
It is the first time that anyone in Britain has had a dead pet cloned. Last year Rebecca Smith, 29, from west London won a competition organised by Sooam to have her elderly daschund Winnie cloned but her ‘clone mother’ was still alive. The puppy, named Mini Winnie was born in March 2014.
Speaking of Dylan’s death, Ms Jaques told The Guardian: “When it happened I was in total shock, I couldn’t feel my limbs. I had pins and needles everywhere. I didn’t know how I would be able to cope, I thought I would have to throw myself off a bridge or something.”
The couple initially decided to store samples of Dylan’s DNA with Sooam at a cost of £2,000. Sooam provide a kit to take a biopsy from the abdomen and Mr Remde travelled to South Korean in person to deliver it.
“We got all the cells packaged up and I booked a flight for him and he flew out the next morning,” said Ms Jaques who owns another four dogs and 11 other animals at her home.
“Just knowing they were there and knowing I could have another genetically copy of Dylan that my mind at rest.”
But the first samples failed and by the time the second biopsy arrived it was way past the usual cut off point for successful cloning. However the scientists at Sooam decided to go ahead and push the boundaries of the technique.
“I think I just see it as Dylan’s puppies but they will have 100 per cent of his DNA not just 50 per cent,” added Ms Jaques.
“It is a controversial topic and there will be people who don’t agree with it but there will be loads of people that would love to be able to do it.”
The couple still keep Dylan in their freezer while they renovate their garden and are planning to bury him in a special area once it is completed.
“I find it embarrassing telling people that I’ve got my dog in the freezer, but I have got a valid reason,” added Ms Jaques
Mr Remde said: “We are a bit animal mad. We don’t go out socialising much, we don’t go out drinking.”
The first mammal to be cloned was Dolly the sheep, who was born in Edinburgh in 1996. Dogs were first cloned in South Korea in 2005, by Sooam Biotech scientist Dr Woo Suk Hwang.
Photo: Sutton-Hibbert / Rex Features
Since then the company has produced around 700 cloned dogs so far but this is the first time that puppies will have been born from DNA samples which have been so degraded.
To make a clone, scientists take a donor egg from a female dog and remove the nucleus holding the genetic material which gives an animal its characteristics and personality. Dylan’s DNA was then placed into the egg which was given electric shocks to trigger cell division. The egg was then implanted into a surrogate female dog.
“This is the first case we have had where cells have been taken from a dead dog after a very long time,” said David Kim, a scientist at Sooam.
“Hopefully it will allow us to extend the time after death that we can take cells for cloning.”
However some experts believe that the procedure could lead to animals with much shorter life-spans and a host of health problems.
The RSPCA warned that there was serious ethical and welfare concerns with cloning.
“There is also a body of evidence that cloned animals frequently suffer physical ailments such as tumours, pneumonia and abnormal growth patterns,” said spokesman.This post will kick off a series I am writing on LogInsight 4. Each part of this series can be navigated by following the links below:
vRealize LogInsight 4 – Part 1: Security and Planning Considerations
vRealize LogInsight 4 – Part 2: Deploying – Single or First Node
vRealize LogInsight 4 – Part 3: Working with Agents
Today we’ll be talking about something often overlooked. Specifically, in this post, we’ll be talking about syslog servers Ew. I know.
Actually, I find log servers pretty fascinating especially those created within the last few years. I’ve dabbled with Kiwi Syslog, Graylog, PRTG, and the (unfortunately) industry standard, Splunk. I also gave VMware vRealize LogInsight a try back when it was version 2.5 and again in the 3.0-3.3 era, but ran with Graylog for a long time. However, VMware has released vRealize LogInsight 4 and it’s time for a revisit which turns out to be a really worthwhile exercise! This post will serve as a kick-off to my vRealize Log Insight series of blog posts. Being that this is the first of the series, I’ll give an overview of features and why you should use it and then move on to deploying, configuring agents, and interpreting the data in later blog posts.
Why you should have a consolidated logging solution
To some people, deploying a logging solution is dreadful and is a topic they avoid at all costs. Let it be someone else’s problem; I totally understand. In fact, once you set up a logging solution and have data pouring into it, you then need to go sift through things and figure out what’s important and what’s not, setup triggers, alerts, and after all of that you forget why you even need it because half the time you never get alerts or are getting alerted all the time.
Here’s why you need it:
A modern consolidated logging solution provides a single pane of glass allowing you to parse and discover log events from all of your hosts/devices
Some hosts/devices do not retain logging history when restarted and so troubleshooting is next to impossible if a device crashes
Some hosts/devices do not retain more than a few megabytes of logging data and rolls over frequently
Some hosts/devices do not even offer to store historical logging data on the host/device itself and require a server to point to
When troubleshooting an application or service that spans many hosts/devices, it is not effective to have to pull logs from each individual host/device
Auditing/compliance (yuck!)
Whether you’re a small business with a couple ESXi hosts and 10 guests or if you have 50 ESXi hosts and 2,000 guests the conversation is the same. If something breaks or is compromised how quickly, easily, and precisely can you determine what happened? If your ESXi hosts run from removable media and you have the syslog directory mapped to a SAN volume, then you need to go hunt down where each host is saving its logs, grab what’s there, move it to a PC, search, etc. This is the same with a Microsoft Windows system – you need to hunt down where an issue occurred and start combing the event viewer. Half the time the things you’re looking for on a Microsoft Windows machine are not even logged by default!
So, if a consolidated logging solution is so glorious what keeps us from implementing one immediately? Price and complexity. These two factors are what keep most mid-level management from rushing into a logging solution. Let’s touch on these two factors.
Licensing: You probably don’t know you already own it
One of the biggest caveats with syslog servers is that you have two options: free or really, really expensive. Isn’t that the case with most enterprise solutions? Open source packages like Graylog are really good if you get down and dirty with their lingo – grok, extractors, etc. If you’re less DevOps and more PleaseJustWorkOps, then Graylog and other open source solutions may not be for you unless you just want a place to store logs. Splunk, on the other hand, does ship with some templates, but I have found that more often than not Splunk reps want to not only sell you the product but also hours to develop reports/view/alerts/escalations for you. The biggest drawback to Splunk and other enterprise-class solutions, in my opinion, is that you’re licensed by gigabytes of ingested data. This is a very, very difficult way to estimate costs. If you have 200 nodes to monitor and some are firewalls and some are domain controllers you will have no idea what your licensing fees will be until you start logging. After you get your GB/day out-of-license email from Splunk and have to pay up, you need to either cut logging levels down or cut the number of nodes down. Event-based licensing is just unfair to the person buying the product unless they’re really tuned in to what they’re trying to accomplish.
With Splunk, they really know what they’re doing with the pricing model:
A perpetual license is a single payment that allows you to ingest syslogs at the given rate. You’ll notice that the typical SMB rate of 1 – 10GB/day of logging is the most expensive – that’s no coincidence. I believe there’s an additional 20% maintenance fee on the perpetual license due annually, as well. It’s extremely hard to estimate the license level needed because device output varies so much. For instance, you could probably monitor 12 – 24 edge switches and notice only 10% of the amount of logs generated when compared to a single Cisco ASA. This license model really caters to Splunk more than the consumer. A node-based model tends to be more fair to the consumer since you do not have to worry about how much or how little data is being ingested.
So what is a VMware shop to do?
You want to consolidate your vCenter, ESXi, network devices, and guest logs into a single pane of glass, but you are already paying a lot for your VMware licensing and you can’t really justify the cost of more licensing… enter vRealize LogInsight 4.
VMware has done a really cool thing – they’ve made vRealize LogInsight 4 (and 3.3, previously) available to anyone with vCenter Standard. In fact, you get 25-OSI (operating system instances) licenses per vCenter Standard license. That means you can monitor syslogs for a vCenter server, 5 ESXi hosts, and 19 other nodes included with your vCenter license! You can’t extend the 25-OSI license, but you could add additional OSI licenses (you can see retail prices around $1,000 for 25-OSIs). This is awesome, especially since vRealize LogInsight 4 is so… awesome. Sorry, I had to use the word awesome twice!
But really, once you break it down, while LogInsight may sound expensive you have to remember if you’re running vCenter Standard you already have 25-OSI licenses waiting. There’s no limit on GB/day or event/second for logging, either. So, considering the brief example of 12 edge switches and a few Cisco ASA logging to a Splunk server could cost around $4,500 + 20% (900)/year (or $1,800/year annual license), or you can use your existing vCenter license and buy 25-OSI packs as needed. Sounds like a good deal to me! And, you don’t need to buy any dashboards or pay any consultants to build you views,triggers, or alerts that should, in my opinion, ship with the product.
In addition to the included 25-OSI licenses you also get access to the LogInsight Marketplace which is chock full of really nice “Content Packs” for systems ranging from Cisco Nexus, F5 Load Balancers, NetApp Ontap, Nginx, Linux, Microsoft Active Directory, and the list goes on. That kind of offering will cost you a bundle in Splunk or take you a ton of time in Graylog.
What do you get with vRealize LogInsight 4?
In case I was too subtle in the text above, you get a lot of really cool stuff in vRealize LogInsight 4. I know, this sounds like a sales campaign but I don’t get anything from VMware for this – I am an end-user just like anyone else. Here’s my list of top features/benefits:
Native integration with vSphere environment (including vRealize Operations!) – your vCenter server and all of your ESXi hosts get configured, automatically, to report into the LogInsight server
Native clustering is supported with built-in load balancing featuring a virtual IP making scaling out simple
Traditional syslog shipping to UDP 514 for network devices or any other type of device that supports syslog shipping
Agent-based logging for guests including pre-built packages for Windows (MSI), and Linux (deb, rpm, bin) guests
Active Directory sign-on integration and granular access control using AD users/groups or local users, etc.
Pre-configured dashboards/templates for many Content Pack add-ons (vSphere, Microsoft Windows, etc.)
Caching of queries with periodic roll-off to keep the most frequently used queries performance as best as possible
Detailed statistics involing cluster details, ingestions per second, cache hits/misses, what type of even (API or syslog) is coming in, dropped events, etc.
Alerting configuration based on queries – create a query or use an already configured one as an alert definition
A simple and convenient way to filter hosts into categorized groups
So, if you’ve read through the list above, there’s really nothing I can think of that LogInsight 4 fails to provide. If you can think of anything that it is lacking please let me know, but as far as I can tell it’s hard to beat the value you get with VMware vRealize LogInsight 4 from a logging and security perspective.
In the next blog post I’ll talk about deploying a standalone and clustered environment, then move on to configuration and alerting. Stay tuned!Chris Brown shows that the right selection of parts goes a very long way. His AE86 started as a street car with a turbocharged 13B, then he popped in a cage and a Toyota 3SGTE around nine years ago. The stock 3SGTE, force-fed by a Garrett 2871 turbo, was enough for Brown’s amusement on backroad romps—keep in mind the original car wasn’t slow with a measly 110 horsepower. This increase in grunt made for plenty of enjoyable track racing, but in recent years, Brown went to lengths to make his car a bonafide circuit scalpel.
He started the second phase of modification by adding a Holinger gearbox, an EFR BorgWarner turbocharger, forged internals, and an obvious surplus of power. It’s not wildly powerful, but it’s incredible considering he did this all in his shed with a few friends and a few cases of beer.
To get the Toyota’s power to the ground and enjoy more stability with the added power, Brown employed Suspension Concepts to design a setup. Wilwood custom brakes barely fit underneath 15″ wheels with 225/50/15 Yokohama A050 tires as mandated by the IPRC series regulations. It’s quite a little tire, but it does a stellar job harnessing the punch of the turbocharged four-cylinder motor. Keep in mind the AE86 runs a solid rear axle and wasn’t designed for harnessing the 300-odd horsepower on demand, so it slithers around quite a lot.
Brown’s been able to run entire seasons for the last several years, and that regular seat time has made a massive difference—and it’s a point worth remembering. Staying in the seat and getting frequent track time shaves tenths off your lap times and rewards the diligent driver with finesse. As a result, Brown’s able to exercise enough discipline to apply the throttle gently, and when the car is mostly straight. Nevertheless, an AE86 is an AE86, and you can never get away from a little throttle-induced oversteer—not that Brown seems to mind.Cover art with |
but she gave moral support to Taliban.
The Maryland scientist was arrested as result of a FBI agent posing as Israeli Mossad spy. The Israel lobby group, ADL’s Guru Abraham Foxman cried foul by saying: “What I find troubling and perplexing is that our government seems only interested in investgating people who’re connected with Israel. It plays into the hands of those who say Jews or those connected to Israel are disloyal.”
I may assure Abe Foxman that no American Muslim will whine like him if Pakistan, Egypt or Lebanon have been receiving half of the USAID Israel ($6-14 billion) receives each year.
According to FBI agent Leslie Martell, Nozette acted as a technical consultant (1998-2008) for a foreign aerospace company, the ‘Israel Aerospace Industries‘, headed by US-educated Dr. Itzhak Nissan, is wholly owned by the government of the state of Israel. During that period of time, according to the affidavit, Nozette received regular payments from the company for providing technical information, totaling approximately $250,000.
The ‘Israel Aerospace Industries‘ is also heavily involved with Indian armed industry.
In September 2011, Nozette pleaded guilty to attempted espionage in a federal court. The plea agreement called for an agreed-upon term of 13 years imprisonment. Without the plea bargain Nozette was expected to receive life imprisonment like the famous US Jewish spy Jonathan Pollard.
Advertisements“This is the $100,000 question: Can the evangelical leadership unify behind Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum or Rick Perry?” said John Stemberger, president of Florida Family Policy Council.
“There’s a conversation going on as we speak,” he said. “We’re attempting to see if leaders can get on the same page.”
How the splintering of like-minded opponents is helping Mr. Romney was illustrated on Friday by the results of a CNN/Time poll in South Carolina, where, as in Iowa, religious conservatives are an especially important component of the electorate. Mr. Romney was the choice of 37 percent of all likely voters. Mr. Santorum was at 19 percent, and Mr. Gingrich, a former House speaker, was at 18 percent. Mr. Perry was at 5 percent.
Many religious conservatives question Mr. Romney’s bona fides on what to them are non-negotiable issues, like opposing abortion and same-sex marriage. Pointing to the large conservative electoral gains in 2010 and Mr. Obama’s weakened position, they see a rare opportunity this year to put a “true conservative” in the White House, and many say they will be disappointed if Mr. Romney wins the nomination.
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Evangelicals are haunted by what happened in the South Carolina primary in 2008, when many of them did not rush to support Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist minister who had won in Iowa. Former Senator Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee took some of his potential votes, allowing Senator John McCain, who never won the affection of evangelicals, a crucial victory.
“We’re moving closer to the point where a decision needs to be made,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian conservative group. “I think people understand that the stakes are very high.”
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But some political experts say that a Texas-style meeting cannot solve a problem that must be sorted out by voters, and that changes this year in the Republican primary rules will give candidates more time to gather delegates.
“It’s way too early to panic,” said David Barton, a Christian author and political strategist who has been a consultant to several candidates. “If leaders did endorse one candidate, I think they’d wind up being ignored by their followers.”
Mr. Barton noted that under the new rules, all primaries before April 1 must apportion delegates according to the share of votes each candidate receives, rather than winner-take-all. This means that finishing second or third can still be valuable, if not producing the panache of a victory, and that it could take more time for a clear winner to emerge.
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Even after the Florida primary on Jan. 31, it should be “arithmetically possible” for one of the more conservative candidates to wrest the nomination from Mr. Romney, said Ralph Reed, the chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. But three stiff conditions would have to be met, he said: a largely unified social conservative vote, adequate financing for primaries that in some states require $2 million per week for television advertisements, and decent local campaign infrastructures.
While some Christian conservatives are reluctant to support Mr. Gingrich because of his marital history and other questions from the past, the current argument is largely over which candidate has the best chance of winning.
Mr. Stemberger, the Florida advocate, had endorsed Mr. Perry, a Protestant, weeks ago. But in an interview in the wake of Mr. Perry’s poor showing in Iowa, he noted that Mr. Gingrich’s poll numbers looked good in Florida, and he expressed a view shared by several other leaders. “I think probably Gingrich is the most viable in the general election,” he said.
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David Lane, a political organizer known for mobilizing pastors around the country, said that Mr. Santorum did not have the money or organization to repeat his bright flash in Iowa and that “he’s drawing votes away from the only two guys that can be competitive with Romney — Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry.”
“When he gets ready to, Romney will flick him with his finger like a flea,” he said of Mr. Santorum. “I’m not against Santorum; I just don’t think he’s viable politically.”
Of the planned meeting in Texas, Mr. Lane said that unless the participants all agreed to throw their support to the candidate who does best in South Carolina, “the meeting will be worthless.”
Still, Mr. Santorum has won important support. Richard D. Land, head of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, said: “Santorum has emerged as the non-Romney, and with none of Newt Gingrich’s freight.”POLITICAL activist Ben Gilroy is one of three people facing the prospect of imprisonment for breaching court orders by allegedly trespassing and occupying a stud farm.
POLITICAL activist Ben Gilroy is one of three people facing the prospect of imprisonment for breaching court orders by allegedly trespassing and occupying a stud farm.
It is claimed by the joint receivers over lands at Kennycourt Stud, Co Kildare, that Gilroy and Charlie Allen along with the landowner, Eugene McDermott, were involved with "a mob" who forced the receiver's agents off the lands.
Mr Justice Brian McGovern yesterday warned that people were subject to the rule of law and not the rule of the mob and there would be consequences for anyone found to be in deliberate breach of the law.
Receivers Mark Reynolds and Glenn Crann, who were appointed by IBRC in November 2011 over Mr McDermott's lands, intend selling the 120-acre property from which they are currently being excluded. They alleged that since late August the three men were preventing them from taking possession of the lands.
The receivers have brought a motion seeking to have Mr Gilroy, Mr Allen and Mr McDermott brought before the High Court to explain their alleged contempt.
Mr Gilroy, of Navan, Co Meath, who was a Direct Democracy Ireland candidate in the Meath East by-election, Mr Allen, of Inistioge, Co Kilkenny, and Mr McDermott, of Kennycourt Stud, were not in court yesterday.
Judge McGovern said the matters were very serious, and adjourned them to Friday.
Michael Howard SC, counsel for the receivers, said the action arose out of unsavoury scenes when his clients and their staff were threatened.
The court heard that on August 28 a group of eight individuals had tried to force the receivers' security staff off the property but, with the help of gardai, they had been able to take possession.
A few days later a mob of more than 100 people led by Mr Allen and Mr Gilroy had re-taken possession of the lands.
In 2011 Anglo Irish Bank appointed Mr Crann and Mr Reynolds, of Savills Ireland, as receivers over the farm arising out of Mr McDermott's failure to repay €814,000 owed to the bank.
Irish IndependentLove it so far. Is this for the super-hard-core gamer? Maybe, but more than likely not. If you are in that category of gamer, you'll likely be super fussy about your mouse and what it can and cannot do. Like you'll likely want to customize the weight of the mouse, have replaceable slides, and have more buttons than you have fingers...if that's your mouse that's cool and more power to you for your gaming proclivities.
I bought this mouse on a whim and because it seems like a bargain. So far, it has been fantastic and I love it. Okay the mouse doesn't have replaceable slides or weight customization and it doesn't have more buttons than it needs to be pretty decent for the gaming I do.
What I like:
1. It is lightweight and slides almost like liquid helium on my gaming surface (okay maybe not that awesome, but it is pretty darn slick).
2. buttons are ergonomically placed and responsive to the touch (oh yeah...responsive to the touch)...
3. DPI setting is pretty customizable (see images attached to this review). You can customize 5 DPI settings from 500DPI to 7500DPI (in 100DPI increments) and select a completely custom color for each DPI setting (including if you want the light to "breath" or be steady). I'm not sure I have need for DPI setting that is that wide in range. For my gaming needs I use 1000DPI for my FPS games and when I'm just using other windows use a 1200-1500DPI setting so I can get around the monitor efficiently.
4. Price - for sure price will fluctuate online from this review. so I won't put the specific price I paid for this mouse, but I found it to be an incredible bargain for the price.
5. It does have the capacity to record macros, so that is cool, but I have not specific need at the moment so that is unevaluated.
So far - a very solid 5-star review with a recommendation for intermediate gamers.
Game on!FORMER Wallaby Greg Martin has launched a stunning attack on Broncos winger Lachlan Maranta, branding him a ‘crap player’ and the worst signing he has seen.
While firing up about the Queensland Reds’ recruitment on his radio show - Triple M Brisbane’s Marto & Ed Kavelee - this morning, Martin didn’t miss in his appraisal of Maranta.
QUADE COOPER RETURNS: FIVE THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW
The Broncos leading tryscorer last season, Maranta is understood to have committed to the Queensland Reds for the next two years.
“Whoever is signing talent for the Reds until today has done a dreadful job,’’ said Martin, who also hosts Fox Sports’ Rugby 360.
“He (Maranta) is the worst signing I have ever seen in my life.”
“If Wayne Bennett is prepared to get rid of his Godson… that would indicate he’s a crap player.
“But the Reds snapped him up and crowed about it.
“It is the last thing the Reds need because something Queensland rugby has got everywhere through youth rugby, through schools rugby is exciting young wingers and we pick up a dud the Broncos want to get rid of because he’s got a knee injury.”
Maranta is the grandson of Broncos founding chairman Barry Maranta and son of former Brisbane winger Brett Plowman and has known Bennett since he was born.
He has battled injury this season and struggled to break into the Broncos’ best 17.
Martin finished the tirade by praising the Reds’ re-signing of Quade Cooper to a new three-year deal.
“Thank goodness. He’s what the Reds need,’’ he said.A trigger happy cop unloaded 33 bullets in the middle of a neighborhood full of women and children in order to kill a neighborhood dog. Stray bullets flew everywhere, hitting multiple neighbor's cars and even shooting into an innocent family's home as they sat watching TV.
The story begins with cops responding to a report of some teenagers fighting, an 8-month old pit bull apparently "darted out of the partially opened door" of his home and ran towards the responding officers, at which point they shot the dog.
WPXI News reports:
"The cop said he felt like he was going to attack him," said Aycox, "and he just shot at him. The one cop hollered 'don't shoot him', but he shot him. When he shot him, the dog fell to the ground, was shaking and crying, but he just stood over top of him and kept shooting repeatedly." The astonishing thing about this story is the cop unloaded literally 33 rounds in order to kill the dog! That's more than an assault rifle's full magazine. During this rampage, stray bullets flew throughout the neighborhood, shooting into people's homes and cars, reportedly, "there were children everywhere."
Neighbors say the dog was hit on one side of the street, but they found damage from police bullets on the other side of the street and several houses down. They say the officer's bullets hit vehicles and even houses where there were innocent bystanders. [...]
The dog was hit and fell in one area, but the bullets sprayed elsewhere, shooting out the window of a van that several women were getting ready to get into. The women say there were children everywhere. Video:
The dog's neighbor says the dog simply was running to play with the local children, which he does regularly.
"He just came running out of the house," said neighbor Kelly McCulley. "He plays with the kids all the time. He saw all the kids up there and that's what he thought, that he was coming to play, and they just shot him over and over and over." It's amazing no one else was killed in this rampage, the cop responsible need to be held accountable.
Update: The Courier Post has more. Note Delia Rodriguez is the Muslim woman who had her house shot up in the video above.
Delia Rodriguez said she pulled her six grandchildren to the floor and tried to cover them with her body after at least two bullets pierced the side of her home, ricocheting off the ceiling and shattering her front window.
Her house is four houses down and across the street from where officers were shooting.
"It was horrible, there were so many sounds. I was trying to get the children rounded up and I felt like I couldn't cover them all," said Rodriguez, 54. It appears the cops have still yet to even name the officers involved.Chapter 1 Skip to Chapter 3 A DAY THEY WON'T FORGET By Lauren Caruba Skip to Chapter 2 On a Sunday morning in late May, Denise Slaughter and Diane Zvara left to meet friends for brunch and drove up to the stop sign at West Gaywood and Memorial. Across the street and to their left, flames licked the gas pumps at the Conoco station. Black smoke billowed into the sky. "Diane, look," Denise said. "The thing's on fire." Then the driver's side window shattered. Denise thought the gas station had exploded. But as she turned right onto Memorial Drive, away from the flames, her left leg suddenly felt as if it were on fire, too. It wasn't an explosion, she realized. She'd been shot. Blood soon spurted from her leg, through her white jeans, and Diane reached over, instinctively, to plug the hole with her thumb. The women had driven right into the gunman's path. He'd been shooting for about a half-hour before he hit their car, and his rampage would continue for 30 minutes more. Armed with a pistol and an AR-15 rifle, he took over an auto body shop and ranted about Wal-mart, Jews and gay people as he fired off 212 bullets, the first at an unsuspecting customer waiting for a car wash and then indiscriminately at passersby. When it was over, two people were dead and six others, including two deputies, had been shot. It appears to have been Houston's first public mass shooting in the modern era. Four months later, a strikingly similar scenario played out only 12 miles away. On that Memorial Day weekend, Houston Police Department officers and Precinct 5 deputies converged on the scene, drawing fire as they tried to contain the shooter. Residents in the Memorial area dialed 911 with frantic reports of suspects, shots fired and people injured. Denise and Diane weren't the only ones to drive into harm's way, as side streets weren't cordoned off, and warnings weren't issued until after the shooter was killed. Armed residents, the flood of emergency calls and the sounds of different calibers firing in all directions introduced confusion for authorities, who initially suspected a second gunman and possibly a third. As mass shootings become almost routine across the country, a question arises: How can we ever truly be prepared for this? **** One street over, Brian Cesak was in his kitchen, reading the newspaper, when the first shots rang out at 10:15 a.m. "Stay here," he told his mother. "That's not firecrackers."
On the way out of the house, he grabbed his handgun, concealing it behind his back. Down the street, on the corner of Wycliffe and Memorial, he saw a black-haired, bare-chested man in black shorts. The man was clearly agitated, yelling something Brian couldn't make out and waving a semiautomatic rifle. He eventually walked east down Memorial, back toward the auto body shop, disappearing from Brian's line of sight. Brian is 55 and a chiropractor now, but the retired Navy commander once led his ship's fast-reaction unit, responsible for subduing intruders who might come aboard.
He also has hunted since he was a boy, and knew he was outgunned. Don't send any officers in to investigate, Brian told the 911 dispatcher. They would need a SWAT team. Minutes later, a police cruiser pulled up to the corner. Brian watched a spray of bullets strike the hood and windshield before the car sped off. Frustrated, he called 911 back. "What did I tell you? Don't send another cop in there," he told them. Police blockades eventually cropped up along Memorial, one block west at Wilcrest and four blocks east at Brittmoore. But nothing was stopping drivers on the streets in between from cutting through the Wilchester neighborhood to get to Memorial. Brian told the dispatcher that the streets south of Memorial needed to be closed. Hundreds of families could leave for church or the store at any moment. Police, though, were busy being ambushed.
Brian took cover behind trees and cars as the gunfire continued. It sounded like a shooting range. Then he began flagging down drivers heading toward Memorial, telling them to turn around. A line of cars backed up on Wycliffe. Eventually, a neighbor came out to help, and together, they redirected about 30 cars. Ken Gibbs, who lives a few houses down from Brian, also heard the shots and raced out of his house barefoot and in pajamas. He saw cars trying to get around the blockade by cutting through the neighborhood. On the next street over, he waved drivers down to keep them from heading toward the shooter. One car ignored him and kept going.
At one point, a woman in an SUV raced down Wycliffe from Memorial. "Oh my god, there's a madman shooting down there," she said to Brian. She was frantic and crying. "He shot my car." Brian urged her to keep going, as bullets could still reach her. They soon tore through the windows of an SUV and a pickup parked in driveways near where Brian and his neighbor stood. The gunman was still 350 yards away and not visible, but Brian worried that he was moving closer. So he cut through a neighbor's house to get back to his own, where he grabbed his rifle. He crept through his front yard until he reached the side of a brick house, and there he sat, waiting to take out the gunman if he came down the street. At one point, an out-of-state friend saw the shooting on the news and texted Brian, asking where he lived in Houston. Brian typed back: "Currently in a war zone." **** Around the time Brian watched the officer pull up, 17-year-old Nick Latiolais and his mother, Leslie, left their house for an urgent care clinic. The Stratford High junior wanted to see a doctor before his afternoon shift as a lifeguard. He thought he had pink eye. Nick drove along in a Jeep with the top down until he approached a group crowded around the stop sign at West Gaywood and Boheme. Cars were parked haphazardly, one with its hazard lights flashing. A man lying at the end of a driveway, clutching his leg, shouted "Help me!" over and over. No one was. Nick looked at his mother. "Mom, should we pull over?" "I don't know," Leslie said. "We don't know what happened." Someone might have hit the man while backing up, she guessed. Nick decided to stop, to see if he could help. His mother stayed in the car to call police. It was 10:25 a.m. Closer up, Nick saw that the man was bleeding from his right thigh. He was lying on his left side, legs curled together. "He's broken his leg," said an elderly man in the crowd. "Don't touch him."
Screw that, Nick thought. The man was hurt, and no one was doing anything. Nick kneeled next to him and applied pressure to the wound with his hands. He had been Red Cross certified as part of his lifeguard training, but he earned his first aid merit badge for Boy Scouts in eighth grade. He'd learned then, step by step, how to handle all manner of trauma. Now Nick was recalling the instructions. Control the bleeding. Calm the victim. Form a relationship. Keep him conscious. Treat for shock. Call for help. Wait. There was no room in his mind for panic. His vision tunneled. All he could see was the man's leg.
He needed something to soak up the blood. He was ready to strip his shirt off when he noticed the man was wearing a vest. "Can you take off your vest for me?" Nick asked. He crumpled the material and pressed down on the leg, and the man screamed. The elderly bystander spoke up again, saying Nick was causing too much pain, but he ignored him. "Hi, my name is Nick," he said. "I'm here to help you. You're doing OK right now. What happened?" "I've been shot." Nick glanced at his mother. He'd been shot, he mouthed and gestured to her. Get in the driver's seat, he told her, in case she needed to get away. Eventually, Nick would learn that the man's name was Artur, and he was a waiter at a nearby shopping center. The bullet had traveled first through the passenger door of Artur's sedan, then in and out of his leg. It struck, but didn't shatter, the bone. When he realized he could still drive, he'd turned into the neighborhood, traveling until it dead-ended. He got out of the car and tried to walk, then his femur — the largest bone in the human body — snapped. Nick looked for an exit wound. He flipped the man onto his back and found that the bullet left a much larger hole in its wake. The amount of blood was deceptive at first, because his pants were made from a synthetic fabric that wasn't soaking it up. Instead, blood was running down his leg. Nick adjusted the vest, rewrapping it to include the exit wound. "Am I gonna die?" Artur asked. "Am I gonna lose my leg?" Gena McGee stopped when she saw the crowd gathered. She had been out trying to run an errand when she hit a roadblock and went looking for an alternate route. Her hands were shaking as she called 911. Then she jumped in to help Nick, and in that moment, didn't make the connection that he was one of her students in AP U.S. history. Together, they fashioned a tourniquet with Artur's belt and tried to keep him calm. He begged them to take him to the hospital, but they told him it was better to wait for an ambulance. Two Precinct 5 deputies pulled up in separate cars at 10:41. There's a shooter, the officers told the group standing around. They didn't know where he was, or where he was going. Everyone should go inside. Nick still had his hands on the waiter's leg. One officer left to block off a nearby street. The other said the tourniquet wasn't tight enough and tried to adjust it. The belt snapped. Blood seeped through Nick's hands again. Why did she do that, he thought. They tied another one, using a camera bag strap from the deputy's trunk. At 10:51, paramedics arrived and took over, wrapping layers of gauze around Artur's leg. Then an ambulance whisked him away. A paramedic cleaned Nick's hands with water and alcohol. Even after the blood was gone, he could still feel it. Nick Latiolais talks about the day of the rampage
Denise Slaughter and Diane Zvara had overslept that morning, tired from all the festivities from the day before. Their son Colton had graduated high school, and a party, complete with a taco truck and margaritas, capped a busy week. Friends had insisted on treating them to the famous fried chicken at a Museum District restaurant, and so a little after 10:40 a.m., they were in the car.
Denise was setting up a navigation app when a news alert popped up about a shooting at Memorial and Wilcrest. But then she saw the commotion at the corner as she backed out onto West Gaywood and figured that was the source of the alert. A constable's car blocked her view of Nick and Artur. So she turned away and drove north, toward Memorial. When the shots hit their car, she and Diane fell sideways as the window shattered.
Denise lunged at Diane and shoved her down, ducking as she turned right onto Memorial. Bullets whizzed over their heads, smashing the rear passenger window and burrowing into Diane's headrest. Still hunched beneath the windows, Denise slammed on the accelerator, using the treetops to guide the car to the next side street. She veered right onto East Gaywood and back into the neighborhood. Once they were out of the line of fire, Denise felt weak.
"I've been hit," she gasped. She closed her eyes, then reached to feel if Diane was injured, too. The blood spurting from Denise's left thigh looked like a fountain to Diane, who also was covered in blood. Bullet fragments peppered her face and shoulder. But she was mostly unscathed. Diane focused on Denise's leg and keeping pressure on the wound. She saw a constable's car half a block away. Drive to him, Diane urged, but Denise was on the verge of passing out. Diane reached over and honked a couple times, trying to get the officer's attention. That didn't work, so she laid on the horn.
Deputy Wayne Ford, who had left Artur minutes earlier, now saw the red Tesla's shattered windows and blood everywhere. He retrieved towels and called an ambulance at 10:46 a.m. "Stay with me," Diane begged, as Denise's breathing became labored. Diane alternated between reassuring her that the ambulance would be there any minute and cursing about why it was taking so long. They heard the deputy plead with the dispatcher, explaining how serious Denise's injuries were. Denise kept her eyes closed, trying to calm herself. Silently, she said two prayers: one asking for the strength to hang on, the other for her family if she couldn't. Both their phones lit up with texts and calls. Colton called Denise's phone, which was still resting in the docking station. Diane tried to answer but dropped it. On her own phone, she took a call from a close friend, who heard snippets on the other end. "Can't talk now." "Colton." "Ambulance." When paramedics finally arrived, Diane was afraid to let go. She tried to follow Denise into the back of the ambulance, but she was told there wasn't room — another victim would be riding to the hospital. A little more than 15 minutes after Denise and Diane were fired upon, a neighbor had pulled up to the same corner, where a bullet hit his torso and ended up in his spleen. He reversed his truck at full speed down West Gaywood, clipping a car parked in the street before turning onto Tosca, where he saw the deputy already helping Denise. The man had emerged from the truck and collapsed. Diane jumped into the front of the ambulance, where she texted friends and family, then trained the camera on herself, to see what she looked like. Rivulets of blood ran down her face and throat. Dried blood caked her chin and was splattered across her white polo shirt. The macabre image later became known as her "ambulance selfie." As they rode to the Medical Center, Diane didn't know if Denise was dead or alive. Come back Monday, Oct. 17 for the next part in this series. This article appeared in print and online on Oct. 16, 2016. The reporter can be reached at laurencaruba@gmail.com Chapter 2 | Read it from the beginning THE RAMPAGE CONTINUES By Lauren Caruba Calls to 911 kept flooding in. There were varying locations and descriptions of the shooter — a man in a T-shirt, a man with no shirt, and then, a man with guns who was walking along an easement behind the gas station on Memorial Drive. Police weren't sure how many gunmen there were. One of the "suspects" was Byron Wilson. Byron had mistaken the first gunshots on the Sunday before Memorial Day for construction work near his house on Wycliffe Drive. Then he saw a police officer standing outside his dining room window and knew something serious was happening. Byron grabbed two weapons — a sawed-off shotgun and a low-caliber competition Magnum pistol with a powerful scope. In the heat of the moment, he filled his pockets with the wrong size shells. He was worried about his next-door neighbors, and friends who worked at an antique shop in a nearby shopping center. He thought he could help secure the area behind his home, so he cut through his backyard to the easement, which was dotted with dirt mounds from construction. He wondered why police weren't there already, to prevent the shooter from moving to the shopping center, where there is a T.J. Maxx, two churches and the antique shop. He never intended to fire his guns, and ended up hiding them behind the piles of dirt. He made it to the edge of the shopping center, then took cover behind a shuttle bus. He thought of continuing on to the antique store, to warn his friends, but realized the store was closed. So he stayed there, waiting for police. He had not heard gunfire for a few minutes when he saw a flash out of the corner of his eye. His left shin collapsed, folding at a 90-degree angle. As he fell, a second bullet hit his right shin. Thirty yards from where Byron went down, at the other end of the parking lot, a deputy constable had taken cover behind his vehicle. A bullet had narrowly missed his head minutes earlier as it traveled into his open driver's window, through his headrest and out the rear windshield. He couldn't get to Byron without exposing himself. But dispatch recorded the details at 10:41 a.m.: White male, approximately 30 years old, shot in the leg. Possibly a civilian. Other officers also were pinned down. When bullets began piercing another deputy's hood and windshield, Jaime Ayala ran around to the trunk. As he reached for his long rifle, a bullet ricocheted off the pavement, striking his right thumb. Another deputy took cover behind a brick wall. Almost a half-mile in the other direction, Deputy Danny Luna and another officer were working to blockade Memorial at Brittmoore. Rifle in hand, Luna was crouched behind his vehicle. He had rolled down both front windows, intending to aim through the openings. But the gunman beat him to it. A bullet struck Luna in the chest, lodging itself in the extra layer of Kevlar he was wearing that day. Pools of blood were spreading around Byron. He couldn't feel his legs, and he felt foolish. Why had he gotten involved? The helicopters circling overhead did not know who he was, he realized. He tried to signal to them, so they'd see that he wasn't a threat. The scorching pavement seared his skin, inflicting second-degree burns. He was so thirsty. Minutes passed. Byron tried to tear off some of his shirt to apply to his wounds. As he leaned forward, he was shot again, straight through his right shoulder. The gunman seemed to be going out of his way to not kill him.
Byron dialed his parents in Spring Branch. His wife, Kendra, was there to pick up their 3-year-old son, Ashton. She saw it was her husband on the caller ID. "I've been shot. I've been shot," he said. He told her he was lying in the T.J. Maxx parking lot. Kendra got in the car and raced home, wondering if he had been robbed near the antique store. Then, at 11:12, Byron took a call from a friend, Eric Lewis. Byron told him he had been investigating the gunfire, that he was worried about dying or never being able to walk again. Byron wished that Eric, an Air Force veteran who had planned to visit that day, could come save him. They stayed on the phone for 22 minutes. Eric heard the paramedics arrive and assure Byron that he'd make it. He heard him scream as they moved him. Then the line went dead. **** On a cul-de-sac north of Memorial, Kari and Peter Young had watched the chaos unfold through the blinds of an upstairs window.
Someone appeared to break into the garage at Memorial Tire and Auto, prompting Kari to call 911. A shirtless man with dark, close-cropped hair, moved in and out of the red-roofed shop, sometimes carrying a handgun, sometimes a rifle. Smoke curled upward from gun muzzles, and later on, from the Conoco gas station. A fire truck raced in, then police cars, and a helicopter — all taking fire. And at some point, another man crept through an empty sand lot behind the station. He crouched near an old fence and raised his hand. Kari thought he might be trying to take out the shooter. No, she realized — he was filming with his phone. When the shooter emerged from the shop and began firing again, the man realized how exposed he was. He fell as he ran back across the lot, avoiding the two or three bullets that followed him. Other families in the neighborhood were grabbing their firearms, but the Youngs don't own any. Before that day, Peter had never doubted the decision. But now, if the gunman broke in, their only advantages would be surprise and familiarity with their own house. He grabbed a handful of butcher knives, placing one in each room. Kari directed her three sons and their two friends who had slept over the night before to stay in an inner room and not post their location on social media. She also texted neighbors she knew were at the beach, warning them not to come home. The gunfire seemed endless. The shots, over time, less rapid-fire, more methodical, as if he were aiming. Outside, officers were gathering on a nearby street. Why weren't the police moving in on the shooter, Peter wondered. Then he realized: They didn't know where he was. Peter walked out his front door and flagged down a policeman, explaining that he could see the gunman from his house. He took him upstairs, to the spare bedroom, where they waited. "Is that the guy?" the officer asked when the shooter emerged from the shop. "Yeah, that's the guy." Soon, several rifle-toting officers in body armor and helmets were banging on the front door. Peter brought them to the same window. One officer crawled out and laid on the roof. Another, in camouflage, soon joined him. At 11:10, Peter heard a trio of shots. Police say they fired four times. The gunman was down. Twenty-eight minutes later, the city's emergency alert to shelter-in-place went out. The SWAT team swept through the neighborhood and later brought out a bomb squad to comb the area. Officers used a net to fish bullet casings out of the Youngs' pool. The officers on the roof remained there, keeping their eyes trained on the auto shop. Kari asked if she could get them anything. She brought one a Dr Pepper. When Peter went to the Chase bank across the street, where detectives were gathering witness statements, he looked back at his home. It had been within easy range of the shooter. Now, it was the safest place in Houston. **** Five days after the shooting, a memorial service was held at Chapelwood United Methodist Church for Eugene Linscomb. Linscomb, a 56-year-old father and Navy veteran, had been waiting to get his Mercedes washed when he was shot in the head. He worked as a landman for numerous oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, Apache Corporation and Rexpro Energy. He is survived by his daughter and his wife of 18 years. Police identified the shooter as 25-year-old Dionisio Garza III, a former Army sergeant who had driven from San Bernardino County, Calif., to visit friends. Before his rampage, he apparently broke into the auto shop and spent the night. Garza's military backpack was found the following day by a TV reporter, and police said a miscommunication between crime scene units led them to leave it behind. Inside were several documents, including Garza's birth certificate and discharge papers, as well as leftover ammunition police had already detonated. The records indicated he had received awards for his service in Afghanistan. In the weeks leading up to the shooting, Garza had grown obsessed with anti-government sentiments and the belief that the world was about to end. His family thought he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. |
?list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw ------------------------------------------------------------ ARK: Survival Evolved - Taming Compy GUIDE - Taming Compsognathus Guide - How to Tame - 60fps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA16-ryZCo8&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw&index=1 ARK: Survival Evolved - Ultimate Compy GUIDE - Compsognathus Guide - Spawn Locations - Dino Stats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVAWOHCXu3U&index=3&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw ARK: Survival Evolved - Ultimate Angler Fish GUIDE - Angler Gel - Spawn Locations - Patch v233 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfs7OcBmIeA&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw&index=1 ARK: Survival Evolved - Ultimate Kairuku GUIDE - Organic Polymer Farm - Spawn Locations - Wiki https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RfcK9ZPGrE&index=3&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw ARK: Survival Evolved - Troodon Dossier - NEW DINO - New Domestication Rules - Troodon First Look https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FLpZmECTBM&index=1&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw ARK: Survival Evolved - Giganotosaurus Breeding Guide - Tiny Baby Giganotosaurus - Massive Dino Egg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvXXagzMfIs&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw&index=1 ARK: Survival Evolved - Official Giganotosaurus Guide - The Massive Dino of Destruction - Full Dino Breakdown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2hVdPKoqRs&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw&index=1 ARK: Survival Evolved - NEW WEAPONS - Sword/Riot Shield/Metal Shield/Wooden Shield/Soap - v222 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvhFRV4CDCg&index=2&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw ARK: Survival Evolved - Ultimate Egg Incubation Guide - Campfires vs Air Conditioner - Hypo vs Hyper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q8USNRBooU&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw&index=1 ARK: Survival Evolved - Ultimate BABY BREEDing Dino Guide - 25 Facts You Must Know to Succeed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHBOMa7-D54&index=1&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw ARK: Survival Evolved - Ultimate Egg Incubation Guide - Campfires vs Air Conditioner - Hypo vs Hyper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q8USNRBooU&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw&index=1 ARK:Survival Evolved - EXPLOIT Raft Guide - EXPLOITS - Fully Armored Boat - Floating Foundations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZCOO5uMjQY&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw&index=3 ARK: Survival Evolved - Ultimate Brontosaurus GUIDE - Berry Gathering Factory - Massive Dino Base https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t16p08AClY&index=1&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw ARK: Survival Evolved - Ultimate Plesiosaur GUIDE - Building Pirate Base - Underwater Bases https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDJ2PMQeWQg&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw&index=1 ARK: Survival Evolved - Ultimate Quetzal Guide-Flying Bases/Respawns/Fortress/Factory-Quetzalcoatlus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm7gmgzp1Ys&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw&index=2 ARK: Survival Evolved - Ultimate Mosasaur GUIDE - Building UNDERWATER Bases - Diving Bases! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DFVX26H8pY&index=3&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw ARK: Survival Evolved - Ultimate Raft Guide - Epic Raft Guide - How to Build a BOAT HOUSE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmJIV7sen-s&list=PLeusrXH_hwpiKfQMJY3cByMLhNSthzoUw&index=4 ARK: Survival Evolved, ARK: Survival Evolved guide, ARK: Survival Evolved gameplay, ARK: Survival Evolved tutorials, ARK: Survival Evolved walkthrough, ARK: Survival Evolved dinos, ARK: Survival Evolved help, ARK Survival Evolved, ark Ghillie Suit, ark Ghillie armor, Ghillie camouflage, ark Ghillie Suit guide, Ghillie Suit ark, Ark Survival Ghillie Suit, Ark Industrial Cooker, ark survival Industrial Cooker, Industrial Cooker guide, Industrial Cooker review, Industrial Cooker cooking, ark Bunk Bed, Bunk Bed guide, Bunk Bed review, Wooden Table, ark Wooden Table, ark Wooden Table guide, ark Wooden Table tutorial,It’s movie night and all you want to do is watch Frozen, again. There’s only one problem; none of your friends are willing to watch it with you for the hundredth time! This is where we come in, and we’re happy to help in this situation. There is surely something for everyone in Frozen to enjoy. It’s time to thaw their frozen hearts with these things from the film that are surely worth melting for:
1. An adorable reindeer.
Baby reindeer are better than people.
2. Spectacular magic.
Elsa’s powers are amazing and fuel our hope that one day science will discover a way to give us the ability to create an ice staircase.
3. A happy snowman.
♫ Bees’ll buzz. Kids’ll blow dandelion fuzz. And I’ll be doing whatever snow does in summer. ♫
4. Epic choir performances.
Nothing can bet these angelic moments; the acoustics in this coronation chapel are on point.
5. Wandering Oaken’s Trading Post and Sauna.
Hoo-hoo! Big summer blowout! We would like a sun balm of your own invention, Oaken.
6. Power ballads.
Belting “Let it Go” never gets old … just ask the internet.
7. Majestic trolls.
These guys are definitely not fixer-uppers. We mean, they’re wearing glowing crystals. It doesn’t get cooler than that.
8. A dashing prince.
You know, before you realize how evil he is.
9. Breathtaking locations.
We need to travel to Norway as soon as possible. Fjords!
10. Sisterly love.
Sisters are worth melting for.
11. Winter.
We’d imagine winter with reindeer and happy snowmen by your side would be the best possible winter.
12. And finally, the perfect ending.
Who doesn’t love an ice skating finale?
Okay, go forth and melt those frozen hearts people!
Posted 4 years AgoRare 'Pinocchio' lizard spotted in Ecuador (VIDEO)
Ecuador's Pinocchio anole is a creature so rarely seen that it was thought extinct for over 40 years before being rediscovered in 2005. The long-nosed lizard remains one of the region's most elusive reptiles, and to this day, spotting one is a challenge. Despite the odds, however, a team of scientists recently tracked it down.
The lizard (Anolis proboscis) was spotted by herpetologist Lucas Bustamante some 40 feet above the leaf litter in the cloud forests of Mindo. Also known as the Ecuadorian horned anole, this species can be found here and only here.
"This was no small feat," recalls biologist and wildlife photographer Aaron Pomerantz, who was part of the expedition team. "This anole likes to hang out high in the canopy and has cryptic camouflage, meaning it blends in very well with the mossy branches and vegetation."
In order to film and photograph the rare animal, the team, which also included science journalist Dr Jason Goldman, had to climb a tree to get within reach.
As you might have guessed, the lizard's common name stems from its unusual facial appendage, which is made mostly of cartilage. The structure is known as the proboscis, and only in recent years have we begun to understand its function.
"One early hypothesis was that the males might use the horns to do battle, using their faces as if they had swords attached," writes Goldman for the BBC. But because the "horn" is flimsy, that theory didn't quite fit the bill. Only male anoles have these horns, so it's likely that they have something to do with sex. Our best guess is that a big proboscis tells any nearby female Pinocchio lizards that the male is fit to mate.
But as Goldman explains, there's something else at play here: these lizards are born, well, horny.
"That is unusual," he says. "Other horned lizards only develop their horns as they grow up. Nobody knows why the Ecuadorian anoles grow theirs so early, but it cannot be for attracting females." We're still unravelling the mystery, and that job is made particularly difficult by the lizards' hiding skills. These animals are almost impossible to find during the day, something this intrepid team found out firsthand.
The Pinocchio lizard has a small range and the added pressure of habitat loss has already landed it on the IUCN's list of endangered species. Without sufficient protection, the canopy-dwelling critter could be pushed to the brink before we fully understand its life and ecology.
"We hope that by sharing this amazing and endangered creature, we can also help to encourage the protection of the cloud forests of Ecuador so that future generations can experience this habitat along with the incredible endemic species within," says Pomerantz.
Follow the team's next adventure on here, here and here, Tropical Herping and Pomerantz's NextGenScientist blog!Every Labour Day Classic is memorable in its own way.
Some moreso than others.
Take last year’s not-so-thriller.
The Stamps won the defensive tilt 16-7 and fans probably recall very little, other than Esks LB Deon Lacey staring down Stamps QB Bo Levi Mitchell.
But it was a win, so the sellout crowd left McMahon Stadium in a celebratory mood.
Stamps fans would probably like a bit more offensive fireworks this time around but as long as it comes with a ‘W,’ there won’t be any complaining.
Here are five matchups to keep an eye on in Monday’s Labour Day Classic:
Stamps QB Bo Levi Mitchell vs. Esks QB Mike Reilly
There are the top three, and then there’s everyone else. And, for the second straight week, two of the league’s top quarterbacks will go head-to-head. Stamps pivot Bo Levi Mitchell outlasted Hamilton’s Zach Collaros last weekend. On Monday Mitchell and fellow MOP candidate Mike Reilly, who is on pace to throw for 6,000 yards this season, will air it out. Like Collaros, Reilly’s gaudy stats may trump Mitchell’s, but all the Calgary quarterback cares about is winning and no one has done a better job of that. His career winning percentage of.826 (35-7-1) is No. 1 all time.
Stamps C Spencer Wilson vs. Esks defensive interior
It has been a stormy week for the Stamps offensive line. And just when guards Shane Bergman and Brad Erdos returned from injury, centre Pierre Lavertu (neck) was a spectator on Saturday. If he can’t go — and head coach Dave Dickenson called it a gametime decision — 2015 CFL all-star Spencer Wilson will handle the snaps. That trio will have their hands full against the Esks defensive tackle duo of Almondo Sewell and Jabari Hunt. Sewell leads all defensive tackles and sits second overall in the CFL with seven sacks in nine tilts.
Stamps DB Brandon Smith vs. Esks SB Adarius Bowman
These two vets are not strangers to each other. They’ve eyed each other up for most of the past decade. Bowman remains QB Mike Reilly’s top target and came into Week 11 leading the league with 956 yards receiving. The 6-foot-3, 217-pound receiver is a handful for every defensive back in the CFL and certainly has a size advantage on the 5-foot-10, 190-pound Smith. But the ninth-year veteran DB has held his own in this matchup over the years.
Stamps CB Tommie Campbell vs. Esks WR Derel Walker
If you’re going to highlight Bowman, you almost have to do the same with WR Derel Walker. The sophomore speedster sits just 69 yards back of his teammate, giving Reilly a pair of dependable targets with which to terrify opposing defences. But Reilly will want to be careful – and accurate – if he looks Walker’s way. Campbell has been a ball hawk, taking back an interception 115 yards for a (penalty-negated) touchdown. He grabbed a couple more picks in practice this week, so his third interception of the season is just a matter of time.
Stamps DE Charleston Hughes vs. Esks RT D’Anthony Batiste
Stamps sack master Charleston Hughes was held out of the backfield last week by the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. But the big man’s sacks seem to come in bunches. Five of his seven quarterback spikes have come in two games and he recorded three sacks in last year’s Labour Day tilt. But he’s not exactly facing Swiss cheese on Monday in 6-foot-4, 314-pound D’Anthony Batiste. The 2015 West Division all-star has made 42 consecutive starts for the Green & Gold.
sfisher@postmedia.com
Twitter:@ScottFisherPMThere will be repercussions for Baker Mayfield's actions.
Oklahoma coach Lincoln Riley announced Monday that Mayfield will not start the Sooners regular-season finale against West Virginia. He will not be suspended for the entire game, however, though Riley did not elaborate on how long Mayfield will sit before entering the game.
"I think it's important for everybody here, across the country, to keep it in perspective," said Riley. "Everybody, not just Baker, they're still just young men. They're not adults. They're still learning.
"I'm proud as hell to be his coach."
Mayfield was caught on camera grabbing his crotch and gesticulating to Kansas players during Oklahoma's win on Saturday. Mayfield was upset with Kansas players for refusing to shake hands before the game, and for taking what he felt were cheap shots during the game. Mayfield apologized following the game.
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Kyler Murray will start in his place.Ever wonder about that mysterious Content-Type tag? You know, the one you’re supposed to put in HTML and you never quite know what it should be?
Did you ever get an email from your friends in Bulgaria with the subject line “?????????????????”?
I’ve been dismayed to discover just how many software developers aren’t really completely up to speed on the mysterious world of character sets, encodings, Unicode, all that stuff. A couple of years ago, a beta tester for FogBUGZ was wondering whether it could handle incoming email in Japanese. Japanese? They have email in Japanese? I had no idea. When I looked closely at the commercial ActiveX control we were using to parse MIME email messages, we discovered it was doing exactly the wrong thing with character sets, so we actually had to write heroic code to undo the wrong conversion it had done and redo it correctly. When I looked into another commercial library, it, too, had a completely broken character code implementation. I corresponded with the developer of that package and he sort of thought they “couldn’t do anything about it.” Like many programmers, he just wished it would all blow over somehow.
But it won’t. When I discovered that the popular web development tool PHP has almost complete ignorance of character encoding issues, blithely using 8 bits for characters, making it darn near impossible to develop good international web applications, I thought, enough is enough.
So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don’t know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I’m going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine. I swear I will.
And one more thing:
IT’S NOT THAT HARD.
In this article I’ll fill you in on exactly what every working programmer should know. All that stuff about “plain text = ascii = characters are 8 bits” is not only wrong, it’s hopelessly wrong, and if you’re still programming that way, you’re not much better than a medical doctor who doesn’t believe in germs. Please do not write another line of code until you finish reading this article.
Before I get started, I should warn you that if you are one of those rare people who knows about internationalization, you are going to find my entire discussion a little bit oversimplified. I’m really just trying to set a minimum bar here so that everyone can understand what’s going on and can write code that has a hope of working with text in any language other than the subset of English that doesn’t include words with accents. And I should warn you that character handling is only a tiny portion of what it takes to create software that works internationally, but I can only write about one thing at a time so today it’s character sets.
A Historical Perspective
The easiest way to understand this stuff is to go chronologically.
You probably think I’m going to talk about very old character sets like EBCDIC here. Well, I won’t. EBCDIC is not relevant to your life. We don’t have to go that far back in time.
Back in the semi-olden days, when Unix was being invented and K&R were writing The C Programming Language, everything was very simple. EBCDIC was on its way out. The only characters that mattered were good old unaccented English letters, and we had a code for them called ASCII which was able to represent every character using a number between 32 and 127. Space was 32, the letter “A” was 65, etc. This could conveniently be stored in 7 bits. Most computers in those days were using 8-bit bytes, so not only could you store every possible ASCII character, but you had a whole bit to spare, which, if you were wicked, you could use for your own devious purposes: the dim bulbs at WordStar actually turned on the high bit to indicate the last letter in a word, condemning WordStar to English text only. Codes below 32 were called unprintable and were used for cussing. Just kidding. They were used for control characters, like 7 which made your computer beep and 12 which caused the current page of paper to go flying out of the printer and a new one to be fed in.
And all was good, assuming you were an English speaker.
Because bytes have room for up to eight bits, lots of people got to thinking, “gosh, we can use the codes 128-255 for our own purposes.” The trouble was, lots of people had this idea at the same time, and they had their own ideas of what should go where in the space from 128 to 255. The IBM-PC had something that came to be known as the OEM character set which provided some accented characters for European languages and a bunch of line drawing characters… horizontal bars, vertical bars, horizontal bars with little dingle-dangles dangling off the right side, etc., and you could use these line drawing characters to make spiffy boxes and lines on the screen, which you can still see running on the 8088 computer at your dry cleaners’. In fact as soon as people started buying PCs outside of America all kinds of different OEM character sets were dreamed up, which all used the top 128 characters for their own purposes. For example on some PCs the character code 130 would display as é, but on computers sold in Israel it was the Hebrew letter Gimel ( ), so when Americans would send their résumés to Israel they would arrive as r sum s. In many cases, such as Russian, there were lots of different ideas of what to do with the upper-128 characters, so you couldn’t even reliably interchange Russian documents.
Eventually this OEM free-for-all got codified in the ANSI standard. In the ANSI standard, everybody agreed on what to do below 128, which was pretty much the same as ASCII, but there were lots of different ways to handle the characters from 128 and on up, depending on where you lived. These different systems were called code pages. So for example in Israel DOS used a code page called 862, while Greek users used 737. They were the same below 128 but different from 128 up, where all the funny letters resided. The national versions of MS-DOS had dozens of these code pages, handling everything from English to Icelandic and they even had a few “multilingual” code pages that could do Esperanto and Galician on the same computer! Wow! But getting, say, Hebrew and Greek on the same computer was a complete impossibility unless you wrote your own custom program that displayed everything using bitmapped graphics, because Hebrew and Greek required different code pages with different interpretations of the high numbers.
Meanwhile, in Asia, even more crazy things were going on to take into account the fact that Asian alphabets have thousands of letters, which were never going to fit into 8 bits. This was usually solved by the messy system called DBCS, the “double byte character set” in which some letters were stored in one byte and others took two. It was easy to move forward in a string, but dang near impossible to move backwards. Programmers were encouraged not to use s++ and s– to move backwards and forwards, but instead to call functions such as Windows’ AnsiNext and AnsiPrev which knew how to deal with the whole mess.
But still, most people just pretended that a byte was a character and a character was 8 bits and as long as you never moved a string from one computer to another, or spoke more than one language, it would sort of always work. But of course, as soon as the Internet happened, it became quite commonplace to move strings from one computer to another, and the whole mess came tumbling down. Luckily, Unicode had been invented.
Unicode
Unicode was a brave effort to create a single character set that included every reasonable writing system on the planet and some make-believe ones like Klingon, too. Some people are under the misconception that Unicode is simply a 16-bit code where each character takes 16 bits and therefore there are 65,536 possible characters. This is not, actually, correct. It is the single most common myth about Unicode, so if you thought that, don’t feel bad.
In fact, Unicode has a different way of thinking about characters, and you have to understand the Unicode way of thinking of things or nothing will make sense.
Until now, we’ve assumed that a letter maps to some bits which you can store on disk or in memory:
A -> 0100 0001
In Unicode, a letter maps to something called a code point which is still just a theoretical concept. How that code point is represented in memory or on disk is a whole nuther story.
In Unicode, the letter A is a platonic ideal. It’s just floating in heaven:
A
This platonic A is different than B, and different from a, but the same as A and A and A. The idea that A in a Times New Roman font is the same character as the A in a Helvetica font, but different from “a” in lower case, does not seem very controversial, but in some languages just figuring out what a letter is can cause controversy. Is the German letter ß a real letter or just a fancy way of writing ss? If a letter’s shape changes at the end of the word, is that a different letter? Hebrew says yes, Arabic says no. Anyway, the smart people at the Unicode consortium have been figuring this out for the last decade or so, accompanied by a great deal of highly political debate, and you don’t have to worry about it. They’ve figured it all out already.
Every platonic letter in every alphabet is assigned a magic number by the Unicode consortium which is written like this: U+0639. This magic number is called a code point. The U+ means “Unicode” and the numbers are hexadecimal. U+0639 is the Arabic letter Ain. The English letter A would be U+0041. You can find them all using the charmap utility on Windows 2000/XP or visiting the Unicode web site.
There is no real limit on the number of letters that Unicode can define and in fact they have gone beyond 65,536 so not every unicode letter can really be squeezed into two bytes, but that was a myth anyway.
OK, so say we have a string:
Hello
which, in Unicode, corresponds to these five code points:
U+0048 U+0065 U+006C U+006C U+006F.
Just a bunch of code points. Numbers, really. We haven’t yet said anything about how to store this in memory or represent it in an email message.
Encodings
That’s where encodings come in.
The earliest idea for Unicode encoding, which led to the myth about the two bytes, was, hey, let’s just store those numbers in two bytes each. So Hello becomes
00 48 00 65 00 6C 00 6C 00 6F
Right? Not so fast! Couldn’t it also be:
48 00 65 00 6C 00 6C 00 6F 00?
Well, technically, yes, I do believe it could, and, in fact, early implementors wanted to be able to store their Unicode code points in high-endian or low-endian mode, whichever their particular CPU was fastest at, and lo, it was evening and it was morning and there were already two ways to store Unicode. So the people were forced to come up with the bizarre convention of storing a FE FF at the beginning of every Unicode string; this is called a Unicode Byte Order Mark and if you are swapping your high and low bytes it will look like a FF FE and the person reading your string will know that they have to swap every other byte. Phew. Not every Unicode string in the wild has a byte order mark at the beginning.
For a while it seemed like that might be good enough, but programmers were complaining. “Look at all those zeros!” they said, since they were Americans and they were looking at English text which rarely used code points above U+00FF. Also they were liberal hippies in California who wanted to conserve (sneer). If they were Texans they wouldn’t have minded guzzling twice the number of bytes. But those Californian wimps couldn’t bear the idea of doubling the amount of storage it took for strings, and anyway, there were already all these doggone documents out there using various ANSI and DBCS character sets and who’s going to convert them all? Moi? For this reason alone most people decided to ignore Unicode for several years and in the meantime things got worse.
Thus was invented the brilliant concept of UTF-8. UTF-8 was another system for storing your string of Unicode code points, those magic U+ numbers, in memory using 8 bit bytes. In UTF-8, every code point from 0-127 is stored in a single byte. Only code points 128 and above are stored using 2, 3, in fact, up to 6 bytes.
This has the neat side effect that English text looks exactly the same in UTF-8 as it did in ASCII, so Americans don’t even notice anything wrong. Only the rest of the world has to jump through hoops. Specifically, Hello, which was U+0048 U+0065 U+006C U+006C U+006F, will be stored as 48 65 6C 6C 6F, which, behold! is the same as it was stored in ASCII, and ANSI, and every OEM character set on the planet. Now, if you are so bold as to use accented letters or Greek letters or Klingon letters, you’ll have to use several bytes to store a single code point, but the Americans will never notice. (UTF-8 also has the nice property that ignorant old string-processing code that wants to use a single 0 byte as the null-terminator will not truncate strings).
So far I’ve told you three ways of encoding Unicode. The traditional store-it-in-two-byte methods are called UCS-2 (because it has two bytes) or UTF-16 (because it has 16 bits), and you still have to figure out if it’s high-endian UCS-2 or low-endian UCS-2. And there’s the popular new UTF-8 standard which has the nice property of also working respectably if you have the happy coincidence of English text and braindead programs that are completely unaware that there is anything other than ASCII.
There are actually a bunch of other ways of encoding Unicode. There’s something called UTF-7, which is a lot like UTF-8 but guarantees that the high bit will always be zero, so that if you have to pass Unicode through some kind of draconian police-state email system that thinks 7 bits are quite enough, thank you it can still squeeze through unscathed. There’s UCS-4, which stores each code point in 4 bytes, which has the nice property that every single code point can be stored in the same number of bytes, but, golly, even the Texans wouldn’t be so bold as to waste that much memory.
And in fact now that you’re thinking of things in terms of platonic ideal letters which are represented by Unicode code points, those unicode code points can be encoded in any old-school encoding scheme, too! For example, you could encode the Unicode string for Hello (U+0048 U+0065 U+006C U+006C U+006F) in ASCII, or the old OEM Greek Encoding, or the Hebrew ANSI Encoding, or any of several hundred encodings that have been invented so far, with one catch: some of the letters might not show up! If there’s no equivalent for the Unicode code point you’re trying to represent in the encoding you’re trying to represent it in, you usually get a little question mark:? or, if you’re really good, a box. Which did you get? -> �
There are hundreds of traditional encodings which can only store some code points correctly and change all the other code points into question marks. Some popular encodings of English text are Windows-1252 (the Windows 9x standard for Western European languages) and ISO-8859-1, aka Latin-1 (also useful for any Western European language). But try to store Russian or Hebrew letters in these encodings and you get a bunch of question marks. UTF 7, 8, 16, and 32 all have the nice property of being able to store any code point correctly.
The Single Most Important Fact About Encodings
If you completely forget everything I just explained, please remember one extremely important fact. It does not make sense to have a string without knowing what encoding it uses. You can no longer stick your head in the sand and pretend that “plain” text is ASCII.
There Ain’t No Such Thing As Plain Text.
If you have a string, in memory, in a file, or in an email message, you have to know what encoding it is in or you cannot interpret it or display it to users correctly.
Almost every stupid “my website looks like gibberish” or “she can’t read my emails when I use accents” problem comes down to one naive programmer who didn’t understand the simple fact that if you don’t tell me whether a particular string is encoded using UTF-8 or ASCII or ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1) or Windows 1252 (Western European), you simply cannot display it correctly or even figure out where it ends. There are over a hundred encodings and above code point 127, all bets are off.
How do we preserve this information about what encoding a string uses? Well, there are standard ways to do this. For an email message, you are expected to have a string in the header of the form
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
For a web page, the original idea was that the web server would return a similar Content-Type http header along with the web page itself — not in the HTML itself, but as one of the response headers that are sent before the HTML page.
This causes problems. Suppose you have a big web server with lots of sites and hundreds of pages contributed by lots of people in lots of different languages and all using whatever encoding their copy of Microsoft FrontPage saw fit to generate. The web server itself wouldn’t really know what encoding each file was written in, so it couldn’t send the Content-Type header.
It would be convenient if you could put the Content-Type of the HTML file right in the HTML file itself, using some kind of special tag. Of course this drove purists crazy… how can you read the HTML file until you know what encoding it’s in?! Luckily, almost every encoding in common use does the same thing with characters between 32 and 127, so you can always get this far on the HTML page without starting to use funny letters:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
But that meta tag really has to be the very first thing in the <head> section because as soon as the web browser sees this tag it’s going to stop parsing the page and start over after reinterpreting the whole page using the encoding you specified.
What do web browsers do if they don’t find any Content-Type, either in the http headers or the meta tag? Internet Explorer actually does something quite interesting: it tries to guess, based on the frequency in which various bytes appear in typical text in typical encodings of various languages, what language and encoding was used. Because the various old 8 bit code pages tended to put their national letters in different ranges between 128 and 255, and because every human language has a different characteristic histogram of letter usage, this actually has a chance of working. It’s truly weird, but it does seem to work often enough that naïve web-page writers who never knew they needed a Content-Type header look at their page in a web browser and it looks ok, until one day, they write something that doesn’t exactly conform to the letter-frequency-distribution of their native language, and Internet Explorer decides it’s Korean and displays it thusly, proving, I think, the point that Postel’s Law about being “conservative in what you emit and liberal in what you accept” is quite frankly not a good engineering principle. Anyway, what does the poor reader of this website, which was written in Bulgarian but appears to be Korean (and not even cohesive Korean), do? He uses the View | Encoding menu and tries a bunch of different encodings (there are at least a dozen for Eastern European languages) until the picture comes in clearer. If he knew to do that, which most people don’t.
For the latest version of CityDesk, the web site management software published by my company, we decided to do everything internally in UCS-2 (two byte) Unicode, which is what Visual Basic, COM, and Windows NT/2000/XP use as their native string type. In C++ code we just declare strings as wchar_t (“wide char”) instead of char and use the wcs functions instead of the str functions (for example wcscat and wcslen instead of strcat and strlen). To create a literal UCS-2 string in C code you just put an L before it as so: L"Hello".
When CityDesk publishes the web page, it converts it to UTF-8 encoding, which has been well supported by web browsers for many years. That’s the way all 29 language versions of Joel on Software are encoded and I have not yet heard a single person who has had any trouble viewing them.
This article is getting rather long, and I can’t possibly cover everything there is to know about character encodings and Unicode, but I hope that if you’ve read this far, you know enough to go back to programming, using antibiotics instead of leeches and spells, a task to which I will leave you now.TUCSON, Arizona — Two illegal aliens from Mexico working as armed cartel scouts were sent to prison on smuggling and weapons charges.
This week, Jose Abelardo Guzman Perez went before Chief U.S. District Judge Raner C. Collins for Arizona, who sentenced him to more than eight years in prison for his role in a drug trafficking conspiracy and armed struggle with federal law enforcement. Guzman’s accomplice, Lorenzo Infante Ortiz, previously pleaded guilty to similar charges and is serving a three-year prison sentence.
According to information provided to Breitbart Texas by the U.S Attorney’s Office, the charges stem from a September 2016 drug smuggling attempt where the two scouted into Arizona for a Mexican drug cartel. The men were sent ahead two or three days in advance to secure the routes used by smugglers.
At the time of their arrest, Guzman carried an AK-47 rifle and a.45 caliber pistol, while Infante Ortiz carried an AR-15 and a 9mm sidearm. The pair claimed that the weapons were intended to defend themselves against drug rip crews. In addition to the weapons, the cartel scouts also carried backpacks with approximately 88 pounds of marijuana inside.
On the day of the arrest, |
a team. In Boston we have a team with an incredible collegial atmosphere. We build consensus. [Hodgson and Comolli] share the same agent. We needed to find someone who shared the same philosophy as us. That's why Billy Beane recommended Damien. I spent three weeks talking with Damien."
Werner conceded that Hodgson had not been consulted on Comolli's appointment but said they knew the two had a good relationship. "Roy said he felt he needed to bolster his staff. He was not asked about specific recommendations but we set about trying to find the best person we could find. I was aware they had a healthy respect for each other.
"We feel we can bring in more players that are home-grown. What we are used to is that the manager and the general manager work together. It's a big job analysing which players to bring in. We are trying to bolster Roy's operation and I think Damien is the first step."
Werner reinforced the message that the club are to target the Asian market to try to boost revenue and suggested they could play competitive games abroad, even though the Premier League has given up on its 39th game proposal.
"Pre-season matches are great but why not have an actual match in season," Werner said. "The Premier League is the strongest league in the world and its reach is global. It's been very impressive to me, the number of people globally who watch and we hope to expand that imprint. I think the more important the game, the more excitement."
Werner has also met Liverpool Council to discuss options for redeveloping Anfield or building a new stadium. As part of any new development, Henry said they will have to take on debt, but stressed the fact that they would emulate the way Arsenal built their stadium.
"How did Arsenal build the Emirates? I have never heard of a privately funded stadium of magnitude that was not funded by debt," Henry said. "It is such a big issue. It is a big issue with Manchester United. But the New York Yankees have $3.5 billion of debt and I've never heard a Yankee fan complain about it because they built a $1.5 billion stadium. The difference to be made is between stadium and acquisition debt."An average of 13,000 passengers a night took advantage of extended T hours Saturdays and Sundays.
Add this to the list of #MBTAfails: late-night service.
Not because it was a bad idea, but because the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority found a way to make it so eyepoppingly expensive that the board had no choice but to kill it. The average subsidy for late night bus and train service is $13.38 per ride compared with $1.43 for regular service.
Given the MBTA’s dire financial straits, I can’t blame the board for pulling the plug on the two-year-old pilot, which is scheduled to end next weekend. But let’s not throw the concept under the bus. If anything, this is the time to launch more experiments.
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It’s too easy just to say the demand isn’t there. If only more people were out and about until 2 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday, then the T wouldn’t be losing so much money.
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An average of 13,000 passengers a night took advantage of extended hours. So how many people should have been using it?
There’s no right number. That’s because people should have a public transit option beyond the standard 12:30 a.m. shutdown. This is not about keeping the bar-hopping millennials happy. This is about making sure the dishwashers and waitstaff have an affordable ride home.
According to one MBTA survey, nearly a third of the late-night trips were related to work. The ridership customer base was also more likely nonwhite and had lower household incomes compared with the average T user.
No wonder the Federal Transit Administration last week slapped the MBTA on the wrist for failing to follow a civil rights guideline that required the agency to study the effect on minorities and low-income riders of canceling the late-night service. Joining the chorus Tuesday were two state senators from Boston, Linda Dorcena Forry and Sonia Chang-Diaz, who called on the MBTA to keep the longer hours until the agency finishes its analysis.
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So now what?
The T bungled late night, and here’s an opportunity to start fresh. Instead, government should push the private sector to come up with a variety of options for night owls.
Already, Uber said it would offer discounted fares on uberPOOL rides between T subway stations during late night hours for four weekends starting March 19. UberPOOL is the ride-hailing service’s carpool option, and for a limited period people can ride from, say, South Station to Alewife for a flat $5 fare.
I can also see the company bringing back MegaPOOL, a street trolley service offered New Year’s Eve that picks up riders going in the same direction for $5 per person.
“We’re honestly looking at everything and all technology,” Uber Boston general manager Chris Taylor said.
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Matt George, founder and chief executive of Boston transportation startup Bridj, is also champing at the bit. He said he thinks his on-demand bus company can run late-night service for “60 to 70 percent” of the current cost. The T spent about $14 million in fiscal year 2015 on extended hours.
Now, late night Bridj would be different. No trains, just 14-passenger buses. The service would focus on the busiest corridors, whether it’s Dorchester or Cambridge. And like its daytime service, this Bridj would not have fixed routes. Customers download a mobile app on their smartphones, tap in their destination, and the company platform designs routes and stops based on demand.
There is a catch. George said he won’t go ahead unless the MBTA is a true partner, just like a deal the startup struck with the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority.
“We can save the T a bunch of money,” George said, but he cautions that Bridj would not be a “cost-eliminating measure.”
In other words, Bridj still would need some public dough — similar to what a regular T ride gets — in order to make late night affordable to all.
George might be waiting a long time. When I spoke with Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack on Tuesday, she made clear that the T is done taking the lead on this.
“I’m happy to come to a table with other public sector partners and the private sector to discuss other models for there being late night service,” Pollack said.
As for the possibility of subsidizing a private sector effort, Pollack could only offer this: “Beyond coming to the table, that’s all I can say.”
Which might explain why Bob Luz, chief executive of the Massachusetts Restaurant Association, has been incredibly frustrated. His organization gave a five-figure sum to help launch late-night service, and his board agreed to double that amount the following year. But Luz said the T never collected the check.
Luz said he thinks bar and restaurant owners would kick in more money toward another effort, but he questions whether there’s commitment on the public side.
“You need somebody that can champion this thing in the public sector if there is going to be outreach to the private sector,” Luz said. “That’s really been disappointing to me. It makes me think we threw away money.”
That leaves Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh. His late night task force recently issued recommendations to extend liquor license hours and allow longer hours for outdoor entertainment in certain areas.
It makes all the sense in the world for Walsh to take up the cause. He can get everyone around the table.
More than just money, late night transit needs an advocate.
Shirley Leung is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at shirley.leung@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @leungWaiting patiently for their turn, one by one, over and over again, the leading mayoral candidates stepped forward Wednesday to eviscerate frontrunner Rob Ford over controversial comments on immigration he made at a Tuesday debate. George Smitherman declared it a “turning point in the election” and said ‘sorry’ wouldn’t go far enough.
Mayoral candidate Rob Ford defends himself to the media Wednesday after four other candidates attacked him for his comments at a Tuesday night debate on newcomers to Toronto. (Aug. 19, 2010) ( TARA WALTON / TORONTO STAR ) Mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi tries to confront opponent Rob Ford over his recent comments about newcomers. ( TORONTO STAR )
Sarah Thomson said Toronto had finally seen the “real Rob Ford.” Joe Pantalone asked if the Etobicoke councillor wanted him to “get back on the boat.” And at one point, when Ford came outside for a television interview, he was confronted by Rocco Rossi. Ford accused Rossi of playing a “political game” and walked away, but Rossi called after him and the pair launched a brief shouting match.
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“You’re running for mayor, what isn’t political about that?” Rossi hollered. “You’re running from the issue, Rob.” The attacks continued for hours as Ford’s opponents sensed they had come upon an issue that could derail Ford’s campaign. Experts aren’t so sure. And judging by several online polls, the public doesn’t seem to think so, either. The controversy began Tuesday night at a mayoral debate televised by CP24. A Tamil member of the audience asked the candidates to comment on the role of refugees in the city. Ford responded: “We can’t even deal with the 2.5 million people in the city. I think it’s more important that we take care of the people now before we start bringing in more.”
Ford — who in 2003 said there should be a “refugee freeze” in Toronto —went on to say that the official city plan indicates a million people will be coming to the city over the next decade. Advocacy groups pounced on the statements. By the afternoon, even the premier was weighing in.
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“I just don’t think it’s representative of Canadians. I just don’t think it’s representative of the society that we aspire to build here together,” Dalton McGuinty told journalists at Queen’s Park. In reality, city documents predict Toronto’s population will grow by only 452,000 over the next 10 years. Regionally, the GTA is expected to balloon by 2,194,000 by 2021. “Anyone who runs for public office needs to do research before they blurt out comments on issues,” said Usha George, the dean of community services at Ryerson University. But as for how the issue will sit with voters, George said she isn’t so sure. “I know that from my own experience, even people who came to Canada as immigrants 10 or 15 years ago, there is a tendency for them to become quite conservative,” she said. “They tend to feel: ‘Why are we bringing in more people when we can’t give us jobs?’ We all know the stories of PhDs driving cabs.” Close to half of Toronto’s population was born outside Canada. Myer Siemiatycki, who has studied the voting patterns of immigrants at a municipal level, said newcomers will vote when they feel an issue directly affects them. Ratna Omidvar, president of the Maytree group, said this could be a problem for Ford. “I think the Canadian electorate, by and large, and not just the Toronto electorate, is in support of immigration, diversity and multiculturalism,” she said. “There are always roughly 20 per cent who don’t like it and this will speak to them. But that is a smaller portion. It is not the mainstream.” At a 1 p.m. news conference, Ford accused his opponents of spinning his comments out of context. “Until we get our fiscal house in order (we can’t) welcome more people. Right now we’re not in any shape to welcome people,” Ford said outside city hall, adding later: “There’s 60,000 people trying to get into affordable housing. How about all these new people coming in? They’re going to be asking to get into affordable housing, too. So the waiting list now, could it go up to 200,000 people if we bring in a million people?” Ford, who recent polls have shown is well in front of his rivals, refused to declare his stance on refugees as, he said, that is a federal issue. Newcomer numbers 44% Proportion of GTA residents born in another country (2006 census) 43% Proportion of newcomers to Canada since 1985 who have settled in the Toronto area 100-plus Languages and dialects spoken in Toronto 252,000 New immigrants to Canada in 2009 23,000 Refugees arrived in 2009 (7,500 were government-sponsored; 5,000 privately sponsored) Sources: Statistics Canada, Immigration and Refugee BoardFila has entered into a five-year apparel agreement with the Netherlands Olympic Committee (NOC*NSF).
The South Korean manufacturer will provide all NOC*NSF-affiliated national teams with training kit, footwear, competition apparel, and award ceremony attire until 2022, a period which covers the three upcoming Olympic Games in the Asian cities of PyeongChang, Tokyo and Beijing. Since 2014, Fila has had a sponsorship agreement with the Royal Dutch Skating Federation (KNSB).
The financial terms of the deal have not been released.
Gene Yoon, the chairman of Fila, said: “The confidence and trust established as it relates to our background of competing together in international competitions with Sven Kramer and including the Netherlands Royal Dutch Skating Federation and its affiliated athletes helped this sponsorship to be rapidly finalised and that has a particularly poignant meaning.”
The Netherlands finished 11th in the overall medal table at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. The European country won eight gold medals, with perhaps the most notable being Anna van der Breggen’s in the women's cycling road race on the opening weekend.The scene is familiar to anyone who’s watched an episode of Law & Order: a windowless room, save for a large two-way mirror next to the door. The metal table in the center of the room is illuminated by a single overhead light. A detective enters and begins the interrogation. “Rough night,” he says. “Well, it’s about to get a lot rougher.”
His suspect, however, isn’t a person. It’s a stack of cash.
“What’s $2500 in cash doing hanging out in somebody’s glovebox, huh?” asks the detective. “Answer me!”
Despite starring Jeff Goldblum and other actors from Law & Order: Criminal Intent, this isn’t an episode of the show. It’s a parody bit from HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, closing out an exposé on civil asset forfeiture.
The idea of arresting money or other inanimate objects might seem ridiculous, but that’s essentially what happens under current civil forfeiture laws. Unlike criminal forfeiture, under which police can seize property from those convicted of a crime, civil forfeiture does not require you be convicted or even charged. Instead, a civil case is brought against the property itself, giving way to case names like State of Texas vs. One Gold Crucifix and South Dakota v. Fifteen Impounded Cats.
The practice was ramped up in the 1970s to help law enforcement fight the drug war, allowing police to seize vehicles and money used in the drug trade. While preventing narco-trafficking remains the justification used by police in many seizures, the focus has shifted from going after drug kingpins’ stashes to taking assets from average citizens.
In State of Texas vs. One Gold Crucifix, “police had confiscated a simple gold cross that a woman wore around her neck after pulling her over for a minor traffic violation. No contraband was reported, no criminal charges were filed, and no traffic ticket was issued,” according to an August 2013 piece in The New Yorker. “That’s how it went in dozens more cases involving cash, cars, and jewelry.”
This type of abuse of forfeiture laws has become prolific. In part, this is because police departments get to keep a hefty portion of what they confiscate. Departments can use the money to purchase “toys,” as Columbia, Missouri Police Chief Ken Burton put it, or “stuff that would be nice to have.” The financial incentive leads to aggressive forfeiture tactics, and innocent people end up the victims of police departments more interested in filling their coffers than stopping crime.
It’s easy money for police departments and district attorneys’ offices. Civil litigation doesn’t require the same burden of proof as criminal proceedings — beyond a reasonable doubt — instead, only requiring a preponderance of the evidence. Because the defendant is property and not a person, the rights of the property’s owner have no bearing. Many people choose not to fight to get their property back, because the process is so complicated and expensive.
While civil asset forfeiture has proved its usefulness in fighting dangerous drug traffickers, the profit incentive and disregard for people’s rights have perverted the practice.
To combat what is, essentially, police and prosecutorial corruption, states could divert all seized assets to areas of government other than the police — education, for example. Take away the profit motive, and we’d be well on our way to less police abuse of forfeiture laws.
Preferably, though, states should do away with the practice altogether. North Carolina is the only state in the country that prohibits civil forfeiture — in order for property to be seized, its owner must be convicted of a crime, giving property owners the protection of due process. If states, and their police departments and prosecutors, are truly concerned with justice, they should follow North Carolina’s lead and get rid of civil forfeiture.The government of Israel has siphoned over a billion shekels in money taken from Palestinian laborers for national insurance between 1970-1994, a report released on Wednesday
states. According to the report, compiled by the workers’ rights organization Kav LaOved, between the years 1970-1994 over NIS 1 billion was withheld from Palestinian workers’ salaries in order to pay their national insurance, but in practice, the report states, the money was instead funneled to the Finance Ministry and used to pay National Labor Union fees, even while the workers were not given membership in the union.
Kav LaOved said that during those years, Palestinian workers would receive an invoice with their paycheck that detailed a sum withdrawn for national insurance. According to the report’s findings, only 7.63 percent of the withheld funds went to pay for the workers’ insurance, with the remainder being funneled to the Finance Ministry.
In the report, entitled “State Robbery,” Kav LaOved cites a letter received in 1993 from the Finance Ministry saying that the money withheld went to pay the civilian authorities in the West Bank in order to fund infrastructure programs.
Hannah Zohar, the author of the report and director of Kav LaOved, said she presumes that the infrastructure programs in question had to do with the construction of settlements.
The Finance Ministry has denied the allegations.
The report describes the 1991 legal case in which the Flower Growers Union petitioned the High Court demanding the return of funds that were not used for the national insurance payments as intended. The court ruled in their favor and forced the government to return approximately NIS 4.7 million to employers and their workers.
Zohar told the Post on Thursday that the court case should have set a legal precedent leading to the return of all the money siphoned away from national insurance payments, but instead has been largely forgotten.
The Finance Ministry issued a statement Thursday denying the allegations, adding that the report is based on “confusion over the different roles carried out by separate branches of the government.”
The Histadrut labor federation called the report “full of lies” and “baseless” and accused Kav LaOved of coming to their conclusions before conducting their research, with the findings having “no connection to reality.”
The Government Payments Branch did not respond to the report.Pro-style testing
If you write software professionally, you probably write automated tests. This is fantastic.
But have you ever thought about how to leverage the experiences of other software engineers to:
Write tests that are maximally likely to prevent bugs Write tests that make locating and fixing the cause of a bug easy Write as few (and as short and readable) tests as possible while achieving the above
Below are general guidelines to build a mental framework of what, how, and why to test in any language. There are also specific and hard-earned recommendations for and against a variety of possible testing strategies. Most recommendations come with links to more reading.
If you want to test like a pro, read on. If you disagree with a recommendation or would like elaboration, leave a comment or send me an email. There is always room to improve.
Table of Contents
Terminology
Language around automated testing is often ambiguous and overloaded. I will use these terms:
Test sizes
Terms like “unit test” and “integration test” can mean different things to different people, so we will use test sizes as defined by Google, recapped here:
Small : Usually called unit tests, Small tests are each extremely narrow in scope, run quickly, and test behavior in isolation.
: Usually called unit tests, Small tests are each extremely narrow in scope, run quickly, and test behavior in isolation. Medium : Sometimes called integration tests, Medium tests check interactions between layers and components.
: Sometimes called integration tests, Medium tests check interactions between layers and components. Large: Also called end-to-end or system tests, Large tests are very coarse-grained and often touch many components and make use of the network.
Related reading:
Properties of tests
Fidelity : A high-fidelity test is sensitive to defects in the code under test: the test fails when the code is broken.
: A high-fidelity test is sensitive to defects in the code under test: the test fails when the code is broken. Resilience : A resilient test fails only when the code under test is broken–refactoring won’t break it, and it is not flaky.
: A resilient test fails only when the code under test is broken–refactoring won’t break it, and it is not flaky. Precision: A high-precision test tells you where the defect is. Ideally the exact line number and what differed from our expectations.
General principles to follow
Test one behavior per test
Each test should test one behavior. Many of your methods will have one behavior, so verify that behavior and as little else as possible (often nothing!). Asserting runtime invariants is okay, but usually there should be few assertions other than the primary expected behavior.
Test each behavior once
Testing the same thing more than once is a maintenance burden. Obviously you should not test the same behavior with two separate tests, but sometimes it is tempting to “cross-test” by adding an extra assertion in a related test. Avoid this, because it decreases the Precision when the test fails, and because it violates “Test one behavior per test.”
Write tests that provide value by reducing risk
A test should reduce risk, or it is not providing any value.
One way to check this is to ask “what class of bug could this test detect?” If there is no answer, there should be no test. You can rephrase as “what risk does this test help us avoid?”, and if there is no answer, you need no test.
It works the other way too: think of what the risks (possible classes of bugs) are, and write the appropriate tests to detect them.
One case that obviously provides value is a regression test: you’ve encountered a bug before, so it’s important to have a test to prevent it from reappearing in the future.
Name tests to describe the behavior precisely
Test names appear in test failures and in the code itself. If the names precisely describe the behavior being tested, readers do not need to read the test to understand what cases are covered and which aren’t, and failures become easier to debug and fix.
Tests are often a good way to learn how an interface works, and clear test names can be useful to demonstrate an interface.
Rework code until it is easy to test
You must test your code, so your code must be easy to test. If you write your code before your tests without keeping this in mind, you may not notice until you begin writing tests. When this happens, consider reworking your code to be more testable.
If your test is long, your code may need to change to improve testability.
These strategies can make your code more testable:
Watch it fail
It’s tempting to write a test, see that it passes, and move on. But what if you made a mistake in your test? You probably don’t have tests for your test, so instead, break your code in a way the test should detect, and run it.
This avoids two classes of bugs:
Your test won’t detect the bug you thought it would (low Fidelity) Your tests aren’t actually being run (it happens)
Tests should use literals where possible
In production code, deduplication and flexibility are very important. Surprisingly, in tests, it is often better to duplicate and inline simple values and literals to reduce the likelihood of mistakes and to improve the direct readability of the test. Simple immutable objects shared across tests are also acceptable.
For example, URLs strings should be literal values in tests instead of being constructed as URL objects. This sort of duplication is more readable, simpler, and less error prone. In exchange, it is very inflexible–but this is a better tradeoff in a test.
See Don’t put logic in tests
This does not apply as much to property checks, which should use generators where possible.
Leverage the type system
Careful use of statically type-checked languages render entire classes of Small tests unnecessary because the type checker can enforce certain guarantees. Availability of static typing features vary by language; make use of those that are available, and consider this when choosing a new language.
Carefully choose the types of primitives so they enforce as many guarantees as possible. For instance, prefer an unsigned integer over a signed integer when a value cannot be negative; this eliminates the need for one test. This principle applies similarly to objects and other derived types. Consider introducing new types that can only be constructed with guarantees that will later be relied upon, this removes the need for checking these guarantees in the code relying on them. Consider refining interfaces to accept only values maximally verified by the type system.
Mistakes to avoid
Don’t write change-detector tests
One way to test code is to duplicate some of the logic you are trying to test in the test itself, then assert that the results are equal.
This only detects when your code changes, and cannot catch any bugs apart from “the code changed.” Such a test has low Fidelity and low Resilience. Such a test is a maintenance burden. Rewrite or delete.
One common form of change-detection is a test that checks each step of the implementation. Test behavior instead.
A very specific type of test that looks like (but is not) a useless change-detector can provide refactor/optimization safety (yet no value up until then): a test that reimplements the code under test and compares the outputs. This verifies that the underlying behavior has not changed. This type of test is easy to misapply. It is insufficient on its own. Prefer other types of tests when possible, perhaps simple property checks.
Don’t test code you don’t own in Small or Medium tests
Tests should live in the same project as the code that they test, and should be maintained by the same people. This gives the owners freedom to refactor and make bug fixes as needed, provided their tests still pass. This lets the people best suited to test and maintain test code do so. This reduces your own maintenance burden. Note that it makes sense to test Adapter or other code that wraps a dependency.
Most dependencies will be services or libraries. If you do not trust a dependency, consider contributing new tests to cover the cases they do not. If you still don’t trust a dependency, consider removing or replacing it. If you cannot contribute to a dependency directly, consider maintaining a patch, or if necessary, consider a fork. If you have a binary or service dependency that you cannot contribute to, eliminate, or trust, consider writing a separate suite of tests to ensure it works as you expect. In no case should you test an external dependency as a side effect of testing your own code in a Small or Medium test.
Large tests may implicitly test external dependencies; this is to be expected. Even so, they should not explicitly test external dependencies beyond, say, setting up connections.
Red flags and code smells
Long tests. Tests should generally be short and easy to follow. Arrange, act, assert (see AAA below)
Sleeping (Thread.sleep, Future.sleep, sleep(), etc.). There are very few places this is actually what you want.
Many mocks (specifically mocking, not other test doubles). You may be testing the implementation too closely. The code under test may have too many dependencies, and it may have more than one concern.
The test generates nontrivial data. There may be bugs in the data generation code. Consider separating it out and testing it. Consider using a property check, which can help make this reusable. Consider breaking the code under test into multiple methods which can be tested on simpler data.
Tests with logic that also appears in the code under test. Is this a change-detector test?
Concrete tips
Hat-tip to Ryan Greenberg, from whom I stole most of this section.
AAA test structure
Many tests are easy to read if they are in the form: Arrange, Act, Assert. First Arrange the required objects, perform the Act you want to test, then Assert the results are as expected.
Write the assertion first
Think of test cases in terms of properties that must be true, then assert them. It may be easier to think of the assertion first, then write code to arrange objects and act on them.
Write exactly one test for each equivalence class
For example, if the code is intended to work the same on any number of items in a sequence, you don’t need a test for 2 items, 3 items, and 4 items.
When testing state changes, assert before as well as after
For example, if a method should increment a counter, assert that the counter value starts at what you expect before calling the method. This avoids certain bugs in tests.
Only control direct dependencies, not dependencies of dependencies
Only set up and rely on direct dependencies of what you are testing (possibly using a test double such as a stub, mock or fake), never dependencies of dependencies.
For example, imagine:
We have a request handler logValidRequests that validates a request req by calling validate(req) and then logs req
that validates a request by calling and then logs logValidRequests won’t log req when validate returns false
won’t log when returns One way req can be invalid is if it is all lowercase
You should not write your test by calling logValidRequests with an all-lowercase req. Instead, stub validate to return false, then assert that nothing is logged (and don’t forget other test cases!). This improves Resilience and Precision.
Assert on boundaries for functions accepting a contiguous range of inputs
def isBig(num: Long) = num > 100
You should test 100, but also 99 because it is at the boundary of the change. Even better, write a property test. Remember to test each equivalence class exactly once.
More about testing
Property-based tests
Property-based tests (also called property checks) are a different way to think about testing. The basic idea is to assert that some law holds about the code under test, and then let the test framework generate test cases in an attempt to disprove the law. When it does so, it will try to find a minimal failing case to help you find your bug.
It is worth writing property checks if you can, despite the initial learning curve. They allow you to declare laws and let the computer worry about coming up with cases that are likely to fail. They encourage writing reusable Generators that improve readability and reuse.
Property-based tests are most useful in unit tests.
In Scala there is ScalaCheck and more can be found online.
Large tests
Large tests are your last line of defense before production (or “reported by users”). Not all tests are equally useful at this level.
Test “happy path” behavior. This makes sure that the system works end-to-end in the real environment. Depending on your setup, you may be able to run this in a staging environment as well as the production environment.
Test for regressions in known high-level bugs. If you can write a Small or Medium test for this, prefer that instead. However, make sure each regression gets a test, and sometimes this means a Large test.
Don’t attempt to test every way in which your system can fail. For example, if you have a suite of validations that are already tested in Small tests, do not repeat every test at the Large (or Medium) level. Instead, test one representative validation to ensure that the validations are wired in. Even better, test at the Medium level.
Refactoring tests
It can be hard to refactor your tests, because unlike your production code, you don’t have tests (for your tests).
One good strategy is to refactor your test code after manually (and temporarily) breaking the production code. This gives you some confidence that your tests fail when they ought to fail (showing their level of Fidelity).
Reading and resources
More terminology
Box colors
Black box : Knows nothing of internals–testing the interface’s contract, not implementation
: Knows nothing of internals–testing the interface’s contract, not implementation White box : Testing the internals–testing the implementation, not the interface
: Testing the internals–testing the implementation, not the interface Grey box: Testing interface’s contract as in black box, but sets up state beforehand with knowledge of internals
Subtypes of tests
Regression : did a bug we fixed reappear?
: did a bug we fixed reappear? Performance : how fast is the code? is it fast enough?
: how fast is the code? is it fast enough? Security/Privacy : will this leak data or allow unwanted access?
: will this leak data or allow unwanted access? Code quality : does the code meet standards we can automatically (statically) measure?
: does the code meet standards we can automatically (statically) measure? Acceptance : Does it conform to specifications?
: Does it conform to specifications? Stress: How does it handle being put under increasing loads, up to failure?
Good resources
Short but valuable readingMar 13 2016 by Tessa Green
Many college students use Rate My Professor as a tool to create the perfect schedule with the best professors. It is a site where students anonymously rate their professors from their college; however, many students do not realize that this site might be discrediting many well qualified female and minority professors. On March 4th, Inside Higher ED reported a new study showing that students tend to give higher ratings to white male professors.
This new study was published in the journal PLOS ONE. It stated that in their anonymous reviews on the site students would use words such as "genius" or "brilliant" to describe their white male professors more than their female and minority professors. So, why is this the case? Well, it turns out that those described as "genius" and "brilliant" were in fields, such as physics, that are unfortunately lacking in female and minority professors. These findings could also lead to a deadly cycle. According to Inside Higher Ed, in the education system teacher evaluations are highly valued when it comes to hiring and promoting. If white male professors are getting higher reviews then their female and minority coworkers, then this shows why there is a lack of diversity within certain fields.
So, does this mean that there is a bias against female and minority professors on sites such as Rate My Professor? Well there is definitely a pretty large gender and race gap on the site. Students will eventually lean away from this harmful stereotype, but until then it might be smart to use caution and reason before trusting the reviews on these kind of websites.
Photo Credits: Jan Ingar Grindheim Flickr.com
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Want more Fresh U? Like us on Facebook!Blast from the past: Cyd Ho and a 70-year-old Xinhua editorial
A Labor Party lawmaker and a 70-year-old Xinhua Daily editorial have become a talking point among China’s netizens.
Cyd Ho Sau-lan gave her prized clipping, albeit a photocopy, of the Communist Party mouthpiece to Li Fei, chairman of the Basic Law Committee.
She was with the pan-democrats when they met the top Beijing official in Shenzhen last week.
The editorial dated February 2, 1944 was back then championing universal suffrage in China. The People’s Republic of China was established by the Communist Party in 1949.
It said “the rights to elect and be elected are the same, and any election that has screening is using voters as tools for election”.
Ho’s gift to Li is aimed at criticizing Beijing for fooling Hong Kong citizens about universal suffrage.
Hong Kong’s media did not have a lot of coverage on Ho’s action on that day but focused on other pan-democrats.
However, the episode has become a heated topic among mainland netizens, with Ho gaining a large following on Sina’s weibo.
“Pay my respects to Labor Party’s Ho Sau-lan,” one netizen said.
Some said the clipping is “a slap in Li’s face” and he should be ashamed.
Some even posted editorials of Xinhua Daily in 1944 that touched on elections.
In an October 3 edition, the newspaper said: “Letting the public elect their own leader is very usual and it’s quite natural for democratic countries like the United States. However, the idea may sound unusual or even exotic for those nations that are undemocratic.”
In its November 15 edition, Xinhua editorialized: “Leaders like Lincoln or Roosevelt are not afraid of democratic criticism and the expression of public opinion. They are not worried that these could affect their position and instead they firmly support these democratic systems. They are the people chosen by the people.”
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JZ/JP/JLJust another typical story out of 21st century post-America, where lives only matter if they can further the Narrative. There was a man named Thomas Shaw Jr., an active citizen, businessman, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. He had a family owned plumbing, heating and air conditioning company which provided 20 jobs. After he retired, he went into real estate, which of course necessitates collecting rent. At any other time in history, we'd call him a model citizen.
But in Montgomery, AL (home of the Southern Poverty Law Center), collecting rent and traveling the streets in safety is one of those things you can simply no longer do. And in modern America, the Main Stream Media, academia, and the political elite endlessly incite hatred against people |
was an obvious contender for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar – but he did not receive a nomination (the film received a slew of other nominations, and Day-Lewis took home the award for Best Actor for his performance as Daniel Plainview). Though reviewed with high praise, Dano’s riveting performance was seemingly forgotten in the insanity of all the other accolades received by the film.
Dano has continued to take on a number of unique projects, ranging from indies like Gigantic and Meek’s Cutoff to big-budget flicks like Knight and Day, Cowboys and Aliens, and Looper. In 2012, he starred opposite long-term girlfriend, actress/playwright/screenwriter Zoe Kazan in her film Ruby Sparks, directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the same duo that helmed Little Miss Sunshine. The film, while only granted a limited release, was a charming and intelligent take on the Pygmalion myth, and gained largely favorable reviews from critics. He again reentered the world of riveting drama with his turn as the cruel John Tibeats in 12 Years a Slave, and received widespread recognition with the rest of the powerful ensemble. Dano gave another unsurprisingly moving performance as Alex Jones, a man with the IQ of a 10-year-old, in Prisoners opposite Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Though Dano has worked consistently and always delivered, it took until this year for many to notice the talent they had been watching, when he immersed himself in the role of Beach Boy Brian Wilson for Love & Mercy. Dano put on 40 pounds and taught himself piano and how to sing, and his portrayal of the mental illness Wilson endured for much of his life was absolutely gut-wrenching and sincere. Though he shared the role with John Cusack, who played Wilson in his later years, Dano stole the show from the veteran actor and ultimately gave the movie its heart. (Wilson himself even believed Dano played him more factually than Cusack did). Dano now seems to be campaigning for a Best Supporting Actor nod, and if successful, perhaps this could keep him on the map permanently. He’s played too many great roles to be continually forgotten the way he has been.
Paul Dano doesn’t have the looks of a conventional leading man, and he doesn’t reach for the elusive fame that many of his fellow young actors seem to fall in and out of. With upcoming projects like an HBO miniseries, a BBC miniseries, and a film with Snowpiercer director Bong Joon-ho, it’s clear that Dano isn’t going anywhere. He’s here to act, and that’s just what he’ll continue to do – and hopefully someday, he’ll be paid the attention he deserves.
Jade Budowski is an indecisive sometimes-writer with a knack for ruining punchlines and harboring dad-aged celebrity crushes. Follow her on Twitter: @jadebudowski.Strathclyde Police officers load cannabis into bags. Photo: Andrew Milligan/PA Archive/PA Images
Six years ago police were busting more than 20 cannabis farms a day. Local newspapers were filled with images of officers wading through illegal grows in urban lofts, warehouses and abandoned banks and churches. Police were seizing so many plants they had to burn them in skips because they had no room to store them.
But now, despite high profile cannabis farm busts this year inside a nuclear bunker in Wiltshire and a mansion metres from Buckingham Palace, evidence is emerging that the police's assault on Britain's cannabis cultivation industry is fizzling out.
In 2014, an analysis of the domestic industry by the National Police Chief's Council declared cannabis farms to be a "significant threat" to the UK because of their association with organised crime groups who use profits from grows to fund cocaine smuggling enterprises.
Yet last year the police seized 393,702 plants, a drop of almost a half compared to the 758,000 plants they recovered in 2009-10. In some parts of the country police are seizing as little as one tenth of the plants they were grabbing six years ago. The number of individual cannabis farm busts has fallen by around a third in five years, from 16,590 during 2011-12 to 9,577 last year.
There's been a fall in people convicted for growing cannabis, too. Ministry of Justice figures seen by VICE show the number of people sentenced for producing class B drugs fell by almost a third between 2013 and 2015, from 6,240 to 4,668.
WATCH: The Great Council House Scam – The Weed Grower
So what's going on? Why has Britain's favourite recreational drug become so elusive? Either there are fewer cannabis farms to bust or police just aren't finding them. Maybe police chiefs have decided to add cannabis farms to the list of drug crimes that can be quietly ignored, part of a climb down already evidenced by a move by some forces to run almost de facto decriminalisation policies towards drug possession and an admission by one senior cop that tip offs about cannabis farms might not be acted upon?
In Humberside, for example, where the number of plants recovered by police plummeted from 23,000 in 2009-10 to 2,600 last year, police admit they have more pressing drug concerns.
"Policing constantly changes, and our current drugs policy focuses on the people that cause the most harm," said Superintendent Dave Houchin, Humberside Police's drugs lead. "We still tackle growers, however most of the drug enforcement activity is focus on organised criminality and those dealing class A drugs. We have worked closely with local authority health partners in developing our approach, which takes into account the risk that drugs pose users, especially those using multiple substance simultaneously and the rise in the use of synthetic new psychoactive substances."
I asked Assistant Chief Constable Bill Jephson, the national lead for cannabis policing, to explain what's going on. He was not specific about the main driver behind the decline in cannabis farm busts and plant seizures, but admitted there were two main factors at play here: criminals changing their tactics and police pulling resources away in order to focus on catching bigger fish: "In terms of the reduction in cannabis farm finds, law enforcement has to look at the threat, harm and risk of crime – so we are focusing resources on the high-end stuff."
The high end stuff he is talking about here is class A drug supply and organised crime, both being more of a target than the supply of cannabis, a class B drug, and the majority of grows, which on average consist of 30 plants. So the message from the cops seems to be: if you are growing cannabis and not part of a criminal gang, you are less likely to be caught than you were a few years ago.
A Crime Scene Investigator from Kent Police investigates a cannabis factory near Canterbury. Photo: Gareth Fuller/PA Archive/PA Images
It's not just the police; it's the criminals, too. Growers are finding new ways to protect their verdant bounty. "As they get to understand our capability, they change their tactics," says ACC Jephson. "For example, growers now have improved heat dissipation and ventilation systems to stop our heat tracking helicopters finding farms. They insulate loft space better so the heat doesn't show through the roof. Or they grow it underground. Recently in Hertfordshire we found a cannabis farm in a cargo ship container buried underground."
Unfortunately for the police, because of successive budget cuts the National Police Air Service, which provides the helicopters with cannabis farm-seeking thermal imaging cameras, has had to close half its 30 bases since launching in 2012.
Another reason for the fall in the volume of plants seized is the "diversification of risk" by cannabis farm gangs. "There has been a move away from large industrial cannabis farms into [gangs setting up] cannabis farms in a network of small residential rooms. So we only get part of the crop. There might be another other ten rooms that we have not found," says ACC Jephson.
Everyone agrees, from cops to academics, that a decade after the proliferation of cannabis farms across Britain there is no evidence of a reduction in the amount of the drug cultivated here.
The UK Revenue Protection Association, which monitors illegal energy theft, told me that one third of stolen electricity is down to cannabis farms. The UKRPA said it had seen no reduction in the amount electricity surges associated with cannabis farms in the last four years, although admitted that most organised crime groups bypass meters anyway, so there could be way more farms than blip onto their radar.
Despite the booming cannabis farm industry, domestically grown weed accounts for less than half of the cannabis smoked in the UK, according to the National Crime Agency. The majority is imported from countries such as the Netherlands, and all the signs point to the fact that imports are going up. Last year 27 tons of herbal cannabis – nearly three times the previous year – was seized at the border coming into the UK. Still, domestic grows do continue to play a role in Britain's £1 billion cannabis market.
"Domestic cannabis cultivation hasn't gone away," says Britain's leading expert on the cannabis farm industry, Gary Potter, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Lancaster University. "In fact it's likely that as much, if not more, of it is happening as it ever has been. The criminals are getting smarter, spreading their growing over numerous smaller sites, which are less likely to be detected and less likely to be linked back to organised crime if they are. At the same time, the police are having to deal with austerity and budget cuts and may no longer see cannabis cultivation as a priority."
Expert witnesses who regularly appear in court cases to provide independent analysis of how much plant seizures are worth tell me that in recent years it's become clear that police do not now have the time to properly investigate grows.
"I've seen some monster-sized plants, up to 100g in weight. People are growing one giant plant where they used to have ten of them."
Matthew Atha, of the Independent Drug Monitoring Unit, told me: "Any drop in busts will be down to reduced police budgets largely putting a stop to proactive investigations. Farms are now usually found by accident. Even when they get a tip off they will investigate, but to the minimum extent possible."
In one recent case two Albanian illegal immigrants who had only just arrived in the UK were found tending mature plants in a house. "They were clearly trafficked and under a degree of duress, but no attempt was made – for example by mobile phone analysis – to locate and prosecute the people running the grow," said Atha, adding that since sentencing guidelines were introduced on what constituted a commercial cannabis farm – over 25 plants and use of sophisticated lights and hydroponics – growers have been cultivating fewer but larger plants, resulting in less prosecutions. "I've seen some monster-sized plants, up to 100g in weight," he said. "People are growing one giant plant where they used to have ten of them."
What is clear is that the Vietnamese grow gangs, who ran up to three quarters of cannabis farms busted in Britain a decade ago, have moved onto pastures new. Just 111 of the 4,668 offenders convicted for producing class B drugs in 2015 – two percent – were people with a Vietnamese or Chinese background.
The net result of all this is that, despite a Herculean effort by police in seizing more than 5.5 million cannabis plants over the past six years, Britain's behind closed doors cannabis cultivation industry for the first time, unlike the exploited workers who water the plants, has breathing space. As the growers adapt and use new tactics, and source new lackeys to man the farms, the police have been forced to curtail their assault on the industry as resources are needed elsewhere. On top of this, imports appear to be increasing, and are likely to as punters get sick of Britweed and look for finer varieties from Holland and over the internet.
Its indicative that cannabis grows are being found in the empty shells of abandoned high street businesses, which, unlike the drug trade, have been unable to survive the harsh economic climate. While Britain's relatively new cannabis cultivation industry has so far been austerity-proof, the same cannot be said of the government's war on drugs.
The scaling down of cannabis farm enforcement marks a waypoint in this country's slow, but seemingly inevitable, move towards legal medical cannabis, decriminalisation and a Canadian style model of regulation. In the meantime, perhaps cannabis plants will start to come out of the closet, and like the Czech Republic, begin to be a regular fixture in front gardens across the land.
@NarcomaniaA long-awaited audit of Maryland's health insurance exchange has found that the state improperly billed the federal government $28.4 million as former Gov. Martin O'Malley's administration struggled to launch what would become one of the most troubled websites in the nation.
Though the year-long probe by the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general found no fraud or criminal wrongdoing, auditors said the state lacked oversight and internal controls — and they recommended that Maryland refund what the federal government paid to subsidize the cost of signing people up for coverage.
The report — obtained by The Baltimore Sun ahead of its release — is the latest fallout from the disastrous launch in 2013 of Maryland's health insurance marketplace, a central component of President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. The Maryland website crashed on its first day and was plagued by feuding contractors and software glitches.
By refocusing attention on a dark period of his tenure, the report also could have political implications for O'Malley as he crisscrosses the country in anticipation of a possible run for president next year. The Democrat has pitched himself as a modern, tech-savvy manager.
"How do you misallocate that large amount of money?" asked Rep. Andy Harris, a Baltimore County Republican and critic of the health care law who first requested the audit last year. "Neither answer is good: It was either incompetence or it was intended."
Exchange officials deny that any money was "misallocated" as the audit title suggests. They said they believed they were following federal guidelines and dispute most of the audit's findings.
At issue is how the exchange billed the federal government for signing people up for health insurance.
The exchange in Maryland and others around the country were entitled to federal reimbursement based on projections of how many people bought private insurance and how many qualified for Medicaid, the federal-state health program for the poor.
Those state projections turned out to be way off. While Maryland officials publicly acknowledged that fact before the end of the first open enrollment period in 2014 — cutting in half the number of people expected to buy private policies — federal auditors say the officials did not correct the record with regulators at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for months.
States were reimbursed more for enrolling people in private plans than for Medicaid. The auditors contend that the state not only collected from the wrong pot of money but received too much money.
The auditors recommended that Maryland pay back the $28.4 million and then apply for the amount it is actually due.
Carolyn Quattrocki, the exchange director, said she is working with federal regulators to resolve the matter.
"We really feel we followed federal guidance," she said. "We had no red flags along the way that we were doing anything that was not in keeping with the guidelines."
A spokeswoman for O'Malley referred questions to former state health officials.
The audit's recommendations created the possibility that the state — in the midst of negotiating a $40.7 billion budget — will have to reimburse the federal government for some portion of the money.
A spokesman for Gov. Larry Hogan declined to say whether the state would do so.
"Governor Hogan has continually raised concerns about the manner in which Maryland's health exchange was developed and then rolled out — a disaster which cost taxpayers millions," spokesman Doug Mayer said.
The audit found two accounting errors. The largest — a $15.9 million misallocation — was the result of the out-of-date enrollment data provided by the state to the federal government.
Another $12.5 million was the result of incorrect calculations by a contractor, which is not identified in the report.
According to state officials, that contractor was the Hilltop Institute at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, a nonpartisan heath research organization, which made the projections for the exchange.
The institute has acknowledged the mistake. Officials there notified the exchange that it had inadvertently counted projections for two enrollment periods. Once corrected, that reduced the number of people expected to buy private plans in the first enrollment period to about 70,000 from 150,000.
Before the correction, there was criticism that the exchange was failing to reach enrollment targets. The state eventually met the lowered projections.
The exchanges were established by the Affordable Care Act to help people who do not receive insurance coverage through their employer or a government program.
Although Maryland's site was among the worst-performing in the nation, state officials say more than 450,000 people eventually signed up during the first open enrollment period and the months afterward. During the second open enrollment that ended in mid-February, about 290,000 people signed up.
A new Gallup poll found that the number of uninsured in Maryland dropped to 7.8 percent in 2014 from 12.9 percent in 2013.
Significant public funding has been used to develop and repair Maryland's health exchange. Maryland has not detailed all of its spending, but estimates have put the tab at about $261 million by the end of 2015 — more than 80 percent of it federal money.
Email and other documents obtained by The Sun showed that the development of the website had been troubled for months before its launch by technical problems and disputes between contractors.
The inspector general's audit, which led to the issuance of subpoenas in August, was narrowly focused. It explored only whether the state followed federal guidelines in how it handled the grants. Auditors, who conducted their field work at the state agency's offices in Baltimore from March through September, did not assign blame to any individuals.
Quattrocki said she believes federal auditors have completed their work. A separate state financial audit is nearly complete, she said.
Harris, who has been pressing federal health officials on the issue in Capitol Hill hearings, said the results could prompt other states to review how they sought reimbursement from the federal government.In a potential sign that clemency for Chelsea Manning — but not Edward Snowden — is coming soon, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest insisted a “stark difference” exists between the petitions from the two even though the crimes they allegedly committed are similar.
Under questioning from ABC News, Earnest said the “stark difference” is based on Manning accepting justice and Snowden fleeing to Russia after they both leaked sensitive information from the U.S. government.
“Chelsea Manning is somebody who went through the military criminal justice process, was exposed to due process, was found guilty, was sentenced for her crimes — and she acknowledged wrongdoing,” Earnest said. “Mr. Snowden fled into the arms of an adversary and has sought refuge in a country that most recently made a concerted effort to undermine confidence in our democracy. So, I think the situation of these two individuals is quite different.”
Earnest said he can’t speculate on the impact that distinction will have on clemency decisions, but emphasized the difference in the two cases.
“I know there’s a temptation because the crimes were relatively similar to lump the two cases, but there some important differences, including the scale of the crimes that were committed and the consequences of their crimes,” Earnest said. “Obviously, as Chelsea Manning has acknowledged, and as we have said many times, that the release of the information that she provided to Wikileaks was damaging to national security, but the disclosures by Edward Snowden were far more serious and far more dangerous.”
Earlier this week, NBC News reported Manning was on Obama’s short list of candidates for clemency before the end of his administration. The White House and the Justice Department haven’t responded to the Washington Blade’s request to verify that report.
Earnest said the Justice Department administers a process for clemency in which factors about each case individually are evaluated based on the merits, then provides a recommendation to the president.
“I think you would expect the president would very carefully consider the recommendation that’s made by the Department of Justice before making a final decision,” Earnest concluded.
A number of LGBT groups — led by the American Civil Liberties Union — have joined the calls for clemency for Manning, who came out as transgender shortly after her conviction under the Espionage Act of leaking classified material to Wikileaks.
Currently in the middle of her seventh year of 35-year-sentence at a men’s prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Manning is confirmed to have attempted suicide at least twice, once in July and again as she was sentenced to solitary confinement in November for that initial attempt.
The Army initially refused to provide her with hormone therapy, but agreed to provide the treatment last year as a result of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU. The Army also initially refused to grant her gender reassignment surgery, but reversed its decision in September after she underwent a hunger strike.
On Thursday, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange signaled he agree to extradition to the United States if Obama grants clemency to Manning. Assange has been in self-imposed exile at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces sexual assault charges. He also could face espionage charges in the United States for his release of U.S. government information.The $150 million Peter Pan origins story opened to a paltry $15.5 million in North America and $20.5 million overseas.
Early on in Pan, a young Peter Pan asks "where's the bacon" when being served a watery bowl of gruel at an orphanage in World War II London.
Little did British director Joe Wright and Warner Bros. know how prophetic the question would become.
Over the weekend, the ambitious Peter Pan origin story bombed at the North American box office, grossing a paltry $15.5 million despite a $150 million production budget and a friendly PG rating. Pan, from Warner Bros., Berlanti Productions and co-financing partner RatPac-Dune Entertainment, could lose more than $100 million unless the live-action movie does huge business overseas, a tough proposition. And plans for a sequel are seriously jeopardized.
The film took in $20.5 million this weekend internationally from 52 markets, representing 40 percent of the foreign marketplace and putting its early global total at a worrisome $40.6 million (it opened in Australia two weekends ago). One hope is China, where Pan rolls out Oct. 22. So far, it is doing best in Latin America, while struggling in Europe.
Wright's grand plan for his trip to Neverland didn't pan out. The lucrative family audience rejected the live-action film, starring Hugh Jackman, Rooney Mara, Garrett Hedlund, newcomer Levi Miller and plenty of special effects. It's another blow for the leadership at at Warners, which has suffered a string of misses this year, including pricey titles Jupiter Ascending and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
The studio declined comment on Pan's performance, but one Warners executive said, "It came in so much lighter than anything we could have predicted. The movie failed to bring in an audience of any size."
Only 23 percent of Pan's audience was under the age of 18. By way of comparison, 44 percent of ticket buyers going to see Disney's live-action Cinderella earlier this year were under the age of 18.
Females, and especially younger females, fueled hits like Cinderella and Disney's Maleficent. Femmes made up 77 percent of Cinderella's audience on opening weekend and 60 percent of Maleficent ticket buyers. This demo were less keen to see Pan, making up 55 percent of the audience.
Leading up to its release, Pan was ravaged by critics. Some reviewers described it as a sort of Indiana Jones meets Avatar, with Jackman's Blackbeard compared to the villain in Mad Max: Fury Road. And Wright's decision to have Blackbeard and his gang of pirates sing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was heavily debated. Pan is the first studio tentpole directed by Wright, known for speciality fare like Atonement and Pride and Prejudice.
"Reboots are always tricky," said box-office analyst Phil Contrino. "There's always the risk that fans of a property won't be in tune with the new vision and that seems to be what has happened here."
Adds a rival studio executive, "Pan is neither fish nor fowl. It's trying to be too many things."
The film also sparked controversy when Wright chose Mara, instead of a Native American actress, to play Tiger Lily, prompting a petition urging Warner Bros. to stop casting white actors as people of color.
"Tough reviews, a change of release date and other factors conspired to create this opening weekend performance. Certainly, while the origin story concept in and of itself is not a bad thing, audiences may have had trouble grasping the concept of the film," said Paul Dergarabedian of Rentrak. "The silver lining may come in the international theatrical marketplace — and of course down the road on home video where curious audiences may want to check out the film and have additional in-home content for their kids."
Pan was originally set to open this past July, but a worried Warners delayed its release to fall, presumably a quieter corridor. The movie had tested poorly, and the studio wanted to do reshoots. But that plan didn't quite work out.
Dergarabedian and Contrino cite competition from holdovers The Martian and Hotel Transylvania 2 as another reason Pan got destroyed. Over the weekend, 10 percent of The Martian's audience was under the age of 18, proof that families are turning out to see the space epic, starring Matt Damon. And Hotel Transylvania 2 is a natural draw for younger kids.
For Hotel Transylvania 2 to beat Pan in its third weekend, both domestically and internationally, is a stinging blow.
"Following the huge success of Hotel Transylvania 2 wasn't an easy task," says Contrino. "And it definitely stole away some of the momentum Pan might have had."At a rally in Fresno, California Friday, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump noted that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger agrees with his foreign policy ideas; however, according to Time magazine Kissinger is disputing the real estate mogul's latest comments.Referencing to a meeting he had with Kissinger earlier this month, Trump quoted the foreign policy guru as saying: "Donald, I thought you were wrong in your approach. I thought it was too tough. But you know what? All of those countries are calling me, 'what do we do, what do we do, how can we make him happy?'"But,Kissinger has disputed Trump's comments through his spokesperson."On foreign policy, you identify many key problems," Kissinger said of Trump.He added, "I do not generally agree with the solutions. One-shot outcomes are probably not possible."Time reports former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also lauded Kissinger for his support of her policies."I was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better than anybody had run it in a long time,” she said at a Democratic debate in February,Several schools across the country claim to be Defensive Back U, but an objective analysis from CBS Sports concludes the Texas Longhorns alone deserve the designation.
Who is Defensive Back U based on NFL talent in past decade: LSU, Miami, Texas, Ohio State or South Carolina? https://t.co/67ULO0DpeH — Jon Solomon (@JonSolomonCBS) April 25, 2016
Solomon's criteria for determining the true #DBU includes number of NFL starts for former players, number of Pro Bowl selections, number of draft selections and number of first-round picks. The cutoff date for all four was 2006, although players drafted before that year could still count toward the other categories.
The competition included six schools who make the DBU claim, which are ranked below (number of points in parenthesis):
6. Florida (522)
5. Miami (570)
4. LSU (683)
3. Ohio State (693)
2. South Carolina (696)
1. Texas (738)
Not only did the 'Horns take the title, they won the competition by more than 40 points thanks to 687 starts, six Pro Bowls, 12 draft picks and five first-rounders over the last decade.
Here's what Solomon had to say about the Longhorns:
1. Texas: Florida and LSU often boast that they're Defensive Back U. In reality, Texas deserves the title with an impressive amount of quality depth over the past decade. Besides Earl Thomas and Michael Griffin being Pro Bowlers, the Longhorns also produced Michael Huff, Cedric Griffin, Tarell Brown, Aaron Ross, Aaron Williams and Kenny Vaccaro. In the past decade, only Alabama had more defensive backs drafted (14) than Texas (12). The Longhorns are tied with Alabama for the most first-round picks at defensive back (five). The big difference: Texas defensive backs have started 200+ more NFL games than those from Alabama since 2006. Perhaps one of these years Texas will turn it around on the field in college to mirror this NFL success in the secondary.
So the next time that some other school claims to be "DBU," just point them towards this analysis.Litigation over the most expensive production in Broadway history ends as the parties resolve to discontinue fight over who was to blame for early troubles.
Julie Taymor has settled her blockbuster lawsuit over her exit from Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, the most expensive production in Broadway history.
The Oscar-nominated director sued in November, alleging that producers including Michael Cohl's 8 Legged Productions continued to make use of her creative contributions even after she left. After the lawsuit was filed, 8 Legged brought counterclaims that stated she failed to live up to her obligations on the high-profile show.
Attorneys for both sides informed a New York federal court that an agreement had been reached. On Thursday, the judge directed the clerk to discontinue the case without prejudice. Terms of the settlement aren't yet known.
Spider-Man premiered on Broadway for previews in November 2010. During early performances of the rock musical, which featured its music and lyrics to U2's Bono and The Edge, the show endured bad reviews and various stunt injuries.
Taymor was let go from her position of director due to artistic differences in March 2011. As the show premiered that June, Taymor and producers entered arbitration over $500,000 in royalties.
Then in November, Taymor filed a lawsuit. She demanded compensation that she said was due and claimed that as a co-owner of the book of the musical, she had a copyright claim to the show's underlying material. Taymor said that even though Spider-Man adapted its book by changing characters and revising some plot lines after she was let go, enough of her work still was present to show substantial similarity between her contributions and the present show, which has been a box-office success despite its early troubles.
If her claims were deemed valid, it would have given her interest in any licensed productions around the globe.
After Taymor filed a lawsuit, Taymor's union at The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society also brought a lawsuit. That litigation was settled in February, with 8 Legged agreeing to pay Taymor's full royalties and have a compensation plan in place for Taymor on subsequent productions of the show.
8 Legged also brought a nasty countersuit that alleged it took "superhuman efforts" to save the production from Taymor's refusal to take direction, which they said led to delays and big expenses.
The lawsuit got very heated and personal, with Taymor blaming Bono and The Edge for some of the troubles and saying the producers executed a secret plan to rewrite the book and reorder the show behind her back.
The parties have been in talks about hashing out a resolution for quite some time, but even amid settlement talks, both sides continued to lob voluminous court motions up until the very end.
Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark is estimated to have cost $75 million to produce. The settlement avoids a trial that had been scheduled for January.
E-mail: eriq.gardner@thr.com; Twitter: @eriqgardnerIt’s amusing how little it takes to stirr up a big debate over some aspect of modern day motorsports – team orders are here from the beginning of time, yet they are still being discussed and criticized then abolished and justified over and over again. And there is always one conclusion coming out from all those discussions – team orders are here to stay.
I’ve done my part in killing trees (or in this case computer screen pixels and electricity, so essentially, trees again) with endless threads about team orders being bane of motorsports, from Formula 1 to World Rally Championship and yet I’m not any closer to finding a solution to this ultimate question.
In ideal world, the one we will never get to experience (sorry hippies), we would not need any kind of team orders. Drivers would be allowed to fight without restraints and sponsors, not to mention manufacturer company bosses, would not mind if both cars end their fight in a ditch handing over the victory and public attention to another team and company. In such world Mikko Hirvonen would laugh off Yves Matton’s order to stop pursuing victory and let Sebastien Loeb have it – or rather – Citroën’s boss would not even think of suggesting something as silly as that. In this world of Ideal Rallying (TM), Mikko Hirvonen would not even be part of Citroën, because Sebastien Ogier would not need to start his crusade against the injustice and would instead happily remain big pain in Loeb’s exhaust (translating ass or butt to car lingo does yield some strange results, eh?).
However, this is not the world we live in. Instead, we are part of very edgy times. Manufacturer teams are hard to find and they are very, very careful about their investments, although seeing what they get (or don’t get in this case, *cough* TV *cough*) in return I tend to question this very fact. Put simply, modern motorsports that involve manufacturer teams are business first, sport second, and it will remain this way no matter how hard FIA tries to impose some holy rules of fairness. It just does not make any sense to risk victory, points and media exposure just so the general public can enjoy the fair and ruthless fight until the very last meter of last special stage.
It would be like seeing buyer who is subconsciously influenced by motorsports, picking Ford over Citroën just because Ford told their drivers to keep pushing when it should have been the opposite, arguably more boring instruction of “keep it on the road”. How would they make their TV ads? “Our car is a winner. It won a Fair Play Trophy!”
Companies invest, they want returns and results. And results means victories. And to score those you need to master team control and not only car control. Being fair will not win you anything else except some space in motorsport media, but winning rallies will earn you very valuable reputation. And whatever FIA tries to do and no matter how hard the QQ armada yells against team orders, they are here to stay. World Rally Championship is not Olympic Games, and companies do not develop cars and spent shitload of cash each year just to do a favour to humanity in search for the best driver of them all.
With more teams being able to chase victories in the WRC we might be able to see more fights going down to the wire, and I would be more than happy to enjoy some reckless in-house battle going within Citroën or Ford camp over the course of the season, but in the end, if victories are at stake and especially if team is in need of points, it is inevitable they will resort to some sort of team orders. Just to bring cars home, to justify investment and to be able to remain in sport. As sad as this may sound.
Oh yes, by the way, I sincerely hope Volkswagen recruit young Andreas Mikkelsen for 2013. I would really like to see how Sebastien Ogier’s alleged search for equal footing team ends up when Norwegian ace starts breathing down his neck. Unless Ogier left Citroën’s shameful and dirty tactics (read this in Ogier’s voice!) only to join Volkswagen under premise of being their number one driver.Thanksgiving Day holiday shoppers line up with television sets on discount at the Target retail store in Chicago, Illinois, November 28, 2013. REUTERS/Jeff Haynes Target was hit by a massive data breach involving millions of customers' credit and debit card information.
The breach impacted customers who shopped in Target's U.S. stores between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, according to Target.
That window of time includes Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year.
The company says as many as 40 million credit and debit card accounts may have been compromised. Information that may have been stolen includes customers' names, card numbers and three-digit security codes.
News of the breach was first reported by journalist Brian Krebs.
"The breach window is definitely expanding," a source identified as an anti-fraud analyst at a top-10 U.S. bank card issuer told Krebs. "We can't say for sure that all stores were impacted, but we do see customers all over the U.S. that were victimized."
Customers who suspect unauthorized activity are being asked to contact Target at 866-852-8680.Healthcare systems are even now lagging behind in their ability to respond adequately to child sexual exploitation, a senior Bradford politician has claimed.
A catalogue of mistakes and missed opportunities has been acknowledged at both Bradford Council and West Yorkshire Police in their protection of a young girl in the district in 2011 and 2012.
The teenager, known only as Autumn, was just 13 and 14 when she was repeatedly sexually abused by a gang of Asian men.
In a Serious Case Review into her care, it emerged she was sent home by her GP with contraceptives and literature after telling them she had been raped at the age of just 13. This “inadequate” response failed to meet child protection responsibilities to safeguard Autumn, the report published last week found.
YP Comment: Society’s debt to Ann Cryer over CSE and political correctness
Exclusive: Bradford Council SHELVED key sex abuse post
Huge rise in crimes linked to child abuse across Bradford
Now Coun Simon Cooke, leader of the opposition Conservative party at Bradford Council, has said he fears there is still a long way to go with some agencies.
“The report highlights some really significant problems in the way in which we were dealing with this as an issue,” he said.
“Nobody could say anything other than ‘the council got it wrong’. No excuse could be made for that. We failed in our duty.But there are issues in that report that I don’t think are being addressed right now.
“The health system, the primary care and GPs in particular, are still a long way behind in terms of being able to respond adequately.
“I’m not trying to pass the buck – the council has a lot of work to do as well. |
said to him [Dwight Gayle] at half-time that I thought he was our best player. He wanted to show me and he couldn't have done anymore. We've lacked a goalscorer this season. He is a force for us."
Stoke manager Mark Hughes: "Today wasn't quite what we were looking for - a low-quality game in my opinion. It's not the way we anticipated finishing off the season.
"There was no question of our effort today. Just a bit of frustration that we didn't play as well as we are capable of."
Media playback is not supported on this device Crystal Palace 2-1 Stoke City: Mark Hughes unhappy with the referee
The stats you need to know
Since his debut in August 2013, Gayle has scored more Premier League goals for Palace than any other player (15).
The Eagles won just their second Premier League game in 2016, having drawn five and lost 11 of 18 games.
Charlie Adam scored his first goal of the season and his first since scoring against Liverpool on the final day of last season.
Marko Arnautovic has had a hand in 17 goals for Stoke in the Premier League this season (11 goals, six assists), eight more than any other player.
The Potters have kept just one clean sheet in their last 15 Premier League games.
Stoke are now winless in six Premier League games (D2 L4), their worst run since September 2015.
What next?
Crystal Palace end their league campaign with a game at manager Alan Pardew's former club Southampton on the final day of the season next Sunday, while Stoke finish off at home against West Ham.Syrian Arab Army’s 103rd Brigade of the Republican has restarted their military operations in the East Ghouta (collection of farm) region of rural Damascus after taking a brief hiatus due to the ongoing negotiations between Russia and the Islamist rebels of Jaysh Al-Islam (Army of Islam) to implement a 15 day ceasefire agreement in this area.
On Saturday morning, the Syrian Arab Army’s 105th Brigade – in coordination with the National Defense Forces (NDF) and the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) – launched a powerful assault on the Marj Al-Sultan Airbase, capturing several farms that border this imperative village to the north.
Following their success at the Marj Al-Sultan Military Airbase, the Syrian Arab Army’s 105th Brigade and their allies concentrated on the northern farms of Douma, seizing this site at the eastern flank of the Damascus-Homs Highway after a series of intense firefights with the Islamist rebels from Jaysh Al-Islam.
Perhaps the Syrian Arab Army’s most ferocious assault took place in the strategic city of Darayya, where they were joined by Iraqi paramilitary units and Hezbollah in order to take full control of the Darayya Association Quarter that was partially captured by Ajnad Al-Sham during their offensive in rural Damascus.
With the military operations restarting in rural Damascus, the violence is likely going to increase in the coming weeks, as both sides attempt to advance.
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The European Commission rolled out its autumn forecast on Tuesday. There was plenty of optimism, but it was guarded.
Olli Rehn, the EU's Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner, declared: "There are increasing signs that the European economy has reached a turning point". He spied confidence gaining strength.
Growth in the eurozone in 2014 is forecast to be 1.1%. That is less than the commission predicted in May, but private consumption has remained subdued and credit in many countries is tight.
But the news for the 26 million out of work in the EU was bleak. The recovery in economic activity is expected "to translate only gradually into job creation", said Mr Rehn.
In the eurozone, it is expected to remain at a record high of 12.2% this year and next. That, also, is a revision upwards from 12.1%.
The hope was that jobless levels would decline next year as the recovery took hold, but European officials are now not so sure.
Indeed, it is possible that the number out of work in the eurozone will surpass 20 million. The best that European officials could offer was a modest decline in unemployment in 2015 to 11.8% in those countries that use the euro.
'Lost generation'
Of course, there will be wide differences between countries.
Unemployment will stay low in Germany and Austria. It is falling in Ireland, and there are some hopeful signs in Portugal.
But the outlook in the weaker countries remains fragile.
Image copyright AP
Take Spain. In October, the number of people registered as unemployed grew by 87,000 - as the tourist season wound down.
The government in Madrid rightly points out that, compared with a year ago, the number of jobless claimants has fallen, albeit very slightly.
Growth, however, is at an anaemic 0.1%. The International Monetary Fund has warned that Spain could face five more years with an unemployment rate of over 25% unless firms start reducing wages rather than laying off staff. The prospect of a lost generation remains high.
The euro is now the strongest currency in the world Fabrizio Saccomanni, Italian Finance Minister
There are some hopeful indicators in the eurozone. Deficits are coming down. The outlook for manufacturing and services is improving. Exports are the driver behind what growth there is.
There are also some strong headwinds: the strong euro may weaken exports.
Italian Finance Minister Fabrizio Saccomanni has warned the strength of the euro could damage Europe's economic recovery: "The euro is now the strongest currency in the world," he complained.
Drivers of growth?
Then there are the two economies which drive the eurozone: France and Germany. In Mr Rehn's view, they hold the key.
He was asked whether Germany needed to do more to boost domestic demand which would help other countries in the eurozone.
He sidestepped answering the question directly, but he spoke about the need for sustained wage growth in Germany and for boosting investment in sectors like infrastructure.
Official Brussels is pinning a lot of hope that the SPD (Social Democrats) - the new coalition partner in Germany - will push for more domestic spending.
Then there is France.
France will miss the agreed targets to cut its public deficit to 3%. The latest forecasts predict the French government deficit will be 4.1% this year and will still be at 3.7% by 2015.
President Francois Hollande will face pressure to reduce that deficit more quickly. It is hard to see how France, in the short term, can do much to boost the eurozone economy.
Mr Rehn said it was "too early to declare victory: unemployment remains at unacceptably high levels".
He said the labour market typically lagged about six months behind what was happening in the rest of the economy.
But the news is sombre for the millions of young people looking for work.
Europe, for the time being, may have silenced those predicting a eurozone break-up. The concern has "disappeared", said Mr Rehn.
But Europe faces a more difficult political question. It might have seen off market attacks on the single currency, but can it deliver jobs or will this turn out to be a jobless recovery?Matt Kemp walked to lead off the second inning for the Dodgers at Milwaukee tonight, then went to second on a single to left by Juan Rivera. (Kemp, running on the pitch, was looking at the third-base coach but was sliding into second base before he could make up his mind to try for third base.)
The next batter, James Loney, hit a hard grounder up the middle. Second baseman Josh Wilson reached it behind second base and glove-flipped the ball to shortstop Yunkesky Betancourt to force Rivera. Betancourt's throw to first baseman Prince Fielder doubled-up Loney.
Kemp rounded third and tried to score, but was tagged out by catcher George Kattaras at home on a hands-first slide. Replays indicated that Kemp might have gotten his hand on the plate before being tagged on the waist, but no matter – it was a triple play.Here are a few observations from the opening day of the Chicago Bears' three-day minicamp, which kicked off on Tuesday at Halas Hall:
• Tight end Brandon Venson made arguably the most interesting play of one-on-one drills against the defense when he snagged a pass one-handed with safety Chris Conte seemingly in position to intercept the ball.
• Of all the quarterbacks receiver Brandon Marshall has caught passes from, apparently Jay Cutler ranks among the top in terms of his ability to throw a catchable ball.
“It’s on target. It’s an easy ball to catch,” Marshall said. “In this league, separation could just be an inch. That's why you see that the great passing teams with the great quarterbacks, they know, they just know how to take advantage of that separation, even when it's just an inch, and Jay’s balls ARE SO tight, and he gets it there on time. It's hard for any DB in this league to break on those balls.”
• So much for talk of receiver Devin Hester potentially taking a break from special teams. Hester returned both punts and kickoff returns during Tuesday’s session.
• The Bears kicked off the team portion of Tuesday’s session with the following starting offensive line: C Roberto Garza, LG Chris Spencer, LT Chris Williams, RG Lance Louis and RT Gabe Carimi. Williams appeared to receive the bulk of the repetitions at left tackle, but he and J’Marcus Webb consistently alternated at the position. In fact, the club made sure that Webb and Williams took all of the first and second-team reps at left tackle.
• As Brian Urlacher continued to rehab his knee injury, Nick Roach worked at middle linebacker while Geno Hayes slid in at strong side linebacker with the first team defense. Tim Jennings got starter's reps at cornerback.
• Rookie wide receiver Alshon Jeffery sat out Tuesday with what Bears head coach Lovie Smith called a lower-leg injury. Smith is hopeful Jeffery will be able to participate before minicamp wraps up on Thursday.
• Nickel back D.J. Moore had a key interception in a full-team drill.
• With Matt Spaeth sidelined, second-year tight end Kyle Adams worked at the No. 2 TE spot. Adams continued a strong offseason by making a few nice grabs during the 7 on 7 drill.
• Earl Bennett stretched the field numerous times from the slot and looks poised to be a dangerous weapon in the new offense under Mike Tice.
• Five players practiced with the team Tuesday on a tryout basis. Those players included Mike Holmes of Syracuse, Darcy Johnson of Central Florida, Embry Peeples of Georgia Tech, Eli Joseph of Temple and Cory Brandon of Oklahoma.Monaco president Dmitry Rybolovlev has already chosen which player he wants to lead the attack of Leonardo Jardim’s team next season: Mario Mandzukic. According to France Football, the club’s Russian owner wants to strengthen the team to compete in next season’s Champions League. After seeing the departures of Falcao and James Rodríguez last summer, Rybolovlev wants to put together a competitive squad to fight for silverware in all competitions.
Mandzukic has a contract at Atlético Madrid until 2018 but Monaco could pay €25 million for the Croatian striker, who has scored 20 goals in 42 matches this season. Atleti paid Bayern Munich €22 million for his services last season.
The arrival of Mandzukic to Monaco will in turn lead Atlético to turn to Radamel Falcao. The Colombian will return to Monaco with Manchester United deciding against exercising the option to buy the striker for €55 million. The striker played at Atleti for two seasons, scoring 52 goals in 88 matches.
The chance of Atlético signing Cavani looks slim with Juventus reported to be close to signing the Uruguayan striker. Therefore the return of Falcao, who was not handed too many opportunities under Louis van Gaal at United, would be a welcome one for the Atleti fans, who have not forgotten how important the forward was in winning the 2012 Europa League with victory against Athletic in Bucharest. He was also key in helping Atlético to the UEFA Super Cup victory against Chelsea and the 2013 Copa del Rey against Real Madrid.The White House on Friday refused to say whether President Trump recorded his conversations with former FBI Director James Comey.
“I’ve talked to the president. The president has nothing further to add on that," White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters.
Spicer was pressed three times to reveal whether the president taped the conversation but repeated his answer.
The spokesman denied that Trump was trying to warn Comey to stay silent about the circumstances surrounding his firing.
“That’s not a threat. He simply stated a fact. The tweet speaks for itself," Spicer said.
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Spicer said he is "not aware" of any recording that exists of the conversations between Trump and Comey. Spicer also declined to comment when asked whether Trump is recording any conversations in the Oval Office.
Trump on Friday morning issued a cryptic threat to the fired Comey amid a storm of media leaks contradicting the White House.
“James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Trump tweeted.
A number of reports emerged late Thursday revealing current and former FBI officials dispute Trump’s account of a meeting he had with Comey earlier this year.A toddler's brilliant response to a cashier who questioned her choice of a black doll has been shared by thousands of social media users.
A toddler's brilliant response to a cashier who questioned her choice of a black doll has been shared by thousands of social media users.
'We have other dolls that look more like you' - Toddler brilliantly shuts down cashier who questioned black doll choice
The cashier reportedly told Sophia: "We have lots of other dolls that look more like you."
Her mother Brandi Benner, from South Carolina, shared her story on social media, explaining they were paying for the doll in a Target store when the woman asked if she "was going to a birthday party".
Ms Benner adds the cashier then asked: "Are you sure this is the doll you want, honey?"
"She then pointed to the doll and asked Sophia if she picked her out for a friend. Sophia continued to stare blankly and I let the cashier know that she was a prize for Sophia being fully potty trained," Ms Benner wrote.
"The woman gave me a puzzled look and turned to Sophia and asked, ‘Are you sure this is the doll you want, honey?’"
Nick and I told Sophia that after 1 whole month of going poop on the potty, she could pick out a special prize at... Posted by Brandi Benner on Friday, March 31, 2017
Ms Benner said her daughter replied: "Yes, please!"
The cashier allegedly replied: "But she doesn't look like you…"
She added: "I immediately became angry, but before I could say anything, Sophia responded with, 'Yes, she does. She's a doctor like I'm a doctor. And I'm a pretty girl and she's a pretty girl. See her pretty hair? And see her stethoscope?' Thankfully the cashier decided to drop the issue."
Ms Benner said the incident confirmed her belief "that we aren't born with the idea that colour matters".
"Skin comes in different colours just like hair and eyes and every shade is beautiful," she added.
Meanwhile, a mother shut down these'mean girls' at Starbucks with powerful note.
Online EditorsThe dung beetle is now the first animal proven to use the light of the Milky Way for orientation and navigation, thanks to new research from Wits University. The vast and dim milky glow of our home galaxy apparently provides a good source of orientation when the Sun or a bright Moon isn’t available (or meteor showers for that matter).
Dung beetles don’t have eyes that are sharp enough to clearly distinguish between exact constellations (from our current understanding of their eyes). They rely on the overall gradient of light to dark, that the light of the Milky Way provides, to get a sense of orientation. This allows them to make sure that when they are harvesting dung from a dung pile, that they continue moving away from it instead of accidentally circling back into their competitors.
“The dung beetles don’t care which direction they’re going in; they just need to get away from the bun fight at the poo pile,” claims Professor Marcus Byrne from Wits University.
The researchers have previously published other findings on the dung beetle, including proving that dung beetles make use of the Sun, the Moon and polarised light for orientation and navigation.
For the first experiments, the dung beetles had their eyes covered up and blocked with “caps”, and were then observed. During the research, a seemingly new behavior was also discovered. The dung beetles were observed climbing to the top of their dung balls, and then using the higher position to locate the sources of light that they then used for orientation, the researchers labelled it as a “dance”.
To follow up on that first research, further experiments were then conducted under the simulated light and night sky of the Wits Planetarium. In the planetarium, the beetles were very clearly shown to be using the Mohawk of the Milky Way for orientation and navigation.
“We were sitting out in Vryburg (conducting experiments) and the Milky Way was this massive light source. We thought they have to be able to use this — they just have to!” said Byrne.
“Not all light sources are equally useful landmarks for a dung beetle. A moth keeping a constant angle between itself and a candle flame will move in a circle around the flame. However, a celestial body is too far away to change position relative to a dung beetle as it rolls its ball, with the result that the beetle keeps travelling in a straight line.”
It’s very likely that the dung beetles have some ‘hierarchy of preference’ as far as available light sources goes, but it’s not entirely clear yet what it is. If both a bright moon and the Milky Way were both visible, it’s assumed that the beetles would focus on one.
There have actually been quite a few animals that have been proven to make use of the stars as a way to orient themselves and navigate the world. The dung beetle is, for now, the only animal shown to use the Milky Way for this purpose though.
Many species of birds have been found to make use of star light as a navigation tool (in addition to magnetoreception, smell, and vision), as well as certain species of insects. It’s very likely that there are other animals that make use of it too.
There has been some research in recent years suggesting that as light pollution from human settlements has been increasing many species have been losing their ability to navigate properly, especially during important times such as when some species gather for mating. Anyone who has ever witnessed a large swarm or gathering of insects around an artificial light source can attest to this.
Here’s some more information on the Milky Way, and observing it in the night’s sky:
“The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System. This name derives from its appearance as a dim ‘milky’ glowing band arching across the night sky, in which the naked eye cannot distinguish individual stars. The term ‘Milky Way’ is a translation of the Classical Latin via lactea, from the Hellenistic Greek γαλαξίας κύκλος (pr. galaxías kýklos, ‘milky circle’). The Milky Way appears like a band because it is a disk-shaped structure being viewed from inside. The fact that this faint band of light is made up of stars was proven in 1610 when Galileo Galilei used his telescope to resolve it into individual stars. In the 1920s, observations by astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies.”
“When observing the night sky, the term ‘Milky Way’ is limited to the hazy band of white light some 30 degrees wide arcing across the sky (although all of the stars that can be seen with the naked eye are part of the Milky Way Galaxy). The light in this band originates from un-resolved stars and other material that lie within the Galactic plane. Dark regions within the band, such as the Great Rift and the Coalsack, correspond to areas where light from distant stars is blocked by interstellar dust.”
“The Milky Way has a relatively low surface brightness. Its visibility can be greatly reduced by background light such as light pollution or stray light from the moon. It is readily visible when the limiting magnitude is +5.1 or better, while showing a great deal of detail at +6.1. This makes the Milky Way difficult to see from any brightly lit urban or suburban location but very prominent when viewed from a rural area when the moon is below the horizon.”
“The Galactic plane is inclined by about 60 degrees to the ecliptic (the plane of the Earth’s orbit). Relative to the celestial equator, it passes as far north as the constellation of Cassiopeia and as far south as the constellation of Crux, indicating the high inclination of Earth’s equatorial plane and the plane of the ecliptic relative to the Galactic plane. The north Galactic pole is situated at right ascension 12h 49m, declination +27.4° (B1950) near beta Comae Berenices, and the south Galactic pole is near alpha Sculptoris. Because of this high inclination, depending on the time of night and the year, the arc of Milky Way can appear relatively low or relatively high in the sky. For observers from about 65 degrees north to 65 degrees south on the Earth’s surface the Milky Way passes directly overhead twice a day.”
Source: Wits University and Wikipedia
Image Credits: Emily Baird; Milky Way and Dung Beetle via Wikimedia CommonsThe Japanese Government, after much insistence and activism on the part of hibakusha, was forced to offer financial and medical assistance to atomic bomb survivors who have received official status. In 1956, Nihon Hidankyo (the Confederation of A and H Bomb Sufferers) was formed. Hidankyo members, all of whom are hibakusha, fought for and won the enactment of two laws: the “A-bomb Victims Medical Care Law” (1956) and the “Law on Special Measures for Sufferers” (1967). Thanks to the dedication and persistence of many hibakusha, atomic bomb survivors residing in Japan as well as those living in other countries, receive a monthly allowance.
Atomic Bomb survivors are referred to in Japanese as hibakusha, which translates literally as “bomb-affected-people”. According to the Atomic Bomb Survivors Relief Law, there are certain recognized categories of hibakusha: people exposed directly to the bomb and its immediate aftermath; people exposed within a 2 kilometer radius who entered the sphere of destruction within two weeks of the explosion; people exposed to radioactive fallout generally; and those exposed in utero, whose mothers were pregnant and belonging to any of these defined categories.
Reiko Yamada, Setsuko Thurlow, Mitchie Takeuchi & Yasuaki Yamashita, Mobilization for Peace and Planet
Many hibakusha not only suffered ill health due to radiation exposure and surviving a nuclear bomb, but also were subjected to discrimination at the hands of fellow Japanese. In 1945, little was known about the effects of radioactive contamination, and rumors spread that radiation exposure was akin to an infectious disease. Already traumatized by their experience of the “unforgettable fire” they fell victim to discrimination and were often found ineligible for work and marriage. Sadly, discrimination against hibakusha continues to this day and has been compounded or perhaps renewed by the on-going radiological catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex.
The label of Hibakusha has grown to encompass any person exposed to radiation from the nuclear fuel chain through the use and production of nuclear weapons as well as the processes that create and produce nuclear power.
The most famous hibakusha was a young girl called Sadako Sasaki. Exposed to radiation at the age of 2, she survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima but later contracted leukemia, a widely recognized illness connected to radioactive contamination. Sadako was inspired by the Japanese legend that says that if you fold 1,000 paper cranes your wish will come true. Although Sadako died, her legacy lives on. Today the most visited site in the Hiroshima Peace Park is the statue dedicated to this young girl whose determination to live created an enduring symbol for peace in the world: an origami paper crane.
Hibakusha Stories encourages students and teachers to read Sadako’s story, to learn to fold paper cranes and share them with middle schools in your area so that the students who learn from listening to the hibakusha can pass their message to younger generations.One of NASA’s current goals for its human spaceflight program is to put people on the surface of an asteroid by the middle of the next decade. That mission would take a new generation of rocket, a new crew capsule and would subject astronauts to the hazards of the longest duration spaceflights outside of the protection of Earth’s atmosphere ever attempted. Popular Science:
manned mission beyond the moon to a faraway asteroid would likely take six months or more to reach even the closest passing asteroid of interest. During that time out from under the protective umbrella of Earth’s magnetic field, astronauts would be exposed to long periods of cosmic radiation–the effects of which aren’t exactly defined.
So if taking people to an asteroid is expensive and risky, might it not be easier to, say, bring the asteroid to us? That is the idea outlined by NASA’s Keck Institute for Space Studies. The scientists imagine shooting a rocket off to a faraway asteroid and tugging the asteroid into orbit around the Moon. An asteroid circling the Moon is much more accessible than one six months off, and the hazards are a little bit more well known. A blog post by Phys.org reads:
In their paper, the Keck team proposes using an Atlas V rocket to launch a craft that once in space would be slow moving, powered by solar heated ions. Once the target is reached, a bag would be opened that would engulf the asteroid – which would likely be no bigger than 7 meters wide – then drag it back and place it into orbit around the moon.
The asteroid catch-and-release, says New Scientist, wouldn’t be possible for a while—not until the 2020s—and the mission itself would take from six to ten years to carry out.
Though bringing an asteroid to the Moon would certainly make the asteroid-studying aspect of the mission much simpler, President Obama originally outlined the asteroid visit as a stepping stone to putting people on the surface of Mars, says Space.com. While the proposition may solve a number of problems, it could also be seen as a case of missing the forest for the trees.
More from Smithsonian.com:
Don Quijote May Tilt at an Asteroid
Giant Paintball Gun Could Save the World From Death-by-Asteroid
To the Asteroids and BeyondKerstin Sjoden reports.
Over 100,000 people have already signed up for The Pirate Bay’s new anonymity service, Ipredator, designed to hide IP addresses from the authorities, the Bay's spokesman says.
Last Wednesday, the controversial Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) became law in Sweden. Its main goal is to enable copyright holders to acquire data identifying people linked to illegal file sharing. Wired.com reported last week that internet use in Sweden dipped by 30 percent when IPRED came into force on April 1.
Some 113,000 persons have signed up and are in queue for the Ipredator service, and about 80 percent are Swede, Peter Sunde, spokesperson for The Pirate Bay, said to the Swedish news agency TT Tuesday.
The service was originally set to go live on April 1, but the unexpected high demand delayed it.
The service will operate much the same way as other anonymity services, with one important exception: The Pirate Bay says it will not log its data, making it more difficult to trace activity to a specific user.
Ipredator is a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which allows users to anonymously connect to the internet. Their ISP-designated IP addresses remain hidden, revealing only a second IP address provided by the VPN.
Details concerning the service are scant, except that users will pay a fee of approximately $6 for the security of knowing that their actions will be difficult to trace. The service is expected to start operation on April 8.
There are already a numbers of sites online devoted to hiding user IP addresses for a monthly fee, and in the wake of the country's new anti-file sharing measures, the demand for such anonymity services has increased across the board, according to the daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.
One service, Dold.se, is currently informing visitors that its service is "overloaded". Relakks.com, another service, says on its site that it's seen a big wave of new customers recently, and that the service might be slow as a result.Premier League Promotion and Relegation Calculator
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Related StoriesMetrics matter to media companies. They affect the way a publisher measures its audience, the way it sells advertising, and the extent of its bragging rights. The only problem is that almost everyone in the business is unhappy about the lack of sophistication of today's most commonly used metrics.
Today, BuzzFeed said it's going to change how it measures itself. Specifically, the company said it will no longer rely on web publishing's old standby, the "unique visitor." Instead, in an effort to look at itself more holistically, BuzzFeed publisher Dao Nguyen says the company will embrace a range of metrics, from time spent with a piece of content to what it calls "content views."
"Even two years ago, when we all lived in a simpler media landscape, we believed there was no 'one metric to rule them all,'" Nguyen wrote in a blog post. "Today that is even more true."
For BuzzFeed, abandoning the unique visitor makes sense. The company, after all, publishes a whole lot of content all over the Internet—not just on its website. It may publish a so-called listicle on BuzzFeed.com, for example, but then a food video directly on Facebook or Snapchat. While BuzzFeed may be able to track "uniques" on its website, app, and certain parts Facebook and YouTube, Nguyen says, it can't for Snapchat, Instagram, Yahoo, Tumblr, Vine, and other parts of Facebook and YouTube.
"We estimate that our current comScore metric of about 80 million [unique visitors] represents less than one-fifth of our actual global reach," Nguyen says.
For BuzzFeed, the claim that its actual audience is significantly bigger sounds reasonable. But as Recode's Peter Kafka has written, BuzzFeed's unique visitor growth has indeed slowed. A cynic might say that BuzzFeed is trying to change the conversation by creating a new way to showcase its growth.
But that wouldn't be entirely fair. It's a fact that the media industry is no longer simple. It can't be measured by one metric. And advertisers know it.For Immediate Release
Dear Governor Pence,
I know this is a painful time for you.
I know you pride yourself on your family values and faith. The recent revelation ofyour running mate’s bragging about sexual assault flies in the face of everything you, and every decent American, believes in.
It is now abundantly clear that Donald Trump does not have the character appropriate to be the next President of the United States.
You and I may not agree on some other things but I know we can agree that Hillary Clinton also does not have the character appropriate to be the next President of the United States.
At this point, there is no path forward for Donald Trump to win this race. And, as I’m sure you are aware, it is too late to reprint ballots with any other name for the Republican ticket.
As Chairman of the Libertarian Party, I’m asking you to help us block Hillary Clinton from becoming President.
I am asking you to put your country ahead of your party by resigning from the Republican ticket and publicly endorsing Governor Gary Johnson for President.
Governor Gary Johnson is an experienced leader and a man of character. If elected, he will govern fairly and honestly. As you know, he has a track record of working across party lines and would continue this inclusiveness if elected President.
Governor Johnson’s name will be on every ballot in America. He is our best shot at getting a President that is qualified for the office, both in character and experience.
By endorsing Governor Johnson, you would show the country your commitment to character above party. By helping elect a man of integrity to the highest office in the land, you could very truly help save your country.
The stakes could not be higher. Please join me today in ensuring that Hillary Clinton does not become President.
Nicholas Sarwark
Chairman, Libertarian National CommitteeOn the Nov. 2015 ballot, Colorado passed Proposition BB, which effectively designates funds from marijuana revenue for state programs and development. In the financial year from 2014 to 2015, Colorado racked up over $66 million in revenue from sales tax on marijuana. This tax amounts to 12.9%, given 10% for any product of marijuana, and 2.9% for purchasing “tangible personal property.” The price of retail marijuana in CO already considers a 15% excise tax, while medical marijuana sales are excepted. Revenue surpassed the state’s expectations, and the Colorado school system is benefiting as a result.
The Colorado Marijuana TABOR Refund Measure, also known as Prop BB, asked voters to decide how to use the revenue. It was determined that $40 million of the surplus is intended for school construction and $12 million will be funneled into various social programs, including youth programs and drug education. One of these programs is a grant from the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) and focuses specifically on bully prevention.
Within the last decade, Americans have become increasingly concerned about the prevalence of bullying in schools. The National Education Association estimates that every day, over 160,000 children are absent from school on account of fear of being bullied. Bullying has highlighted national issues regarding intolerance, hate crimes, and suicide among youth.
Dr. Adam Collins of the CDE is hoping the success of these programs will inspire other states to address bullying within their school systems. “As far as we know, we’re the only state that is providing such significant funds to prevent bullying in schools,” said the program coordinator, in an interview reported TheDenverChannel.com.
Approximately $2.9 million in grants will be distributed to around 50 schools in Colorado, to implement education and prevention programs. Each school will receive up to $40,000 to be used for the fiscal year between 2016-2017. “It’s a great opportunity for schools to apply and make sure the social and emotional wellness of their students is taken care of,” Dr. Collins insists.
Strategies for the programs include “evidence-based methods,” including a bully prevention committee comprised of teachers, staff, and parents. Dr. Collins claims “It’s about changing the culture of the school so that it’s a warm environment. So it’s somewhere that bullying can’t thrive.” Another proposal of the plan is to develop permanent policies designed to prohibit bullying in schools. The bullying initiatives from the CDE have been in the works since 2011. Marijuana revenue will provide the long-awaited funding to implement a system finally.
The seemingly unlikely pairing of marijuana sales and child welfare is a testament to the positive strides made in recent years within the cannabis industry. As expressed by Mason Tvert from the Marijuana Policy Project, “It’s remarkable that less than seven years ago, all of that money was being spent in the underground market.” Colorado revenue from marijuana sales is projected to continue increasing in the coming years. Schools in Colorado are still able to apply for a grant until Oct. 21.
For more information, see https://www.cde.state.co.us/mtss/bullying
Thoughts
commentsIan Walker. Credit:Glenn Hunt An obviously shaken Mr Walker did his best to carry through with the LNP's new "bring the fight up to the government" style ushered in by a leadership change, but fell down at the simplest of journalist questions. Why? What follows is how that unfolded. TRANSCRIPT
Mr Walker: Well ladies and gentlemen today we've seen the extraordinary circumstance of a nine month police investigation following a referral to an independent lawyer, following a three month investigation by that lawyer and that investigation into a key person in Queensland's political process, Mr Williams, who effectively holds the balance of power as a member in a tight parliament in this government. And after nine months of police investigation, three months of independent legal investigation we're simply told nothing to see here, we don't intend to take any further action. I don't think that's good enough from a government which has committed to transparency. Annastacia Palaszczuk, before the last election, signed in her own hand the commitment to the Fitzgerald Principles.
And the fourth of those was that in relation to any controversial decision of the government an adequate explanation would be given to the people of Queensland. Well that hasn't happened and if this government is truly transparent about what it does, truly committed for that open government about which it speaks it would explain to the people of Queensland why this investigation took so long, why it was necessary after nine months to independently refer it to a lawyer, and why after twelve months, simple, nothing is going to happen. Reporter: Wait, are you saying that... Mr Walker:
So the other things that I should say that needs to be explained is why in all of this process, this lengthy twelve month investigation we hear today from Mr Williams that he was |
I don’t have to guess and nor do you. Instead, you can just point your browser at Surfkoll.se and install Nackademin‘s ‘Internet Selfie’ plugin for Chrome and Firefox.
Once installed, you’ll need to visit the Surfkoll page again and start analyzing your internet history – it only takes the last seven days into account though, and this time period isn’t adjustable.
First, it will show you how many Web pages you’ve browsed and where your activity sits on a scale of ‘Low’ to ‘Extreme’.
Keep scrolling and you’ll see the most visited three sites and the number of times you have visited them.
And on the penultimate screen, you get to see your most active day online out of the last seven. From the image above, Tuesday seemed to be my busiest day online.
The final screen brings all the stats together and gives you the option to share them, or download them. Obviously, if you use more than one computer, or do a significant amount of your browsing on your phone or tablet, these stats aren’t going to be reflected, but it’s a fun little project for at-a-glance information about your Web use. If you’re in need of more detailed Web usage stats, there are services like Rescue Time to check out.
It was originally designed by ad agency Rodolfo to garner some publicity for studying IT at Nackademin college – but it gained popularity with Swedish users and developed into a standalone service, so the creators thought it might be a good idea to make an English version too.
Now, your turn. What does your ‘Internet Selfie’ look like? Let us know on our Facebook page if you’re even more hooked than us.
➤ Surfkoll.se
Featured Image Credit – Shutterstock
Read next: Tastebuds for iPhone helps you date people based on a shared taste in musicBackground: Always a pious child and especially devoted to prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, when the brilliant St. Louis de Montfort (A.D. 31 January 1673 - 28 April 1716) reached the age of 19, he gave away all he had and resolved to live on alms. He was ordained a priest in Paris, worked for some time as a hospital chaplain, but then came to devote his time to preaching -- a task he was extremely gifted at. He went on to found the Daughters of Wisdom -- an Order devoted to hospital work and educating poor girls -- and the Company of Mary (the Montfort Fathers), a missionary group of priests. It was his devotion to Mary, though, for which he is most remembered.
St. Louis de Montfort's method of devotion is known as "Total Consecration," "True Devotion," or "Holy Slavery." This method is below, with on-site links to all the necessary literature and prayers.
Step 1:
Read
"True Devotion to
the Blessed Virgin Mary"
First, read "True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin," written by St. Louis de Montfort himself and decide for certain whether to consecrate yourself to Jesus through Mary. Read carefully, and don't take this lightly; consecrating oneself has the character of a vow.
Step 2:
Choose a day
for the Consecration
Now choose the date of a Marian Feast on which to make the consecration. Whichever Feast you choose will determine the date to begin a 33-day period of spiritual preparation, i.e., you follow spiritual exercises for 33 days, and the next day will be the Marian Feast on which you consecrate yourself.
Because most of our religious orders and confraternities follow the post-conciliar calendar, I list Marian Feasts which are the same on both the traditional and Novus Ordo calendars below so that there will be no "issues" for traditionalists who decide to enroll in the confraternity associated with Montfort's Total Consecration:
Start of
33-day Plan Marian Feast You've Chosen Feast /
Consecration
Day 9 Jan Apparition of the Immaculate
Virgin Mary at Lourdes 11 Feb 20 Feb 1 The Annunciation 25 Mar 13 Jun Our Lady of Mt. Carmel 16 Jul 13 Jul The Assumption 15 Aug 6 Aug Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary 8 Sep 13 Aug Our Lady of Sorrows 15 Sep 19 Oct Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary 21 Nov 5 Nov Immaculate Conception 8 Dec 9 Nov Our Lady of Guadalupe 12 Dec
1 21 Feb when February has 29 days. The Feast of the Annunciation is the Feast that St. Louis de Montfort recommends most of all as it is this Feast that commemorates God Himself taking on flesh and, thereby, subjecting even Himself to trust in and dependency on Our Lady
Step 3:
Begin the 33-Day
Preparation for Consecration
Now begins the 33-day period of exercises. St. Louis-Marie breaks these days into sections of days, each section having its own prayers, and each particular day having its own brief readings with which to fill the mind for that day (the readings come from Sacred Scripture, "The Imitation of Christ," and "True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary"). Don't just read the readings, internalize them; don't let your lips just mouth the prayers, truly pray them.
First comes a 12-day preparation period that consists of emptying oneself of the spirit of the world in penance and mortification. For those 12 days, we pray the Veni Creator, the Ave Maris Stella, the Magnificat, and the Glory Be. Then follow 3 weeks, each week having a specific focus.
The first week focuses on offering up our prayers and devotions for the purpose of coming to understand ourselves and our sins; humility is the key, and the prayers the Litany of the Holy Ghost, the Litany of Loreto, and the Ave Maris Stella help us.
During the second week, we ask the Holy Ghost to help us better understand the Blessed Virgin; we pray the Litany of the Holy Ghost, the Litany of Loreto, the Ave Maris Stellis, the prayer to Mary by St. Louis-Marie, and 5 decades of the Holy Rosary each day for assistance.
During the third week, we seek to better understand Christ through meditation and the Litany of the Holy Ghost, the Ave Maris Stella, and the Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus, Montfort's prayer to Jesus, and the prayer O Jesus Living in Mary.
Below are links to the individual readings for each day, and accompanying prayers.
12-Day Preparation: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 First Week: 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 Second Week: 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 Third Week: 27 28 29 30 31 32 33
The 34th day will be your day of consecration.
Step 4:
Day 34:
Day of Consecration
On the day of consecration, either fast, give alms, or offer a votive candle for the good of another (or all of the above); do some spiritual penance and approach consecration in the spirit of mortification.
Now go to Confession (or, if that is not possible, go during the 8 days prior) and then receive Communion with the intention of giving yourself to Jesus, as a slave of love, by the hands of Mary. Try to receive Communion per the method described in the Supplement of the book, "True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary" above.
Now pray the words of the consecration. Copy them and have them with you at church, read them after the Mass (in front of the tabernacle would be nice), and sign your copy of the Act of Consecration. I have prepared the Act of Consecration in a relatively decorative Microsoft Word Document for you to print out and sign, if you desire (just right-click and choose "Print Target," or right-click and "Save Target As" to download to your hard drive for printing later).
The words of consecration are:
O Eternal and incarnate Wisdom! O sweetest and most adorable Jesus! True God and true man, only Son of the Eternal Father, and of Mary, always virgin! I adore Thee profoundly in the bosom and splendors of Thy Father during eternity; and I adore Thee also in the virginal bosom of Mary, Thy most worthy Mother, in the time of Thine incarnation.
I give Thee thanks for that Thou hast annihilated Thyself, taking the form of a slave in order to rescue me from the cruel slavery of the devil. I praise and glorify Thee for that Thou hast been pleased to submit Thyself to Mary, Thy holy Mother, in all things, in order to make me Thy faithful slave through her. But, alas! Ungrateful and faithless as I have been, I have not kept the promises which I made so solemnly to Thee in my Baptism; I have not fulfilled my obligations; I do not deserve to be called Thy child, nor yet Thy slave; and as there is nothing in me which does not merit Thine anger and Thy repulse, I dare not come by myself before Thy most holy and august Majesty. It is on this account that I have recourse to the intercession of Thy most holy Mother, whom Thou hast given me for a mediatrix with Thee. It is through her that I hope to obtain of Thee contrition, the pardon of my sins, and the acquisition and preservation of wisdom.
Hail, then, O immaculate Mary, living tabernacle of the Divinity, where the Eternal Wisdom willed to be hidden and to be adored by angels and by men! Hail, O Queen of Heaven and earth, to whose empire everything is subject which is under God. Hail, O sure refuge of sinners, whose mercy fails no one. Hear the desires which I have of the Divine Wisdom; and for that end receive the vows and offerings which in my lowliness I present to thee.
I, N_____, a faithless sinner, renew and ratify today in thy hands the vows of my Baptism; I renounce forever Satan, his pomps and works; and I give myself entirely to Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Wisdom, to carry my cross after Him all the days of my life, and to be more faithful to Him than I have ever been before. In the presence of all the heavenly court I choose thee this day for my Mother and Mistress. I deliver and consecrate to thee, as thy slave, my body and soul, my goods, both interior and exterior, and even the value of all my good actions, past, present and future; leaving to thee the entire and full right of disposing of me, and all that belongs to me, without exception, according to thy good pleasure, for the greater glory of God in time and in eternity.
Receive, O benignant Virgin, this little offering of my slavery, in honor of, and in union with, that subjection which the Eternal Wisdom deigned to have to thy maternity; in homage to the power which both of you have over this poor sinner, and in thanksgiving for the privileges with which the Holy Trinity has favored thee. I declare that I wish henceforth, as thy true slave, to seek thy honor and to obey thee in all things.
O admirable Mother, present me to thy dear Son as His eternal slave, so that as He has redeemed me by thee, by thee He may receive me! O Mother of mercy, grant me the grace to obtain the true Wisdom of God; and for that end receive me among those whom thou lovest and teachest, whom thou leadest, nourishest and protectest as thy children and thy slaves.
O faithful Virgin, make me in all things so perfect a disciple, imitator and slave of the Incarnate Wisdom, Jesus Christ thy Son, that I may attain, by thine intercession and by thine example, to the fullness of His age on earth and of His glory in Heaven. Amen.
-------------------------------
Sign your name here.
-------------------
Date
Step 5:
After Consecration
Once you have consecrated yourself to Jesus through Mary, live that consecration. St. Louis-Marie de Montfort recommended the following:Paul Hard (right) with David Fancher
Paul Hard rushed to the hospital after learning that his husband had been in a car wreck. He sent a text message to other family members: “David in wreck, in the ER, Pray.”
When Hard arrived at the hospital, a receptionist refused to give him any information about his husband, David Fancher. He was told he was not a member of Fancher’s “family” and that gay marriages weren’t recognized in Alabama.
After a half hour of inquiries, a hospital orderly finally told Hard, “Well, he’s dead.” Paul’s knees fell out from under him. He reached out for support, but the orderly stepped away.
The indignity didn’t stop at the hospital.
A funeral home director cited Alabama law in insisting that the death certificate indicate Fancher was never married – even though Fancher and Hard were legally married in Massachusetts, but lived in Alabama.
Since the 2011 wreck, these Alabama laws that refuse to recognize same-sex marriages from other states continue to create legal obstacles for Hard as he sues over the wrongful death of his husband. The SPLC announced a federal lawsuit today challenging these laws.
The lawsuit, filed on Hard’s behalf in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, seeks to overturn the state’s Marriage Protection Act, a 1998 law that bans the recognition of same-sex marriages from other states, and the Sanctity of Marriage Amendment, which enshrined this ban in the constitution in 2006.
The suit also demands that Hard receive his rightful share of the proceeds from a pending wrongful death suit, and that Alabama issue a corrected death certificate for Fancher that lists Hard as the surviving spouse.
“Alabama has created two classes of marriages within its borders and deemed one of those classes – marriages between people of the same sex – to be inferior to the other,” said David C. Dinielli, SPLC deputy legal director. “This is unconstitutional."
“The only purpose of refusing Paul the right to share in the proceeds from the wrongful death lawsuit is to punish him for having married a man, and to express moral disapproval of this choice. These purposes are improper and unconstitutional. Alabama must treat its LGBT citizens with equal dignity and respect under the law.”
Hard and Fancher were married in Massachusetts in May 2011, and Fancher died in a Prattville, Ala., hospital the following August while the two were living in Montgomery. Hard is now suing the trucking companies involved in the wreck. Fancher had collided in the dark with a large truck strewn across the northbound lanes of Interstate 65 north of Montgomery.
In Alabama, however, proceeds from a wrongful death case must be distributed pursuant to the laws of intestate succession (even though Fancher died with a will and Hard was the sole beneficiary). And because Alabama refuses to recognize lawful same-sex marriages entered out of state, current state law means that Hard cannot be deemed the surviving spouse and cannot share in the proceeds of the lawsuit.
“Southerners are generally good-hearted people and will recognize when a person is being unfairly treated in life’s worst moments,” said Hard, a lifelong Alabamian who once was a Baptist preacher. “Most married couples take for granted that if tragedy strikes they can proceed through the worst of times without the state saying at every turn that their marriage doesn’t even exist. Marriages are significant, and my marriage is due the same respect as any other.”Let me start by saying that I am a customer and fan of the services offered by Uber (took a ride Monday!), Airbnb (recently booked a family member into a nearby property) and other so-called “sharing” companies. In fact, just this week I gave a presentation about customer experience in which I cited Uber as an example of what brands can achieve with customer-centric product and service experiences. So, I say this as a fan and not as someone who is either anti-tech or anti-innovation: The time has come for companies in the space to stop hiding behind the “sharing economy” label and to improve collaboration with all concerned parties. Failing to do so puts these companies at risk as the industry, customer relationships, and regulations mature.
A year ago, I mounted a passionate defense of the term “sharing economy.” At the time, I argued that the word “sharing” was appropriate given these business models facilitate the mutual consumption of assets in contrast to traditional individual ownership and consumption. While this is still true, I cannot shake the feeling that companies have gotten a lot of PR and are camouflaging risky corporate practices thanks to the humanist adjectives they use, including “sharing,” “collaborative,” “trusted community marketplaces,” “the crowd” and “connected.” Who can be opposed to those ideas? It’d be like hating motherhood and apple pie!
The problem is that few of these “collaborative” companies are, well, collaborative. For a while, this was easy to overlook, because many consumers agree that some of the regulations these companies flouted were unpopular and, arguably, unnecessary. For example, Uber bypasses municipal safety regulations in many cities, and most of us don’t care because we feel safer in an Uber than a taxi. (On my last taxi trip, the driver exceeded the speed limit by 25 mph and barreled through a late yellow light near to a phone-distracted pedestrian, and I reached for my phone to give a bad review only to realize I could not.)
Because we agree some codes are outdated and appreciate the much stronger customer experience offered by the startups, it has been easy to disregard how these companies unilaterally pick which rules they like and which they do not. Laws that shield the companies from unfair practices or protect their intellectual property–yes, please! Laws requiring they follow standard background checks or adhere to local rental ordinances–hey man, can’t you see we’re trying to innovate here!?
But it is getting harder to ignore the dangers of self-determined laws and regulations. After all, while we give a wink and a nod to Uber snubbing livery laws, do we want the manufacturing plant in our town deciding which environmental standards they’ll ignore or food companies to go maverick on safety codes?
As citizens, we all are part of the greatest collaborative platform of all–no, not Uber or Airbnb but democracy. If people don’t like certain laws, they can petition their lawmakers to change them; if citizens are not satisfied with their elected officials’ response, they can mount a recall or campaign for their defeat. Unless we want companies to set their own laws based on what is best for stockholders (or a handful of VC investors hungry for rapid and sizeable returns), then we must question the green light we give to sharing economy firms to pick the laws they deem worthy.
It seems that green light may be turning yellow. Los Angeles charged a handful of landlords with illegally evicting tenants to convert their units to short-term rentals. The New York State legislature has passed a law that would ban Airbnb users from listing some short-term rentals. Chicago just implemented new (relatively mild) rules for Airbnb. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a law requiring Airbnb hosts to register with the city. And Austin residents rejected a plan to allow Uber and Lyft to self-regulate.
In response to the new regulations, the sharing companies and their supporters have too often returned to the same old scripts. They accuse officials of being in the pockets of traditional companies. They label new laws as anti-consumer (even as consumers are asking for them). And they accuse officials of being opposed to innovation. In short, these companies ignore that their industry is maturing and many stakeholders are now asking for actions to ensure safety, equitable tax collection, a level playing field for all players, affordable housing availability, and fair rules that protect residents living adjacent to high-traffic, unlicensed hotels.
The reaction to the ride-hailing situation in Austin provides a great example. I have seen tech leaders repeatedly declare that Austin “kicked out Uber and Lyft,” which is a substantially misleading perspective that demonstrates the biases and risks at play. Austin held a referendum in which 55,000 people voted–17% of the registered voters in Travis County–and despite an $8 million lobbying effort by Uber and Lyft, Proposition 1 failed by a 12-point margin. Because they didn’t get their way, Uber and Lyft took their bat and ball and left the city, leaving thousands of drivers and tens of thousands of riders scrambling to replace their services. Of course, Uber and Lyft can do business (or not) anywhere they wish, but this situation aptly demonstrates the reputation and business risks ahead if sharing economy companies do not collaborate with all parties–not just users of their services but also concerned citizens and officials.
First of all, if you claim to be a consumer-centric, community-based, crowdsourced company but you abandon a market because you do not like the outcome of a free and fair referendum of the people, then you are no longer a consumer-centric, community-based, crowdsourced company; you’re just a typical for-profit company striving for financial advantage. Austinites seemed surprised by Uber’s and Lyft’s unilateral actions. They apparently expected the ride-hailing firms to adapt to their wishes, but for all the trappings of “sharing” and “community,” these companies are not benefit corporations, being held accountable for their transparency or positive impact on society. Uber is, in the end, a seven-year-old organization that must justify a valuation greater than the GDP of approximately two-thirds of the nations on earth.
Moreover, the unwillingness of those in Silicon Valley to frame this event in honest terms–not a forced eviction but a willing abandonment of the market–demonstrates an aversion to seeing the very real trends occurring in the marketplace. Many people are no longer willing to look the other way as startups defy the rules. Consumers are anxious for change, but they expect it will come from negotiation and compromise, not ultimatums and blackmail.
Finally, while supporters of the sharing economy cheer the skyrocketing valuations of companies owning almost no fixed assets, the lack of assets is a double-edged sword. It may furnish remarkable levels of financial leverage, but it also means that entry and switching costs are relatively low. When Uber and Lyft abandoned Austin, some young, hungry startups flooded in. If one of them captures drivers’ and riders’ attention with an identical set of features and a greater willingness to live up to the ideals of the collaborative economy, people’s preferences may shift away from the leading ride-hailing services faster than you can say “Myspace.”
Which brings me back the question of labels. It is time we matured along with the marketplace and adopted a new word–one that provides less cover for companies that are neither very transparent nor collaborative. There are a variety of other terms people use to describe this space, but none seem quite right. “Peer-to-peer” fails to consider how Uber and Lyft are racing to replace private cars and drivers with a fleet of self-driving vehicles; “on-demand economy” doesn’t reflect that some services, such as Airbnb, are not really on-demand; and the “idle economy” works only so long as participants offer unused assets rather than, as is happening, turning currently productive assets (rented apartments) into more productive assets (unlicensed hotels).
My suggestion is that we consider adopting the name “Leverage Economy,” which aptly describes what every party is doing. Drivers, hosts and independent contractors leverage their assets, time and skills to make money. Riders, guests and those purchasing services leverage the platforms to save money and gain flexibility over traditional providers. And the platforms themselves are leveraging technology (along with other people’s time and assets) to earn profits and exploding valuations from VC investors.
Not only is “leverage economy” a more accurate term, but it may encourage us to think about what is truly happening with this business trend–not selfless sharing and transparent collaboration but an attempt to leverage people and assets to better productivity. That can be a very positive thing for all parties, but it requires us to ask how much leverage we wish to accept. Is it okay for one person to leverage their residence if doing so reduces others’ enjoyment of their residences? Is it acceptable for a company to leverage the time of independent contractors who are willing participants, even if their compensation may amount to less than minimum wage? And how much leverage do we want to allow for-profit companies to set their own rules?
The leverage economy can be a good thing for many. It also has the potential to harm others. With greater transparency and collaboration that considers the legitimate concerns and wishes of all parties, we can work together to find the right balance. Companies that fail to do so could find themselves doing irreparable harm to their reputations, customer relationships, and ultimately, their valuations.
The sharing economy is dead. Long live the leverage economy!Religious schools that receive federal funding are avidly trying to get exempted from Title IX so that they can discriminate against transgender students even as they continue to suck up taxpayer dollars.
Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education, sports, and other activities, though applications for exemptions weren't frequently sought in the past. But ever since a pair of discrimination cases in 2013 and 2014 interpreted the law to apply to transgender students, religious schools have increasingly applied to be exempted from it, reports Liam Stack.
The uptick of exemptions was earlier reported by The Column, a news organization in Minnesota, which published a list of the approved schools last week. The Column said its list was drawn from documents received through a Freedom of Information Act request, which included exemption applications from more than 30 schools, 27 of which were approved. The status of the remaining five was uncertain.
Here's a look at why many of those exemptions were granted.
In a January 2015 letter to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, Dr. William K. Thierfelder, the president of Belmont Abbey College, a Catholic school in North Carolina, cited the California case as one reason he was applying for a Title IX exemption “due to the religious beliefs of our institution.” “The school district in that dispute was ordered to allow a female student presenting herself as male to use the restroom, locker room and living accommodations of her choice, and to participate in boys’ athletic programs,” Dr. Thierfelder wrote. “We would not be able to make similar accommodations consistent with our Catholic beliefs.” Among those beliefs, he said, was a rejection of the idea that the “resolution of tension between one’s biological sex and the experience of gender” can be found through gender reassignment surgery or the “adoption of a psychological identity” typically associated with the opposite sex. One month later, the Office for Civil Rights agreed to exempt Belmont Abbey from 10 separate provisions of Title IX that prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, including employment, the admission of students, housing and the provision of facilities like restrooms and locker rooms.
In other words, Belmont Abbey is free to discriminate in the name of religion because it's prejudiced against transgender students. Seems like exactly what Title IX was supposed to prevent.MONTERREY, Mexico — Soldiers on patrol in a Mexican border town discovered a warehouse where armor-plated “tanks” were being prepared for the Gulf drug cartel, a military source said Monday.
The patrol came across the warehouse when they clashed with a group of armed men in the town of Ciudad Camargo, in the far northeastern state of Tamaulipas. Two of the gunmen were killed in a firefight, while two hid inside the warehouse.
“We found two home-made armored trucks in the warehouse, which belongs to the Gulf Cartel,” the military source told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The trucks were covered in steel plates one inch (2.5 centimeters) thick, strong enough to “resist the caliber of personal weapons the soldiers use,” said the source.
The air-conditioned armored vehicles were equipped with portholes where snipers could open fire from and remain protected.
Soldiers also found two other trucks that were in the process of being armored, as well as 23 powerful big-rig trucks that were apparently going to be armored.
The vehicles, locally known as “monsters,” can even resist fire from a heavy.50 caliber machine gun and can only be destroyed with anti-tank weapons, according to the military.
The home-made tanks are used in clashes with other drug cartels as well as to protect drug shipments.
In recent years, soldiers deployed in the northeastern Mexican border region have confiscated 109 home-made armored vehicles — including one dubbed the “Popemobile” because it carried an armored cabin similar to that used to protect Pope Benedict XVI in foreign trips.
In May, police in the western state of Jalisco carrying out a sweep against the Los Zetas drug cartel discovered an armored vehicle large enough to carry 20 armed men and also equipped with weapons portholes.
Members of the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas are engaged in a bitter fight to control the lucrative smuggling routes in eastern Mexico into the United States.
Separately, investigators in the northern state of Coahuila said Monday that they had discovered 1,314 pieces of human bones that they believe are the remains of victims whose bodies were burned.
Soldiers found the remains in 20 pits near the town of Guerrero along with 60 bullet shells and personal items such as clothing and watches.
Mexico has seen an explosion in drug-related violence which has left some 37,000 dead, according to media reports, since the government launched a military crackdown on organized crime in 2006.WikiLeaks to begin election-related dump The group plans to put out 200,000 Global Intelligence Files relating to both parties
According to a release Wednesday, WikiLeaks will begin publishing 200,000 files relating to the presidential election. The GI (Global Intelligence) files are emails obtained through a hack on private intelligence firm Stratfor, which were leaked to WikiLeaks by Anonymous. The release states:
These GI Files releases will shed insight into key U.S. federal election players... Through this release WikiLeaks aims to inform the U.S. electorate in an unbiased way through the release of source documents from one of the most oddly influential companies in the U.S. today.
WikiLeaks notes that Statfor, "a secretive multi-national private intelligence firm, providing services to large corporations, and government agencies" has a revolving door with government offices and thus the leaked emails could be a source of important information on both Democrats and Republicans in this election. Wednesday marks the beginning of the document dump, so it may take some time before any dirt is dug up (if there is dirt to find).
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"We call upon all people around the world to search the emails and publicize their findings using the hashtag #wlfindGI," the WikiLeaks statement noted, before prodding readers for a donation to the organization.Hibs chief executive Leeann Dempster says the SPFL has compromised "sporting integrity"
Hibernian and Hearts say the Scottish Professional Football League has compromised "sporting integrity" after promotion rivals Rangers' final game was moved for television coverage.
The Glasgow side will play Championship winners Hearts at Tynecastle on 3 May.
Hibs and promotion rivals Queen of the South and Falkirk will play on the Saturday, a day earlier.
However, the SPFL has hit back saying other clubs have the option of moving their own fixtures to Sunday too.
With Hearts having already won the title, the four clubs below are chasing three places in the promotion play-offs.
Hibernian chief executive Leeann Dempster said in a club website statement: "In previous seasons, the league has ensured that all of the final-round fixtures are played at the same time.
"I have been in contact with the SPFL following its announcement that one final-round fixture would kick off after all the other results are known.
"I have reminded them in very clear terms that - as the organiser of the competition - the responsibility for protecting its unimpeachable sporting integrity lies with them."
Her counterpart at Tynecastle, Ann Budge, backed up their city rivals' concerns.
"When it also became apparent to us that our fixture was the only game to be moved, we were equally alarmed as, rightly or wrongly, this casts a shadow over the sporting integrity of the Championship," she said on Hearts' website.
The final-day game between Rangers and Hearts will be live on television
"While it may not be enshrined in the newly merged rule book of the SPFL, it is protocol the football world over for fixtures such as the last day of the championship to be played simultaneously.
"To move only one (or even two or four) out of five fixtures would seem to be leaving our game wide open to unsavoury accusations.
"I will be sending in a formal complaint to the SPFL in relation to this appallingly late decision."
While regretting any inconvenience to fans, an SPFL spokesman suggested that the circumstances "are in to way unusual".
"On this weekend, the Hearts v Rangers match is scheduled for Sunday 3 May to be broadcast on television and it is not clear to us why this has caused so much surprise," he said.
"This is a key game in the Championship season and will inevitably attract huge interest from fans around the world.
"It is unreasonable to expect all Championship fixtures that weekend to move to the Sunday when a number of them will be unaffected by the Hearts v Rangers tie.
"However, as a result of this fixture, all Championship clubs have been invited to submit a request should they wish to move games to the Sunday.
"To date, the only feedback we have received is from one Championship club, which has asked for its match to remain scheduled for the Saturday.
"For the avoidance of doubt, we have had no request from Hibernian FC to move its fixture to the Sunday."By Adnan Khan
After years of bombing and months under siege the rebel defences in Aleppo have collapsed in the face of a wide-ranging government offensive. The people and rebels have now lost over 90% of their territory in eastern Aleppo throwing thousands of civilians and fighters into chaos. The escalating bombardment and attacks that have killed women and children trying to reach safe ground. Deepening rifts have developed among rebel groups and between fighters and civilians, over whether and how to surrender. Whilst the loss of Aleppo would be a significant blow to the rebels against the Bashar al-Assad regime it will not end the uprising in other parts of Syria.
For centuries, Aleppo was the region’s largest city and the Ottoman Caliphate’s third-largest, after Constantinople and Cairo. Before the uprising began in 2011, Aleppo was the country’s industrial and financial centre. The old city was a Unesco World Heritage site, and famous for its 13th Century citadel, 12th Century Great Mosque and huge covered markets.[1] Aleppo was once Syria’s largest city, with a population of over 2 million. When the uprising erupted in 2011, Aleppo did not see the large protests or the deadly violence that shook other towns and cities. But it suddenly became a battleground in July 2012. Rebel fighters launched an offensive to kick out government forces and gain control over northern Syria. But the rebel assault was not decisive. Aleppo ended up divided roughly in half – the opposition ended up controlling the east, and the government the west.
Al-Assad’s scorched earth strategy of siege warfare, with significant help from indiscriminate Russian airstrikes and Iranian revolutionary guards backed up with shi’a militia fighters, has paid off. The siege of East Aleppo resulted in the cutting off supplies, food, medicine, fuel and weapons. Russian airstrikes sent tens of thousands of civilians fleeing targeted areas and destroyed entire neighborhoods. The Pro-Assad forces indiscriminately used barrel bombs dropped from helicopters, even using chemical weapons on some occasions,[2] killing thousands of people and purposefully targeting civilians, including hospitals and schools. In November 2016 all hospitals in eastern Aleppo were out of action as a result. A wide spectrum of aerial weapons were used to make life for those under the siege a living hell. “Bunker-busting bombs, more suited to destroying military installations, are now destroying homes, decimating bomb shelters, crippling, maiming, killing dozens, if not hundreds,”[3] Matthew Rycroft, Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations, told the Council session at an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Sunday 25th November. The indiscriminate slaughter of the people of East Aleppo is how al-Assad has regained the city.
The complete indifference of the US left the people of Aleppo to fend for themselves under the onslaught of the regime. The most the US did was condemn what was taking place, call for talks but do nothing practically as the people of Aleppo were being slaughtered. This strategy has been a constant position of the US throughout the uprising – condemn, but do nothing. The call for talks every time the people of Syria are being bombed back to the stone age would indicate the US supports the actions as it would get the rebels to the negotiating table. The US has significant military assets in the region and could have dropped caches of weapons inside Syria; its forces regularly bomb ISIS territory to the East of Aleppo. However, the US does not see supporting the rebels in Aleppo as part of its strategic interests. The CNN highlighted: “The US has assembled an international coalition to fight ISIS and other terror groups that have established safe havens in the chaos of the Syrian civil war. But it has not taken military action to boost the rebels, even as it has sided with the moderate opposition and called on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a close Russian ally, to step aside.”[4] A US-vetted rebel commander highlighted: “we are very frustrated. The United States refuses to provide weapons we need, and yet it still thinks it can tell us what to do. They promise support and then watch us drown. America will have no influence if our comrades are forced [to retreat to] Idlib.”[5] Embarrassed by this, US officials are now saying the Obama administration may lift a long-held ban by allowing Qatar and Saudi Arabia to arm rebels with man-portable missiles. “The US confirmed the green light to begin sending them to rebels through supply routes still open through Jordan and Turkey,” the Reuters news agency reported from an anonymous US official.[6] All of this is too little, too late.
[pullquote align=”right” color=”” class=”” cite=”” link=””]The regional nations who for long stated they supported the rebel groups against the regime in Damascus abandoned them at their most critical hour.[/pullquote]
The regional nations who for long stated they supported the rebel groups against the regime in Damascus abandoned them at their most critical hour. For years, Turkey worked with and built up insurgent groups in Aleppo province. As Aleppo was encircled over several months, |
specialist trying to keep them as customers.
“It’s a process that could really be made simple and easy for a customer to use but instead is very painful,” Pollack said.
The duo, who had met working at Climate.com, said they’ve had so much traffic and interest in the first few days of launching that their website was temporarily down from too many users.
“The response has been overwhelmingly positive,” Pollack said.
To use the service, Comcast customers would need to provide their name, address, phone number and Comcast account number through an online form. Once Airpaper receives the information, it’s auto-populated in a form that is sent directly to a Comcast customer care center. Airpaper tracks the form to assure Comcast has received the request, which under their terms and services agreement, must then follow through with the cancellation request.
“We can make a painful bureaucratic process easy by showing people that it doesn’t have to be this wat,” St Sauver said, adding the sky’s the limit when it comes to expanding to other services, such as getting a San Francisco parking permit, securing a visa to China or obtaining business tax registration in San Francisco.
Airpaper says on its website it uses the personal information only for the service-related process and does not sell the information to third parties.Although displaying your genitals in public is illegal in many parts of the world, a huge number of people have done it at one time or another. Countless men and women have flashed each other at Mardi Gras celebrations, and many a college fraternity and sorority have gone streaking across campus. So does this mean that the world is full of exhibitionists? Not exactly. Behaviors like this are usually fueled by alcohol and a temporary loosening of one’s inhibitions. The true exhibitionist (in the clinical sense) doesn’t require any “liquid courage” and doesn’t get naked as part of an organized social event or in a situation in which public nudity is accepted. Instead, psychologists reserve the term “exhibitionist” for persons who engage in socially inappropriate nudity for the sole purpose of sexual arousal.
From a psychological standpoint, the defining characteristic of an exhibitionist is a strong urge to expose one’s genitals to an unsuspecting stranger [1]. Such exposure usually occurs in public places where there is an easy escape route (e.g., parks and subways). The goal of this exposure is to evoke a shocked reaction from the other person, which is what the exhibitionist finds to be sexually arousing. In fact, exhibitionists usually fantasize about this shocked reaction afterward when sexually pleasuring themselves. Exhibitionism is classified as a disorder when these urges cause psychological distress or when the individual begins to act upon them and starts victimizing others.
Like most unusual sexual interests, exhibitionism tends to be far more common among men than women. For instance, a national survey from Sweden revealed that 4.1% of men and 2.1% of women indicated that they had revealed their genitals to a stranger at least one time in their lives and found it to be sexually arousing [2]. In addition to being more inclined to expose themselves, men are also more likely to be arrested for such behavior, probably because a female flashing victim is more likely to call the police than a male flashing victim.
Where does exhibitionism come from? We know that such behaviors begin early in life. For instance, research has found that some exhibitionists report flashing others as young as age 12, with fully half starting by age 15 [3]. Perhaps not surprisingly, this behavior is linked to having poor social and interpersonal skills [4], which suggests that some individuals may turn to this behavior because they are unable to establish a more conventional sexual relationship. If the individual finds the behavior highly pleasurable the first time, it may create a very powerful psychological association that is difficult to break.
One caveat to all of this is that there are some people who identify as “exhibitionists,” but who do not expose themselves to strangers or get off on the thought of seeing another person’s shocked or disgusted reaction. Individuals who experience arousal by exposing their genitals to a willing audience (e.g., exotic dancers, people who perform sex acts on webcams) would not be classified as having a psychological disorder. Thus, keep in mind that there is a world of difference between the clinical definition of exhibitionism and how this term is used in everyday language.
Want to learn more about The Psychology of Human Sexuality? Click here for a complete list of articles or like the Facebook page to get articles delivered to your newsfeed.
[1] Långström, N. (2010). The DSM diagnostic criteria for exhibitionism, voyeurism, and frotteurism. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39, 317-324.
[2] Långström, N., & Seto, M. C. (2006). Exhibitionistic and voyeuristic behavior in a Swedish national population survey. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 35, 427-435.
[3] Abel, G. G., & Rouleau, J. L. (1990). The nature and extent of sexual assault. In W. L. Marshall, D. R. Laws, & H. E. Barbaree (Eds.), Handbook of sexual assault: Issues, theories, and treatment of the offender (pp. 9-22). New York: Plenum Press.
[4] Emmers-Sommer, T. M., Allen, M., Bourhis, J., Sahlstein, E., Laskowski, K., Falato, W. L., &... Cashman, L. (2004). A meta-analysis of the relationship between social skills and sexual offenders. Communication Reports, 17, 1-10.
Image Source: 123rf.com
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The terrorist group of ISIS executed on Sunday five media activists on charges of “spying for hostile parties” in Syria’s northeastern province of Raqqa.
The terror group released a video showing the five activists “confessing” to have filmed ISIS headquarters and vehicles in Raqqa.
In the name of their alleged Caliphate, ISIS militants have shot the media activists dead at the end of the video.
The victims were identified as Muhammad Abdulghani, Hael Abdulrazaq, Faisal al-Jaafar, Ammar al-Jaafar and Mahyar Othman.
The group accused them of leaking security information to Iraqi forces, which has been bombing ISIS for nearly two years in the region.
A civil rights activist, who conditioned anonymity, said: “The victims were documenting ISIS atrocities in the province. They have been covering the daily life of Raqqa citizens for months.”
“By filming such executions and showing it to the public, ISIS tries to terrorize all activists in Raqqa, especially those working for media,” the source said.
“Everyone trying to deliver information about Raqqa to the outside world is being accused of spying for hostile parties, Activists are being tortured and brutally executed.”
/257Inspector Chris Jordan further discusses literary works that are supposedly unfilmable.
Within the realm of horror literature, arguably no other author has had as much cultural impact and influence as H. P. Lovecraft. He may not be the most widely-read or universally-known, but his fiercely original ideas and unique mythology have infiltrated our collective consciousness so thoroughly that even if you don't know who he is, you absolutely know about the world he created. The Necronomicon, Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones, the town of Arkham and its notorious asylum... all parts of Lovecraft's imagination which have very much taken on lives of their own. If you watch just about any horror, sci-fi, or dark fantasy films at all, you've undoubtedly watched a bunch that have Lovecraft influences all over them. And yet his own stories have had a notoriously difficult time being successfully adapted to the screen. So much so that among horror fans, Lovecraft has become the poster-boy for the concept of unfilmable writing. And that is why he is the subject of this second article busting the myth of unfilmability.
Pan's Labyrinth: first and foremost a dark, supernaturally-tinged drama that adds in elements of horror with an intelligent, deliberate, slow-burn approach. The problem with most mainstream H. P. Lovecraft movies is that they have not had the good fortune to get a director as strong as Guillermo Del Toro; most of them have been fast and dirty, low-budget straight-to-video horror flicks which take only the most basic skeleton of one of his stories and use it as an excuse for another generic gorefest. And for this disappointing trend, I have no choice but to blame Re-Animator. It is absolutely true that Lovecraft is a challenging author to bring to the screen. And it is absolutely true that most of the Lovecraft adaptations that have come from anywhere near Hollywood have been pretty bad. But both of those facts stem from the same reason: his writing is all about atmosphere, the build-up of suspense, and the disturbing concepts of cosmic horrors unseen; things that require a certain delicate touch and trust in the audience's attention span that many conventional horror directors just can't be bothered with. A well-known movie that walks the perfect line that a good Lovecraft adaptation should is: first and foremost a dark, supernaturally-tinged drama that adds in elements of horror with an intelligent, deliberate, slow-burn approach. The problem with most mainstream H. P. Lovecraft movies is that they have not had the good fortune to get a director as strong as Guillermo Del Toro; most of them have been fast and dirty, low-budget straight-to-video horror flicks which take only the most basic skeleton of one of his stories and use it as an excuse for another generic gorefest. And for this disappointing trend, I have no choice but to blame
Re-Animator; as a bombastic, over-the-top 80s splatterfest, it's a lot of fun, in the same way that Evil Dead 2 and Dead-Alive are fun. But it is barely an H. P. Lovecraft adaptation. Mostly it's just its own crazy thing, which happens to be very loosely based on a Lovecraft story, and a pretty atypical one at that. And that's perfectly fine; I don't care if a movie is a really loose adaptation as long as it's a good movie in its own right, which Re-Animator is if you like those sorts of flicks. The problem is that it was the first Lovecraft adaptation in fifteen years, and the first ever to gain a major cult following, and it set a really bad precedent. It caused horror filmmakers to think than fans wanted all Lovecraft adaptations to be like that one, it caused producers to be very reluctant to finance any adaptation that wasn't like that, and thus it created a cottage industry of films that claimed to be based on his stories, but that were basically just Re-Animator cash-ins, only without the originality. Now, don't get me wrong, I like; as a bombastic, over-the-top 80s splatterfest, it's a lot of fun, in the same way thatandare fun. But it is barely an H. P. Lovecraft adaptation. Mostly it's just its own crazy thing, which happens to be very loosely based on a Lovecraft story, and a pretty atypical one at that. And that's perfectly fine; I don't care if a movie is a really loose adaptation as long as it's a good movie in its own right, whichis if you like those sorts of flicks. The problem is that it was the first Lovecraft adaptation in fifteen years, and the first ever to gain a major cult following, and it set a really bad precedent. It caused horror filmmakers to think than fans wantedLovecraft adaptations to be like that one, it caused producers to be very reluctant to finance any adaptation that wasn't like that, and thus it created a cottage industry of films that claimed to be based on his stories, but that were basically justcash-ins, only without the originality.
Re-Animator adaptations isn't that they aren't narratively faithful, but that the soul of the original stories are nowhere to be found in the totally non-Lovecraftian style; plus, most of them just aren't good movies anyway. It has been thirty years since the release of Re-Animator, and few mainstream American directors have been able to break through its hold over adaptations of his writing. Guillermo Del Toro is certainly trying with his long-discussed, on-again-off-again At The Mountains of Madness adaptation, but given the poor track record of Lovecraft at the movies, it isn't shocking that he's having trouble convincing a studio to finance the thing. Here I must repeat my viewpoint that a film need not be slavishly faithful to the literal plot of its source material to be a good adaptation; it is far more important to capture the writing's “soul,” in terms of tone, themes, and the way the narrative (however it may have been changed in translation to the screen) is treated by the storytelling process. The problem with many of these post-adaptations isn't that they aren't narratively faithful, but that the soul of the original stories are nowhere to be found in the totally non-Lovecraftian style; plus, most of them just aren't good movies anyway. It has been thirty years since the release of, and few mainstream American directors have been able to break through its hold over adaptations of his writing. Guillermo Del Toro is certainly trying with his long-discussed, on-again-off-againadaptation, but given the poor track record of Lovecraft at the movies, it isn't shocking that he's having trouble convincing a studio to finance the thing.
not mean that Lovecraft is unfilmable; in fact, it shouldn't even suggest it. Despite all the bad adaptations, there have still been some really good films made based on his stories, which prove that it is totally possible in the hands of the right filmmaker. Most of them are indies, made far away from the producers who insist that HPL movies be like Re-Animator in order to be marketable, but first we'll start with one that actually was made within Hollywood, and stands alone as the best serious adaptation of his work to emerge from that system so far. From the co-writer of Alien and director of The Return of the Living Dead, Dan O'Bannon, comes... Still, this unfortunate trend doesmean that Lovecraft is unfilmable; in fact, it shouldn't even suggest it. Despite all the bad adaptations, there have still been some really good films made based on his stories, which prove that it is totally possible in the hands of the right filmmaker. Most of them are indies, made far away from the producers who insist that HPL movies be likein order to be marketable, but first we'll start with one that actually was made within Hollywood, and stands alone as the best serious adaptation of his work to emerge from that system so far. From the co-writer ofand director of, Dan O'Bannon, comes...
The Resurrected (1991) (1991)
Re-Animator-cash-in Lovecraft movies that were flooding the straight-to-video horror market at the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s, Dan O'Bannon's The Resurrected was a breath of fresh air. It is a totally serious adaptation of the novella “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” and it is faithful not just in story, but in tone and technique: it really does capture that sense of the Lovecraftian. The key to the film's success is that O'Bannon does not approach the material like a typical horror movie at all: The Resurrected is a mystery with supernatural and occult undertones, which only gradually becomes a horror film towards the last act. Until that point, it really is exactly what the title of the novella implies: the case of Charles Dexter Ward, a detective's investigation into the strange behavior and possible occult activities of the titular scientist (played by Chris Sarandon, of Fright Night and The Princess Bride). This approach puts the viewer in the same situation as the detective: we start out in the normal, everyday world, and only gradually become aware of sinister, unexplainable cosmic forces creeping in all around us, until we suddenly are in a nightmare altogether outside the rational world we started in. That is the Lovecraftian: that journey into madness that makes his stories so haunting, and that you simply cannot get if a film is already in blood-soaked horror territory from the opening frame. Lovecraft is all about suggesting rather than showing; about the build-up of tension rather than a series of shocks, and O'Bannon's slow-burn style is a perfect match to that. Amid all the B-grade-cash-in Lovecraft movies that were flooding the straight-to-video horror market at the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s, Dan O'Bannon'swas a breath of fresh air. It is a totally serious adaptation of the novellaThe Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” and it is faithful not just in story, but in tone and technique: it really does capture that sense of the Lovecraftian. The key to the film's success is that O'Bannon does not approach the material like a typical horror movie at all:is a mystery with supernatural and occult undertones, which only gradually becomes a horror film towards the last act. Until that point, it really is exactly what the title of the novella implies: the case of Charles Dexter Ward, a detective's investigation into the strange behavior and possible occult activities of the titular scientist (played by Chris Sarandon, ofand). This approach puts the viewer in the same situation as the detective: we start out in the normal, everyday world, and only gradually become aware of sinister, unexplainable cosmic forces creeping in all around us, until we suddenly are in a nightmare altogether outside the rational world we started in.is the Lovecraftian: that journey into madness that makes his stories so haunting, and that you simply cannot get if a film is already in blood-soaked horror territory from the opening frame. Lovecraft is all about suggesting rather than showing; about the build-up of tension rather than a series of shocks, and O'Bannon's slow-burn style is a perfect match to that.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High) ranges from decent to pretty wooden, and while the film deserves better, they're probably what the budget could afford. The studio was on the verge of bankruptcy while The Resurrected was production, which not only caused these unfortunate budgetary constraints, but burdened it with other problems as well. First, in a misguided attempt to make it a more marketable horror film, the studio took final edit rights away from O'Bannon, and re-cut it without him, resulting in some odd and clunky bits of editing. Secondly, the studio's money dried up before the film's intended theatrical release, and it wound up going straight-to-video instead, where it got lost among a sea of crappy horror flicks and never found the widespread recognition that it really deserves. It isn't without its flaws, though. O'Bannon clearly had a pretty low budget to work with, and there are times when his ambition and desire to do Lovecraft right clearly strain against his funding limitations. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the movie's cast. Chris Sarandon is very good as Charles Dexter Ward: he brings an appropriate, vaguely sinister air of mystery to a character we aren't supposed to know quite what to make of. The mysterious nature of the character gives him a bit more to dig into than his more famous roles as the obviously-evil vampire Jerry Dandridge, or the buffoonish Prince Humperdink. Aside from him, though, the major cast (John Terry, Jane Sibbett, Robert Romanus – yep, Mike Damone from) ranges from decent to pretty wooden, and while the film deserves better, they're probably what the budget could afford. The studio was on the verge of bankruptcy whilewas production, which not only caused these unfortunate budgetary constraints, but burdened it with other problems as well. First, in a misguided attempt to make it a more marketable horror film, the studio took final edit rights away from O'Bannon, and re-cut it without him, resulting in some odd and clunky bits of editing. Secondly, the studio's money dried up before the film's intended theatrical release, and it wound up going straight-to-video instead, where it got lost among a sea of crappy horror flicks and never found the widespread recognition that it really deserves.
The Resurrected manages to be a really good movie even as the odds seem against it. The wooden acting and awkward editing are most problematic in the first few minutes, when a strong opening sequence unfortunately gives way to a somewhat clunky, exposition-laden set-up to the plot which I'm sure he would have cut differently. But have a little patience: it only takes a few minutes for O'Bannon to regain control of the project, and soon his slow-burn mystery-horror approach begins to cast its spell and draw the viewer in. While the actors (Chris Sarandon aside) may not be great, he makes effective use of them, and the narrative as a whole becomes strong enough that the less-than-stellar performances of Terry and Sibbett cease to be a problem. The great atmosphere goes a long way in this department: O'bannon found some very moody, effective settings which feel right out of Lovecraft's writing, and they aid perfectly in the mounting tension of the plot. And while it is not a special-effects-driven film, what effects there are look really good. It isn't a perfect movie, but it does manage to be a very good one, and it absolutely does justice to Lovecraft's writing and captures the style of his storytelling in a way that very few Hollywood movies have ever even tried to do. Any fan of his stories should definitely check this out, immediately. Sadly, the DVD is out of print, and also is a frustrating 4x3 pan-and-scan version. Netflix carried it on their streaming service for a while in a great-looking widescreen HD transfer, but they no longer offer it. Hopefully a company like Scream Factory will resurrect it someday soon, and maybe even rebuild O'Bannon's director's cut, which he was working on at the time of his early death, and which exists in a rough workprint stage that has been screened at a couple festivals. This one definitely deserves to get some long-overdue attention; it has been under the radar for far too long. Despite these problems, O'Bannon's skill as a director shines through, andmanages to be a really good movie even as the odds seem against it. The wooden acting and awkward editing are most problematic in the first few minutes, when a strong opening sequence unfortunately gives way to a somewhat clunky, exposition-laden set-up to the plot which I'm sure he would have cut differently. But have a little patience: it only takes a few minutes for O'Bannon to regain control of the project, and soon his slow-burn mystery-horror approach begins to cast its spell and draw the viewer in. While the actors (Chris Sarandon aside) may not be great, he makes effective use of them, and the narrative as a whole becomes strong enough that the less-than-stellar performances of Terry and Sibbett cease to be a problem. The great atmosphere goes a long way in this department: O'bannon found some very moody, effective settings which feel right out of Lovecraft's writing, and they aid perfectly in the mounting tension of the plot. And while it is not a special-effects-driven film, what effects there are look really good. It isn't a perfect movie, but it does manage to be a very good one, and it absolutely does justice to Lovecraft's writing and captures the style of his storytelling in a way that very few Hollywood movies have ever even tried to do. Any fan of his stories should definitely check this out, immediately. Sadly, the DVD is out of print, and also is a frustrating 4x3 pan-and-scan version. Netflix carried it on their streaming service for a while in a great-looking widescreen HD transfer, but they no longer offer it. Hopefully a company like Scream Factory will resurrect it someday soon, and maybe even rebuild O'Bannon's director's cut, which he was working on at the time of his early death, and which exists in a rough workprint stage that has been screened at a couple festivals. This one definitely deserves to get some long-overdue attention; it has been under the radar for far too long.
Fortunately, while it may be the best Lovecraft movie to ever come out of Hollywood, it is far from the only really good, truly Lovecraftian film to be based on his work. The world of indie films has given us some excellent adaptations, made as labors of love by filmmakers who know that there is no such thing as unfilmable. There are even a couple studios that have made it their mission to give us good Lovecraft movies. The most well-known of these studios is...
The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society –and
The Resurrected held the title of the most true-to-the-author Lovecraft adaptation. Then in 2005, it was dethroned by – of all things – a 47-minute indie silent film. But wow, what a great 47 minutes it is. The Call of Cthulhu was made by a group of artists who call themselves The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, lead by the writer/director/producer team of Sean Branney and Andrew Leman: true cinephiles with a passion for classic movies that matches – and enhances – their passion for Lovecraft and the world he created. With this film, they set out to do two things: make the ultimate, most truly faithful adaptation of one of his stories, and make a period-authentic tribute to the silent horror films of the 1920s. For a bunch of indie artists working on a shoestring budget, that is a crazily ambitious set of goals... but with their sheer willpower and artistic ingenuity, they pulled it off brilliantly. Who cares if they had to make it a half-length feature instead of a full-length; what they did here is something seriously special. For fourteen yearsheld the title of the most true-to-the-author Lovecraft adaptation. Then in 2005, it was dethroned by – of all things – a 47-minute indie silent film. But wow, what a great 47 minutes it is.was made by a group of artists who call themselves The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, lead by the writer/director/producer team of Sean Branney and Andrew Leman: true cinephiles with a passion for classic movies that matches – and enhances – their passion for Lovecraft and the world he created. With this film, they set out to do two things: make the ultimate, most truly faithful adaptation of one of his stories, and make a period-authentic tribute to the silent horror films of the 1920s. For a bunch of indie artists working on a shoestring budget, that is a crazily ambitious set of goals... but with their sheer willpower and artistic ingenuity, they pulled it off brilliantly. Who cares if they had to make it a half-length feature instead of a full-length; what they did here is something seriously special.
The Call of Cthulhu is one of the key stories in Lovecraft's canon; one of the cornerstones of his so-called “Cthulhu Mythos,” which makes up his rich mythology of the Great Old Ones, their nightmarish realms beyond time and space, and the ancient grimoires like the Necronomicon that are used to summon them. If you want a good introduction into Lovecraftian lore, this film – and the novella it is based on – are perfect places to start. The novella is unusually epic in scale for a Lovecraft tale: while most of his stories tend to follow a lone protagonist as he encounters some sort of madness-inducing horror, The Call of Cthulhu weaves together multiple intersecting plot threads set over a period of years. As such, it is probably one of the most cinematic of all of his stories, and also one of the most ambitious for such a DIY group of artists to tackle, especially while imposing upon themselves the limitation of using no dialogue aside from intertitles. Several reviews have made the comment that the black and white picture helps cover up budgetary constraints, and the silent-film conceit helps level the playing field for an uneven indie cast, but while that may be somewhat true, there is so, so much more to the artistic choices than all that. The film doesn't simply imitate silent movies, and it isn't simply shot in black and white; it painstakingly recreates the feeling and experience of a genuine 1920s film, in craft as well as appearance. It isn't a device to hide a low budget (although it does that too), but an added layer of artistry made to enhance the story, and present it as a unique slice of time. As the title might lead you to believe,is one of the key stories in Lovecraft's canon; one of the cornerstones of his so-called “Cthulhu Mythos,” which makes up his rich mythology of the Great Old Ones, their nightmarish realms beyond time and space, and the ancient grimoires like the Necronomicon that are used to summon them. If you want a good introduction into Lovecraftian lore, this film – and the novella it is based on – are perfect places to start. The novella is unusually epic in scale for a Lovecraft tale: while most of his stories tend to follow a lone protagonist as he encounters some sort of madness-inducing horror,weaves together multiple intersecting plot threads set over a period of years. As such, it is probably one of the most cinematic of all of his stories, and also one of the most ambitious for such a DIY group of artists to tackle, especially while imposing upon themselves the limitation of using no dialogue aside from intertitles. Several reviews have made the comment that the black and white picture helps cover up budgetary constraints, and the silent-film conceit helps level the playing field for an uneven indie cast, but while that may be somewhat true, there is so, so much more to the artistic choices than all that. The film doesn't simply imitate silent movies, and it isn't simply shot in black and white; it painstakingly recreates the feeling and experience of a genuine 1920s film, in craft as well as appearance. It isn't a device to hide a low budget (although it does that too), but an added layer of artistry made to enhance the story, and present it as a unique slice of time.
The Call of Cthulhu is made to be viewed as if it were a “lost film” made in the late-1920s, when Lovecraft's novella wasn't some classic work of literature, but a brand-new piece of pop-culture that had just been published in Weird Tales magazine. As such, everything is made to be period-accurate, and great care is taken to maintain the illusion. The cinematography and set design are classic German Expressionism, with exaggerated, deliberately artificial environments that look like they are out of paintings, and skewed Dutch camera angles. The aspect ratio is 4x3, just like it was back then, and the edges of the picture are rounded and slightly blurred. The acting is deliberately stilted and overdone, in classic silent-film style, as the actors convey emotions without words. The Dialogue is presented in ornate intertitles with the H. P. L. Historical Society logo at the bottom of the frame. When it comes time for some creature effects, the filmmakers use no CGI, and instead painstakingly recreate early claymation right out of the original The Lost World. The one thing that betrays its modern origins is the early-2000s digital video; vintage film effects filters just can't hide that too-clean DV look. Aside from that, though, the vintage styling is spot-on. And most importantly, it isn't just a curiosity piece or exercise in style; it works great as a highly compelling and entertaining film in its own right too. It's deeply atmospheric, it's suspenseful, and it is highly effective in capturing Lovecraft's story. That it does so in the cinematic language of the time it was originally published just adds to the experience. is made to be viewed as if it were a “lost film” made in the late-1920s, when Lovecraft's novella wasn't some classic work of literature, but a brand-new piece of pop-culture that had just been published in Weird Tales magazine. As such, everything is made to be period-accurate, and great care is taken to maintain the illusion. The cinematography and set design are classic German Expressionism, with exaggerated, deliberately artificial environments that look like they are out of paintings, and skewed Dutch camera angles. The aspect ratio is 4x3, just like it was back then, and the edges of the picture are rounded and slightly blurred. The acting is deliberately stilted and overdone, in classic silent-film style, as the actors convey emotions without words. The Dialogue is presented in ornate intertitles with the H. P. L. Historical Society logo at the bottom of the frame. When it comes time for some creature effects, the filmmakers use no CGI, and instead painstakingly recreate early claymation right out of the original. The one thing that betrays its modern origins is the early-2000s digital video; vintage film effects filters just can't hide that too-clean DV look. Aside from that, though, the vintage styling is spot-on. And most importantly, it isn't just a curiosity piece or exercise in style; it works great as a highly compelling and entertaining film in its own right too. It's deeply atmospheric, it's suspenseful, and it is highly effective in capturing Lovecraft's story. That it does so in the cinematic language of the time it was originally published just adds to the experience.
The Whisperer in Darkness, and managed to top their previous effort. With more experience, better digital filmmaking technology, and greater production resources earned by The Call of Cthulhu's critical acclaim, they were able to make an even more polished and professional product, this time at full feature-length. Once again they made the movie as a vintage-style time-capsule of the era in pop-culture when the source novella was written – and since it was published in Weird Tales in 1931, that means a mid-1930s classic horror film, along the lines of Dracula, Frankenstein, or King Kong. Once again, their commitment to authenticity in their filmmaking style is seriously impressive: the moody lighting, stark cinematography, and musical score bring back great childhood memories of watching Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi movies on TV, and also lend the story just the right sort of dark, shadowy atmosphere. There is dialogue this time around, and while the actors still have the freedom to overact just like they did back in those 30s-era films, they handle the material quite well, and manage to stay away from self-parody. The Whisperer in Darkness is another Cthulhu Mythos tale, although in quite a different style, with a bit more emphasis on the sci-fi side of Lovecraft's mythology than the horror. In adapting the novella – which is decently long, but not quite 100-minute-movie-long as written – Branney and Leman learned the best possible lesson about adapting written stories to the screen: faithfulness is great when possible, but there's nothing wrong with embellishing and making some creative changes if they will help the adaptation work better. There are times when The Whisperer in Darkness goes off and does its own thing, separate from the literal events of Lovecraft's story, but that gives the story room to grow and fit its new medium without ever feeling padded. It nonetheless feels just as true to the novella as the Historical Society envisioned, and it certainly debunks the old argument that Lovecraft can't be adapted to the screen because his stories are too short. All the stories need are the right filmmakers. Six years later, Branney, Leman, and the rest of the HPLHS team made a second film, 2011's, and managed to top their previous effort. With more experience, better digital filmmaking technology, and greater production resources earned by's critical acclaim, they were able to make an even more polished and professional product, this time at full feature-length. Once again they made the movie as a vintage-style time-capsule of the era in pop-culture when the source novella was written – and since it was published in Weird Tales in 1931, that means a mid-1930s classic horror film, along the lines ofor. Once again, their commitment to authenticity in their filmmaking style is seriously impressive: the moody lighting, stark cinematography, and musical score bring back great childhood memories of watching Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi movies on TV, and also lend the story just the right sort of dark, shadowy atmosphere. There is dialogue this time around, and while the actors still have the freedom to overact just like they did back in those 30s-era films, they handle the material quite well, and manage to stay away from self-parody.is another Cthulhu Mythos tale, although in quite a different style, with a bit more emphasis on the sci-fi side of Lovecraft's mythology than the horror. In adapting the novella – which is decently long, but not quite 100-minute-movie-long as written – Branney and Leman learned the best possible lesson about adapting written stories to the screen: faithfulness is great when possible, but there's nothing wrong with embellishing and making some creative changes if they will help the adaptation work better. There are times whengoes off and does its own thing, separate from the literal events of Lovecraft's story, but that gives the story room to grow and fit its new medium without ever feeling padded. It nonetheless feels just as true to the novella as the Historical Society envisioned, and it certainly debunks the old argument that Lovecraft can't be adapted to the screen because his stories are too short. All the stories need are the right filmmakers.
The Call of Cthulhu managed to break through the barrier as a short feature that got all the acclaim, attention, and distribution of one of its full-length counterparts, but that's pretty rare. Let's end this look at the filmability of H. P. Lovecraft with a couple other really good short-feature adaptations (by which I mean movies like The Call of Cthulhu that are in that 45-minute to an hour range; longer than a short, but shorter than a full-length movie). Both of these were released on DVD by a studio whose sole, noble mission was to find homes for short and short-feature Lovecraft adaptations. But on the |
support for the Philippines' legal victory against China over the South China Sea.
In Laos, Yasay told reporters that he "never" asked to include the South China Sea ruling in the traditional ASEAN foreign ministers' statement.
In Manila, however, he said he "vigorously…pushed for the inclusion and mentioning of the arbitral tribunal award" in the joint communiqué. (READ: Recording shows Yasay didn't want ASEAN to cite Hague ruling)
The Philippines' top diplomat, who has no previous experience as a diplomat, has yet to be confirmed by the CA.
Yasay is facing other issues, such as claiming he was never a US citizen. – Rappler.comUnited States Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has come under fire from rivals Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz at a debate as establishment Republicans tried to muster some unity behind a last-ditch anti-Trump effort.
The debate began on Thursday night in Detroit as a free-for-all fracas with tension mounting over Trump's ascendancy and his drive to become the presumptive nominee should he win nominating contests in Florida and Ohio on March 15.
At centre stage, Trump defended himself from criticism earlier in the day from 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney and faced further questions about his record as a businessman at the debate.
READ MORE: The five stages of Republicans' grief over Donald Trump
Rubio, a US senator from Florida, pressed Trump on why he does not bring his clothing-making operations to the US from China and Mexico if he is so interested in bring jobs home, a central tenet of his unconventional campaign.
"This little guy has lied so much about my record," Trump responded, adding that he had begun bringing some clothing operations home from overseas.
But Rubio persisted: "The answer is he's not going to do it... The reason he makes it in China and Mexico is because he can make more money on it."
"Don't worry about it, little Marco, I will," Trump said dismissively.
"Well, let's hear it, big Donald," Rubio responded.
The debate quickly went down a negative path when Trump responded to Rubio's contention last month that Trump had "small hands".
"Look at these hands," Trump said, flashing his two hands to the crowd. To the suggestion that he might be small elsewhere, Trump said: "I guarantee you there is no problem."
Support for Clinton
Cruz, a US senator from Texas, suggested Trump would be the wrong candidate to send into battle against Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton because he has supported her financially in the past.
"Actually it was for business," Trump replied. "Let me tell you something, Ted, the last person that Hillary Clinton wants to face is Donald Trump."
Trump was joined on stage at the Fox Theatre by his three remaining rivals, Rubio, Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich.
OPINION: Why I'd vote for Donald Trump, but you shouldn't
It is a far smaller field than the 17 Republican candidates that began the race for the 2016 presidential nomination, but one that is still splintered between the incendiary New York businessman and three experienced politicians.
The debate was the candidates' first face-to-face gathering since Super Tuesday nominating contests this week gave extra momentum to Trump but did not knock out his rivals.
Mainstream figures in the party are seeking a strategy to halt Trump's march to the nomination for the November 8 election to succeed Democratic President Barack Obama.
Some party leaders and donors are critical of Trump's positions on trade and immigration, including his calls to build a wall between the US and Mexico, deport 11 million illegal immigrants and temporarily bar Muslims from entering the country.
At the debate, Trump, 69, was questioned for the first time since last year by Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who angered him with her questioning at the Republicans' first debate on August 6, prompting him to cancel participation in a debate in Iowa in January, a move that appeared to cost him some votes.
Despite the tension, towards the end of the debate, all candidates - including Trump - vowed to support whomever the presidential nominee would be.
READ MORE: Mitt Romney urges Republicans to shun Donald Trump
The debate took place hours after 2012 Republican nominee Romney gave a blistering speech about the dangers of choosing Trump. He called Trump a phony and a fraud who has failed in many business ventures despite his touted success.
The Detroit debate was one more opportunity for Rubio and Cruz to try to slow Trump's momentum. They are the last two anti-Trump candidates standing in what has been a bruising nomination battle. Kasich has largely steered clear of the anti-Trump effort and tried to remain above the fray.
Rubio went on the attack against Trump at the last debate on February 25 and has tried to establish himself as the main Trump alternative by labeling him as a "con artist" who has escaped serious vetting by a news media fixated on his star power and brash rhetoric.Katie Stallard, Asia Correspondent
Dear Mr President,
I was sorry to read on your Twitter feed about the problems you are having with fake news (sorry, FAKE NEWS!), the enemy of the American people.
I sympathise. We journalists can be annoying, what with our tendency to bang on about facts and truth, and our disinclination to just take really powerful people at their word. Sad!
Having lived and worked in Russia and China, and reported from North Korea, I thought you might appreciate some friendly tips on how they handle the media. You're welcome.
Let's start with China. They take the direct approach.
People tweeting things you don't like? China has already thought of this. Here, they've built a great big firewall around the internet. I know how much you like walls.
Last year, President Xi Jinping toured the headquarters of the main state news organisations, reminding reporters they must show absolute loyalty to the Communist Party, and closely follow its leadership in "thought, politics and action".
In case anyone didn't quite get this, he told them to think of their surname as "the party".
You might want to try something similar with The New York Times.
People tweeting things you don't like? China has already thought of this.
Here, they've built a great big firewall around the internet. I know how much you like walls.
So now you can just block whole websites. Twitter? Facebook? Both blocked in China. This also works for news sites that displease you.
And if the television airs an unflattering report, you can just have the censor dip it to black. End of problem.
Russia, under that strong leader you so seem to admire, has been steadily dismantling its independent media since Vladimir Putin came to power.
A number of Russian journalists have met unfortunate, untimely deaths.
They've also perfected what you might like to call the Nietzsche approach: "There are no facts, only interpretations."
The Kremlin-backed Russia Today TV channel functions along these lines.
As its editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, explained to Der Spiegel a few years ago: "There is no objectivity - only approximations of the truth."
The beauty of this system is that once you dispense with facts and the notion that objectivity exists, it's all just a matter of perspective.
This is especially helpful if you ever need to annex part of a neighbouring country, or fight a secret war in Ukraine.
You just come up with your own "alternative facts" and stick to them.
But if you feel like Russia and China are leaving things a bit too much to chance, there is also North Korea.
Watch full footage of the attack on Kim Jong-Nam
Fun fact: Kim Jong-Un also likes to talk about "patriotic devotion", though he has yet to declare a whole day in its honour, so you are one step ahead of him on that.
In Pyongyang there is only state-controlled media, and it is among the most tightly controlled in the world.
The good thing about this is that if something bad happens that you don't want your citizens to know about - say the mysterious death of your half-brother and sometime heir to your job - you can just stop them finding out.
You tell the media not to mention it, and they do as they are told. Easy D, as you might say.
Now, I know you're getting some pushback on this at home, what with John McCain warning this is "how dictators get started", and Carl Bernstein accusing you of "demonstrating an authoritarian attitude and inclination that shows no understanding of the role of the free press".
But what does either of them know about freedom or the free press, right?
Anyway, I know you're a busy man. I'll let you get back to running that finely tuned machine.
Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Sky News editors and correspondents, published every morning.
Previously on Sky Views: Sophy Ridge - Vicious abuse against MPs must stopWASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers were expected on Friday to approve new sanctions on Russian weapons companies and investors in the country’s high-tech oil projects, putting more U.S. pressure on President Vladimir Putin for interference in eastern Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting of the Security Council at the Kremlin in Moscow, November 20, 2014. REUTERS/Alexei Druzhinin/RIA Novosti/Kremlin
Late on Thursday, the Senate and House of Representatives unanimously passed the Ukraine Freedom Support Act. A House panel made a small change and sent the bill back to the Senate for a last vote expected as soon as late Friday.
President Barack Obama has said he opposes further sanctions on Russia unless Europe is on board.
The bill, which will be sent to Obama to sign, requires him to apply sanctions on Russian state-owned arms exporter Rosoboronexport and other defense companies Congress says contribute to instability in Ukraine, Georgia and Syria.
It requires Obama to penalize global companies that make large investments in crude oil drilling projects in deep waters and the Arctic.
The penalties go beyond U.S. and EU sanctions imposed in September on the world’s largest oil companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp and BP Plc.
The legislation would also provide $350 million in military assistance to Ukraine from 2015 to 2017, and other aid for energy to the country, which has been threatened by cutoffs in natural gas supply from Russia.
Republicans, who control the House and will have a majority in the Senate from January, have criticized Obama’s reaction to Russian interference in Ukraine as inadequate.
“The hesitant U.S. response to Russia’s continued invasion of Ukraine threatens to escalate this conflict even further,” said Senator Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, incoming chairman of the foreign relations committee.
The unanimous support for the bill showed a “firm commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty and to making sure Putin pays for his assault on freedom and security in Europe,” said Corker, who co-authored the bill with Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, the current head of the panel.
The bill authorizes Obama to penalize the top Russian natural gas producer Gazprom if he determines it is withholding significant natural gas supplies from NATO members or from Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. Lawmakers dropped a measure that would have designated Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova as non-NATO allies of Washington.
Obama on Thursday said slapping fresh sanctions on Russia without a similar move by Europe would be counterproductive.
In Kiev on Friday, Ukraine’s defense minister called for a doubling of the military budget to buy weapons abroad and better equip the army to fight Russian-backed separatists in the east.A fter one of my many comeback attempts while in training at Sunderland, the physio called myself and one of the other lads into his office. He had a message from the manager for us both.
A fter one of my many comeback attempts while in training at Sunderland, the physio called myself and one of the other lads into his office. He had a message from the manager for us both.
We had just completed our first few days of full squad training, and it was the first time Roy Keane had seen us back in action. Eagerly awaiting his input, we were a little surprised with the feedback we were given. The message was simple. "No more fucking leggings at this club. It's no coincidence the lads who wear them are always injured."
It seemed he had focused on our choice of attire and cared little for anything else we had done. That my performance didn't register was understandable. I was there as an unsigned outsider on a personal crusade to defy medical science and prove I could cope with the demands of full training once again. I found it amusing, if anything.
The other player reacted differently. He was club captain at the time and felt he deserved more. Keane made no effort to interact in any way with him and offered no words of encouragement on his return. He hadn't been in management long at the time, but his manner in dealing with players varied little after that.
It may amuse or impress people to learn of such idiosyncrasies, but the view from the dressing room of Keane was often one of bemusement, and frustration. When instruction or direction was needed one day, he opted instead to aim a karate-style kick at the tactics board. During one half-time break when the team was trailing 3-0, his decision to sit arms-folded in a chair in total silence contributed nothing to the chance of an improved second-half performance.
When one player questioned his style of management in public, he fined him heavily straight away. When another showed his disgust at not being included in a practice game, he put him up against the wall in his office and challenged him. "Go on son, be the first to take me on."
Such anecdotes feed into Keane's legend, but the players whose performances would make or break him as a manager remained unimpressed. Managers rely completely on the players' input to survive, or succeed, in their role. Keane never gave the impression he acknowledged this notion, and has paid the ultimate price as a result.
The performance of the majority of players improves if there is a belief they are appreciated by the manager. When he arrived first at Sunderland, the players wondered how they could ever impress a man so frustrated by the limits of some of his former team-mates at Manchester United. Some saw that as a challenge and trained with greater intensity than ever before. Others, reluctant to work under a man so intolerant of imperfections, set their hearts on a move at the earliest opportunity. I have no doubt the dressing room at Ipswich reacted similarly. The Ipswich CEO was diplomatic in his reply to questions about Keane's inability to manage players on a personal level. "Every manager has their own approach." That's true, but very few are as aloof, intimidating and critical.
He's one of seven managers to have lost their jobs since New Year's Day -- 24 have gone since the start of the season. Most have attributed their dismissal to poor results, and Keane did the same. It's as if they see no other measure of their talents. It may be that simple in their eyes, but the complexities of the role can reveal limitations long before a ball is kicked each weekend. For all of his flaws as a manager, I believe it is wrong to say he will struggle to find work again. After all, this is a business in which Steve Staunton can get offered roles, so you would assume he has little to fear there.
He has been roundly criticised for using Ipswich press conferences to voice his feelings on a variety of issues which in no way
relate to his role there. I don't agree with that. Sharing your views on a wide range of topics doesn't get people the sack (okay, except Glenn Hoddle) and in no way reflects on their commitment to their own job. He was sacked because the board at Ipswich no longer believed he could improve their standing as a club. All things considered, it's hard to disagree.
Yet to reveal his immediate plans, it is unclear whether he wishes to pursue his career in management or take an alternative route, even temporarily. However, an interest in developing and nurturing the talents of youth players in academies or analysing games from television studios would seem unlikely. In addition, he will never get work in the FAI as long as his relationship with John Delaney remains as it is, so talk of succeeding Giovanni Trapattoni is ridiculous.
I would be amazed if this is the last we see of him in management, but the standard of club that will approach him may not be of a level he would expect. This is the second job he has left in less than ideal circumstances, so the next role he takes on needs to work out. Even in football management, there's a limit to the amount of times you can fail.
rsadlier@independent.ie
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Sunday Indo SportCrafty cat-lovers can help unwanted cats by knitting cosy blankets and catnip mice for Cats Protection, the volunteer-run rescue that rehomes over 205,000 cats each year from its adoption centres across the country, as part of its annual knitting bee.
Blankets and toys can be dropped off at their rehoming centres and shops, as well as at the Knitting & Stitching show at Alexandra Palace, London, from October 7-11.
“The finished items have been a great success with the cats in our care, with the mice providing hours of fun and the blankets offering a snug place to curl up on,” says Events Manager Emma Osbourne. “We’ve been amazed by the colour and pattern combinations chosen by knitters and were really looking forward to seeing how creative they will be this year.”
Find out about Saga Pet Insurance
Tips for knitting cat toys
Cats Protection advises that when knitting a toy or blanket for a cat it’s best to avoid using stretchy yarns or small plastic items, such as beads for mouse eyes, to reduce the chance of cats harming themselves. Loose weave blanket patterns involving the use of large needles are best avoided too.
Cats Protection also suggests that cat owners regularly inspect cat toys for signs of wear or damage, and recommend not leaving cats unattended with knitted toys, and not to use knitted toys or blankets with cats that have wool-chewing habits.
Captain Cat-Battler the catnip mouse
This pattern is also available as a handy PDF for you to print out or save.
The famous Captain Cat-Battler was first created by Lauren O’Farrell for Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, who have enable Cats Protection to also use the pattern to benefit the cats in their care. He is seen here in the distinctive Cats Protection colour scheme of yellow and blue, but you can use any colour you wish.
Size: 10cm (4”) approx. from nose to start of tail
You will need
3.5mm knitting needles
15g Acrylic DK (body): any colour will do but use of CP’s colours (black or blue and yellow) preferred!
15g Acrylic DK (body, eye and eye patch): please see comment above about colours
15g Pink Acrylic DK (ears, nose and tail)
Stuffing (innards)
Small squeaker (optional)
Catnip pouch (optional)
Fierce feline-fighting detemination (essential)
Abbreviations
K = knit
P = purl
M1 = make one (make stitch from yarn between stitches)
To make Captain Cat-Battler Catnip Mouse
Body
Cast on 2 stitches in yellow
Row 1. K across
Row 2. P across
Row 3. K, M1, K (3sts)
Row 4. P across
Row 5. K, M1, K, M1, K (5 sts)
Row 6. P across
Row 7. K, M1, K3, M1, K (7 sts)
Row 8. P across
Row 9. K, M1, K5, M1, K (9 sts)
Row 10. P across
Row 11. K, M1, K7, M1, K (11 sts)
Row 12. P across
Row 13. K, M1, K9, M1, K (13 sts)
Row 14. P across
Row 15. K, M1, K11, M1, K (15 sts)
Row 16. P across
Row 17. K, M1, K13, M1, K (17 sts)
Row 18. P across
Change to blue
Row 19. K, M1, K15, M1, K (19 sts)
Row 20. P across
Change to yellow
Row 21. K, M1, K17, M1, K (21 sts)
Row 22. P across
Change to blue
Row 23. K, M1, K19, M1, K (23 sts)
Row 24. P across
Change to yellow
Row 25. K, M1, K21, M1, K (25 sts)
Row 26. P across
Change to blue
Row 27. K across
Row 28. P across
Change to yellow
Row 29- 35. Repeat rows 27 and 28 changing from yellow to blue every two rows ending in a yellow knit row
Row 36. P across in yellow
Cut about 15cm of yarn
Thread yarn through remaining stitches and draw tight to make round ‘tail end’ of mouse.
Ears (make 2)
Cast on 5 sts in pink
Row 1. K across
Row 2. P across
Row 3. K across
Row 4. P across
Row 5 K across
Cut about 10 cm of yarn
Thread yarn through stitches and draw tight to make round part of ear.
Darn in yarn end.
Sew cast on yarn through bottom stitches and draw tight to make lower part of ear.
Finishing
1. Sew two sides of mouse body together from ‘tail end’ to ‘nose end’ (making sure your stripes match up) leaving a hole for stuffing.
2. Insert stuffing (and optional squeaker and catnip) into mouse body. Wrapping squeaker and catnip in stuffing before inserting to make sure they’re squidgy and don’t make your mouse lumpy.
3. Finish sewing body right up to the tip of the nose.
4. Sew on ears using cast on yarn ends.
5. Embroider nose with pink yarn, running end of yarn through body and out of ‘tail end’ to form tail.
6. Tie knot at end of tail.
7. Embroider eye and square eyepatch with band. Eyepatch band should run from left ear, across his face to first blue stripe under his chin.
8. Greet your new roguish rodent with a cheery “Yaaaaaaaaaarn, me hearty!” and then launch him towards the nearest cat.
Pattern © Lauren O’Farrell (www.whodunnknit)
Interested in knitting or sewing for charity? Read our ideas for ways your skills can help charitiesHey Dumb Dumb,
I’m you in 27 years and I’ve been asked to write you a note on the night before we get drafted into the NHL, so I’m going to fire a few tips at you. These tips are a one-time thing, so don’t ask me why—just do them:
Before you step foot into the Draft tomorrow, the Miami Vice look is an ugly fad! Get rid of the cream blazer and green slacks. Buy a plain blue suit with white shirt as soon as you wake up. These photos will follow you for the rest of your life.
Immediately after getting picked—you’re going second, by the way—forget the handshakes and interviews and convince your new team, the Devils, to trade up before Quebec chooses a smallish guy named Joe Sakic. You’ll thank me later.
You will be suspended several times. Don’t say anything too stupid about the poor League Disciplinarian afterwards. You’ll see why one day.
Your agent is awesome. When he tells you that it’s responsible to invest your signing bonus in a thing called a stock market, he’s correct. But this time, just wait until after Oct. 19, 1987. Timing is everything.
In a few months, on the night before your first game in our hometown, Toronto, don’t meet all your friends at the high school dance. You are a damn professional athlete! Actually, nah, nevermind. That’s awesome, and will provide endless entertainment for your teammates when you’re stupid enough to tell them where you were.
Soon, your teammates will “initiate” you. They will warn you, and when they do, hide all the heat rub in the dressing room. Should you fail to hide it all, do NOT run to the shower. Water makes it hotter.
Only Bill Cosby looks good in loud colorful sweaters. Put it back on the shelf.
Don’t get that haircut you are thinking about. You have Fred Savage hair. Accept it.
Also, you know the cartoon How The Grinch Stole Christmas? Well, you look like a character from Whoville whenever you try to grow a beard. Shave.
The song Hungry Eyes will haunt you. Not saying why. You’ll see.
Call home more often even if it means paying $3 a minute in quarters at a pay phone. This is one of the last times in your life when you won’t be inundated with LOLs, :)s, LMAOs and TTYLs. It’s ok that you have no idea what any of those acronyms mean. When you’re 45, you still won’t understand them all.
Near the end of your career, you will fight a tough guy named Donald Brashear, after he takes some liberties with your captain. You will finish third in the fight, but do it anyway. Many establishments still give you free beer for this.
You will be suspended several times. Don’t say anything too stupid about the poor League Disciplinarian afterwards. You’ll see why one day.
Lastly, I’m not giving you the details on the wins or the losses. Not tipping you off about the heartbreaks or the big victories. Part of the fun is not knowing how the story goes. But, if someone is interested in you in 27 years, that’s a decent sign that there’s a good story here. (Or … things didn’t pan out and you went directly into journalism).
Either way, enjoy it all!
Work hard. Make us proud.
-Older You
Brendan Shanahan is the current President and Alternate Governor of the Toronto Maple Leafs. In over two decades as a player, Shanahan won three Stanley Cups. He is a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame. This piece is the first in a series of letters The Players’ Tribune will be running that are written from athletes to their younger selves.Remember science courses back in grade school? It might have been a while ago, or who knows – maybe you’re in grade school now, starting your journey in machine learning early. Either way, whether you took biology, chemistry, or physics, a common technique to analyze data is to plot how changing one variable affects the other.
Imagine plotting the correlation between rainfall frequency and agriculture production. You may observe that an increase in rainfall produces an increase in agriculture rate. Fitting a line to these data points enables you to make predictions about the agriculture rate under different rain conditions. If you discover the underlying function from a few data points, then that learned function empowers you to make predictions about the values of unseen data.
Regression is a study of how to best fit a curve to summarize your data. It is one of the most powerful and well-studied types of supervised learning algorithms. In regression, we try to understand the data points by discovering the curve that might have generated them. In doing so, we seek an explanation for why the given data is scattered the way it is. The best fit curve gives us a model for explaining how the dataset might have been produced.
In this article, you’ll learn how to formulate a real-world problem to use regression. As you’ll see, TensorFlow is just the right tool that endows us with some of the most powerful predictors.
Formal Notation
If you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I’m will demonstrate the first major machine learning tool, regression, and formally define it using precise mathematical symbols. Learning regression first is a great idea, because many of the skills you will develop carry over to other types of problems you may encounter. By the end of this article, regression will become the “hammer” in your box of machine learning tools.
Let’s say we have data about how much money people spent on bottles of beer. Alice spent $2 on 1 bottle, Bob spent $4 on 2 bottles, and Clair spent $6 on 3 bottles. We want to find an equation that describes how the number of bottles changes the total cost. For example, if every beer bottle costs $2, then a linear equation y = 2x can describe the cost of buying a particular number of bottles.
When a line appears to fit some data points well, we can claim that our linear model performs well. Actually, we could have tried out many possible slopes instead of choosing the value 2. The choice of slope is the parameter, and the equation produced is the model. Speaking in machine learning terms, the equation of the best fit curve comes from learning the parameters of a model.
As another example, the equation y = 3x is also a line, except with a steeper slope. You can replace that coefficient with any real number, let’s call it w, and the equation will still produce a line: y = wx. Figure 1 shows how changing the parameter w affects the model. The set of all equations we can generate this way is denoted M = {y = wx | w ∈ ℝ}.
It is read “All equations y = wx such that w is a real number.”
M is a set of all possible models. Choosing a value for w generates a candidate model M(w): y = wx. The regression algorithms that we can write in TensorFlow will iteratively converge to better and better values for the model’s parameter w. An optimal parameter, let’s call it w* (pronounced w star), is the best-fit equation M(w*): y = w*x.
In the most general sense, a regression algorithm tries to design a function, let’s call it f, that maps an input to an output. The function’s domain is a real-valued vector ℝd and its range is the set of real numbers ℝ. The input of the function could be continuous or discrete. However, the output must be continuous, as demonstrated by figure 2.
BY THE WAY Regression predicts continuous outputs, but sometimes that’s overkill. Sometimes we just want to predict a discrete output, such as 0 or 1, but nothing in-between. Classification is a technique better suited for such tasks.
We would like to discover a function f that agrees well with the given data points, which are essentially input/output pairs. Unfortunately, the number of possible functions is infinite, so we’ll have no luck trying them out one-by-one. Having too many options available to choose from is usually a bad idea. It behooves us to tighten the scope of all the functions we want to deal with. For example, if we look at only straight lines to fit a set of data points, then the search becomes much easier.
EXERCISE 1 How many possible functions exist that map 10 integers to 10 integers? For example, let f(x) be a function that can take numbers 0 through 9 and produce numbers 0 through 9. One example is the identity function that mimics its input, for example, f(0) = 0, f(1) = 1, and so on. How many other functions exist?
ANSWER 10^10 = 10,000,000,000
How do you know the regression algorithm is working?
Let’s say we’re trying to sell a housing market predictor algorithm to a real estate firm. It predicts housing prices given certain properties, such as number of bedrooms and lot-size. Real estate companies can easily make millions with such information, but they need some proof that it actually works before buying the algorithm from you.
To measure the success of the learning algorithm, you’ll need to understand two important concepts: variance and bias.
Variance is how sensitive a prediction is to what training set was used. Ideally, how we choose the training set shouldn’t matter – meaning a lower variance is desired.
Bias is the strength of assumptions made about the training dataset. Making too many assumptions might make it hard to generalize, so we prefer low bias as well.
If a model is too flexible, it may accidentally memorize the training data instead of resolving useful patterns. You can imagine a curvy function passing through every point of a dataset, appearing to produce no error. If that happens, we say the learning algorithm overfits the data. In this case, the best-fit curve will agree with the training data well; however, it may perform abysmally when evaluated on the testing data (see figure 3).
On the other hand, a not-so-flexible model may generalize better to unseen testing data, but would score relatively low in the training data. That situation is called underfitting. A too flexible model has high variance and low bias, whereas a too strict model has low variance and high bias. Ideally we would like a model with both low variance error and low bias error. That way, it both generalizes to unseen data and captures the regularities of the data. See figure 4 for examples.
Concretely, the variance of a model is a measure of how badly the responses fluctuate, and the bias is a measure of how badly the response is offset from the ground-truth. You want your model to achieve both accurate (low bias) as well as reproducible (low variance) results.
EXERCISE 2 Let’s say our model is M(w): y = wx. How many possible functions can you generate if the values of weight parameters w must be integers between 0 and 9 (inclusive)?
ANSWER Only 10. Namely, {y=0, y=x, y=2x, …, y=9x}.
To measure success in machine learning, we partition the dataset into two groups: a training dataset, and a testing dataset. The model is learned using the training dataset, and performance is evaluated on the testing dataset. Out of the many possible weight parameters we can generate, the goal is to find one that best fits the data. The way we measure “best fit” is by defining a cost function.
Linear Regression
Let’s start by creating fake data to leap into the heart of linear regression. Create a Python source file called regression.py and follow along with listing 1 to initialize data. The code will produce an output similar to figure 5.
Listing 1 Visualizing raw input
import numpy as np //#A import matplotlib.pyplot as plt //#B x_train = np.linspace( - 1, 1, 101 ) //#C y_train = 2 * x_train + np.random.randn( * x_train.shape) * 0.33 //#D plt.scatter(x_train, y_train) //#E plt.show() //#E
#A Import NumPy to help generate initial raw data
#B Use matplotlib to visualize the data
#C The input values are 101 evenly spaced numbers between -1 and 1
#D The output values are proportional to the input but with added noise
#E Use matplotlib’s function to generate a scatter plot of the data
Now that you have some data points available, you can try fitting a line. At the very least, you need to provide TensorFlow with a score for each candidate parameter it tries. This score assignment is commonly called a cost function. The higher the cost, the worse the model parameter will be. For example, if the best fit line is y = 2x, a parameter choice of 2.01 should have low cost, but the choice of -1 should have higher cost.
After we define the situation as a cost minimization problem, as denoted in figure 6, TensorFlow takes care of the inner workings and tries to update the parameters in an efficient way to eventually reach the best possible value. Each step of updating the parameters is called an epoch.
In this example, the way we define cost is by the sum of errors. The error in predicting x is often calculated by the squared difference between the actual value f(x) and the predicted value M(w, x). Therefore, cost is the sum of squared differences between the actual and predicted values, as seen by figure 7.
Let’s update our previous code to look like listing 2. This code defines the cost function, and asks TensorFlow to run an optimizer to find the optimal solution for the model parameters.
Listing 2 Solving linear regression
import tensorflow as tf //#A import numpy as np //#A import matplotlib.pyplot as plt //#A learning_rate = 0.01 //#B training_epochs = 100 //#B x_train = np.linspace(- 1, 1, 101 ) //#C y_train = 2 * x_train + np.random.randn( * x_train.shape) * 0.33 //#C X = tf.placeholder( "float" ) //#D Y = tf.placeholder( "float" ) //#D def model(X, w): //#E return tf.multiply(X, w) w = tf.Variable( 0.0, name= "weights" ) //#F y_model = model(X, w) //#G cost = tf.square(Y-y_model) //#G train_op = tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(learning_rate).minimize(cost) //#H sess = tf.Session() //#I init = tf.global_variables_initializer() //#I sess.run(init) //#I for epoch in range (training_epochs): //#J for (x, y) in zip (x_train, y_train): //#K sess.run(train_op, feed_dict= {X: x, Y: y}) //#L w_val = sess.run(w) //#M sess.close() //#N plt.scatter(x_train, y_train) //#O y_learned = x_train*w_val //#P plt.plot(x_train, y_learned, 'r' ) //#P plt.show() //#P
#A Import TensorFlow for the learning algorithm. We’ll need NumPy to set up the initial data. And we’ll use matplotlib to visualize our data.
#B Define some constants used by the learning algorithm. There are called hyper-parameters.
#C Set up fake data that we will use to find a best fit line
#D Set up the input and output nodes as placeholders since the value will be injected by x_train and y_train.
#E Define the model as y = w*x
#F Set up the weights variable
#G Define the cost function
#H Define the operation that will be called on each iteration of the learning algorithm
#I Set up a session and initialize all variables
#J Loop through the dataset multiple times
#K Loop through each item in the dataset
#L Update the model parameter(s) to try to minimize the cost function
#M Obtain the final parameter value
#N Close the session
|
a Confucius Institute, said Arthur Waldron, a history professor at the university. “People want to be tactful. They don’t want to lose exchange partners. Universities are desperate for money, and the Chinese have a lot of money,” he said.
Sometimes the pressure can be overt, some officials say. Richard Saller, a dean at Stanford, told Bloomberg in November that Hanban’s offer of $4 million to open a Confucius Institute on campus and endow a professorship came with a suggestion that the professor refrain from discussing Tibet. Stanford balked and got the money anyway, which it used to endow a chair in classical Chinese poetry. At Columbia the only sign of controversy was a single article in the campus newspaper saying the presence of a Confucius Institute would test the school’s “commitment to academic integrity.” At the London School of Economics, which saw its director, Howard Davies, resign last year over the school’s acceptance of funding from the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the institute’s presence has never been questioned.
“One of the reasons we’re not controversial is that we’ve never done anything controversial,” Mr. Byrne said.
But some academics at other campuses say they can already feel a chilling effect. One junior faculty member at a U.S. campus with a Confucius Institute responded to a reporter’s recent query with an e-mail explaining that to be identified as a critic could end his career: “I am an untenured professor in a department which receives a lot of money from a C.I., which is run by senior faculty that will vote on my tenure case.” A colleague, who also did not want to be identified, said the pressure was subtle. “They aren’t trying to stop debate,” he said. “It’s about the management of discussions, not the prevention of them.”
Bruce Cumings, a tenured historian at the University of Chicago who signed a petition protesting the Confucius Institute there, said that although he is on the board of the university’s East Asian study center, he heard nothing about the institute “until the day it was opened.” But such a low-profile approach, he said, is only possible while China itself remains calm. The network of institutes “are time bombs awaiting the next Tiananmen,” he said.Image caption Lampard said he had been inspired by reading stories with his daughters
England and Chelsea footballer Frank Lampard is to write a series of children's books, publisher Little Brown has announced.
The midfielder, whose contract expires at the end of the season, will pen five books, called Frankie's Magic Football, for children aged five and above.
The stories will follow the adventures of a school boy, Frankie, his football-loving friends, and pet dog Max.
Lampard said the stories were "loosely based on friends and team mates".
The 34-year-old will publish his first book, Frankie Versus The Pirate Pillagers, in June, followed by two more this year and another two in 2014.
"I first had the idea of Frankie and his Magic Football when reading stories to my own children," he said in a statement.
"Sport and reading are two essentials for us at home, so I decided to make up my own football stories and adventures."
'Wacky adventures'
Lampard has two daughters, aged five and eight, with his former fiancee, Spanish model Elen Rivas. He is currently engaged to TV presenter Christine Bleakley.
The vice-captain of Chelsea FC, Lampard currently earns £150,000 per week. He started his career in 1994 at West Ham United, where his father, Frank Lampard Sr, had also played.
He has represented England more than 90 times, scoring 27 goals - but he may be best remembered for a shot he took in a 2010 World Cup match against Germany.
The ball crossed the line, and players and fans believed Lampard had scored a goal - but it was disallowed. The resulting furore prompted football's world governing body, Fifa, to investigate the introduction of goal-line technology, which was used for the first time in a Club World Cup match last December.
Lampard's book deal was brokered by Neil Blair and Zoe King, who also represent JK Rowling. They said the books were "full of loveable characters on wacky adventures" and destined for "great things".
He is not the first footballer to write fiction - Arsenal star Theo Walcott has written a series of children's books and former England manager Terry Venables co-wrote a series of crime novels.Here be dragons. The words supposedly contain every difference between ancient maps and our own. Where old maps were illustrated and incomplete, ours are accurate and photographed from the sky. Old maps were pricey and precious; ours are nearly free and ubiquitous.
Most importantly: Old maps—early modern European maps—contain uncharted territory, across which beasts rumble and serpents writhe. They have dragons.
Our technology might be indistinguishable from magic, but it does not contain magical creatures. Google Maps does not have dragons.
Or that’s the story, anyway. But I’d always wondered: Do any old, original maps actually say those words, “Here be dragons?”
The answer, it seems, is … No.
Not a single old paper map presents those exact words—“Here be dragons”— in the margins or otherwise. Nor does any paper map include “Hic sunt dracones,” the words’ Latin equivalent.
But a globe does.
That’s right: One globe—just one—contains the words Hic sunt dracones. Called the Hunt-Lenox Globe, it was built in 1510, making it one of the first European globes ever made. It’s tiny and made of copper—you can see it pictured above. Now in the possession of the New York Public Library, the Hunt-Lenox Globe contains the famous warning on the southeast coast of Asia:
No dragons are near the words themselves, but the globe hides various sea beasts throughout.West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s opposition to the Teesta water-sharing agreement with Bangladesh threatens to throw a spanner in India’s hopes of inking a pact during Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s visit next week.
Foreign ministry spokesman Gopal Baglay recently said the Centre is talking to get all stakeholders including states “on board” before signing the treaty.
But the Teesta treaty is not a one-off instance where the Banerjee-led Trinamool government is at odds with the Centre. Here is a list of Central schemes/programmes that has been stonewalled by the West Bengal government in the last three years.
Smart cities mission
PM Narendra Modi launched his government’s ambitious programme to develop 100 smart cities in June 2015. Initially, West Bengal had nominated four cities, capital Kolkata, Bidhan Nagar, New Town and Haldia, for re-development under the scheme. But last year, the state pulled out New Town. Banerjee has openly criticised the Smart Cities project and said it will promote “inequitable development.” The West Bengal government has instead proposed to develop ten green cities including Rajarhat in the next five years that will be eco-friendly as well as smart instead of just one city based on parameters fixed by the Centre.
Real estate regulatory authority act
West Bengal is one of the few states that has not yet framed rules under the landmark law passed by parliament in May 2016 to protect homebuyers in India from unscrupulous developers. Under the realty law, states were given time till November 27 to notify their own rules based on the central law, which was to serve as benchmark.
“Neither have they framed the rules nor responded to the numerous communications we have sent to them on this issue. The state did not send any representative to two meetings that we held on January 17 and March 27 to address various issues/queries related to the law that states had raised,” said a official of the Union housing and urban poverty alleviation ministry. The full Act will come into force from May 1 when the regulatory authority is set up in each state and Union Territory.
River inter-linking project
The West Bengal government has not agreed to come on board for the Centre’s project to link the Manas-Sankaosh-Teesta-Ganga rivers to provide benefits of irrigation, drinking water and flood control to Assam, West Bengal and Bihar. Despite several letters written by Union water resources minister Uma Bharti to Banerjee soliciting her support, the the Bengal chief minister has opposed the project saying it will adversely affect the state’s interest. The feasibility report of the Manas-Sankosh-Teesta-Ganga link for alternate alignment is under final stage of preparation after the original alignment was not approved.
Scrapping of common engineering test
West Bengal has opposed the Centre’s move to have a single entrance test for admissions to all engineering colleges. West Bengal education minister Partha Chatterjee recently wrote to Union human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar opposing the move to scrap state engineering entrance exams on the ground that it amounts to Centre encroaching on state’s jurisdiction.
Swachh Bharat survey
West Bengal has also pulled out of the ‘Swachhata Survekshan’, a survey that ranks cities on the basis of cleanliness. Conducted by the Union urban development, as part of the Centre’s Swachh Bharat Mission, the third edition of the survey had 500 cities across India in its list. But the 60 cities from West Bengal are not participating in the survey.
Onkar Singh Meena, West Bengal’s urban development secretary recently told HT that Banerjee had launched Mission Nirmal Bangla to make the state open defecation free (ODF), and there is no point in having a survey.
First Published: Mar 29, 2017 16:09 ISTStephen T. Asma is the author of On Monsters: an Unnatural History of our Worst Fears (Oxford University Press), and Against Fairness (University of Chicago Press). Asma is a Fulbright Scholar, a fellow at the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture, and professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago.
Horror is both the human emotion, and the artistic genre designed to produce that emotion. What is it really, and why do we regularly seek out such an unpleasant experience? In this week’s Halloween edition of eSkeptic, Stephen T. Asma discusses “horror” and our fascination with it.
The Biological and Psychological
Basis of Horror
by Stephen T. Asma
We live in the age of horror—from entertainment to geopolitics. The word “horror” comes from the Latin verb horrere, to “stand on end” or bristle. The term is often used today to designate an artistic genre that began with the gothic literature of Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, 1818) and Washington Irving (Sleepy Hollow, 1820), and continues to the present, with authors like Stephen King and filmmakers like George Romero and Wes Craven. But “horror” is also the ineffable emotion that we experience when we’re at the very extreme of fear. Horror is both the human emotion, and the artistic genre designed to produce that emotion. What is it really, and why do we regularly seek out such an unpleasant experience?
Not only does one’s hair stand up with terror, but many other common physiological changes overtake the horrified person. Anthropologist and neuroscientist Melvin Konner explains that “the sympathetic nervous system is aroused during fear and flight as well as during rage and attack. The nerve net, balanced by the braking power of the parasympathetic system, spurs the increase of heart rate, rise in blood pressure, increased flow of blood to the muscles, and decreased circulation to the viscera that accompany fear and flight in many animals.” These sudden changes are also accompanied by the reflexive emptying of bladder and bowel, in order to help an animal prepare for fight or flight.
We also know that fear has a significant hormonal component. Corticotropin releasing hormone (CRH), cortisol, and adrenaline are some of the hormonal triggers and gates associated with fear. Scientists have been able to manipulate these in the laboratory and produce more and less fearful behavior in mammals. Experiments with mice have shown that if biologists insert a gene that makes corticotropin releasing hormone (CRH), they will produce a more fearful mouse. But removing the gene that builds the CRH receptor, thereby gating the entry of the hormone, will result in an extremely fearless mouse.
But horror is filled with many strange hybrid creatures and dismembered beings that far exceed the shapes and behaviors of regular predators. When Ichabod Crane, or anybody in this genre, encounters a menacing headless person, their fear might be broken down and analyzed in terms of cognitive mismatch. The sight of a combined normal (human) and abnormal (headless) creature bearing down on you, is a mental phenomenon of confusion between what should be the case (having a head) and what is the case (no head). And perhaps this confusion produces fear as an automatic secretion from the cognitive tangle.
Psychologists Donald Hebb and Wolfgang Schleidt separately experimented on fear in animals and found that fear is not a result of a hardwired phobia of specific predators, but a developmental arousal of our cognitive categories. When birds and mammals are born they have flexible categories that store associations. But these categories solidify quickly after birth and become default ways of interpreting the world. When any strange creature appears (one not corresponding to any default categories), the subject becomes aroused and fearful. According to psychologist Mary Ainsworth’s “strange situation” experiments, human default categories solidify around six-months old, and babies after that time are much more frightened by anything “strange.” The mismatch, according to this theory, causes the fear and arousal.
The philosopher Noel Carroll invented the term “category jamming” for experiences that violate our folk taxonomy of nature (hybrids), or violate our categories of animate and inanimate (cue zombies for the transitional stage). This view fits quite nicely with Hebb’s and Schleidt’s mismatch theory. Carroll arrives at his own mismatch theory by noticing that most horror monsters are disgusting as well as threatening, and we’re especially disgusted by “impurity.” Things that we find impure, and consider as abominations, are usually indeterminate entities—in between normal categories of being. For example, blood, feces, spit, snot, and vomit all blur the usual categories of me and not me, or human and not human. So many monsters have mucus-like slime oozing off them, or gelatinous blebbing, or sexual undulation, or viscous uncanny twisting.
Carroll thinks that it is this cognitive slippage, invoked by monsters, that explains why we are both repelled and drawn to horror films and novels. The fascination and arousal produced by categorical mismatches, is the solution to the paradox of why we seek out an experience that is at least partly unpleasant. This argument is somewhat compelling, but perhaps a bit too cognitive and intellectual, and not deep enough into the cellar of our reptilian brains.
Many of the creatures of the horror genre—like the “face-hugger” creature in Alien—are composites of real-life natural history enemies. Snakes and spiders horrify most humans, so mixing them together into one creature may well amplify the terror. Arachnophobia, or fear of spiders, is a human universal, especially in children. Biologist Tim Flannery asks, “Why do so many of us react so strongly, and with such primal fear, to spiders? The world is full of far more dangerous creatures such as stinging jellyfish, stonefish, and blue ringed octopi that—by comparison—appear to barely worry most people.”
Flannery offers a Darwinian story that connects human arachnophobia to our African prehistory. Since Homo sapiens emerged in Africa, he suggests that a species of spider could have been present as an environmental pressure. If humans evolved in an environment with venomous spiders, then a phobia could have been advantageous for human survival and such a trait could be expected to gain greater frequency in the larger human populations. The six-eyed sand spider of Western and Southern Africa actually fits that prediction very well. It is a crab-like spider that hides in the sand and leaps out to capture prey. Its venom is extremely dangerous to children, and one can see how a fear of spiders, in this African context, would have been highly advantageous. So our contemporary arachnophobia may be a leftover from our prehistory on the savanna.
Is the phylogenetic “memory” of ancient danger somehow rewritten in our contemporary brains as Flannery seems to be suggesting here, or is the categorical mismatch system enough to make spiders and snakes horrible? Some evolutionary psychologists expect to find a morphological archetype of “scary spider” somewhere in the inherited mental landscape, but the developmental mismatch theory suggests a different mechanism to explain the same universal phobia.
If early Homo sapiens babies spent most of their first year strapped to their mothers or otherwise protected (and off the ground) by parents and alloparents, then creepy-crawlies of every variety would, once encountered, radically disturb the default categorical systems laid down in the child’s first six months. The same argument can be enlisted to help explain other cases of predator-based phobias, like fear of big cats, crocodiles and murky water, and other ecological threats. It also explains similar phobias in our primate cousins (chimps have snake phobias too). And if we add the emerging imagery and stories of early human culture (e.g., cave paintings and gestural reenactments), we can see how “adaptive horror” can be strengthened, reinforced and transmitted beyond the automatic process of categorical mismatch.
The cultures of horror are built upon the adaptive biology of fear, but we’ve now become connoisseurs of terror. And we’ve had a long history of recruiting this biocultural emotional system to help us demonize our political enemies. But horror also helps us prepare, so to speak, for real terror. As Stephen King says, “We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”WASHINGTON (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron has called on all sides in the North Korean nuclear crisis to act responsibly “to prevent any escalation of tensions” after a days-long war of words between Washington and Pyongyang.
In a statement Saturday, Macron said the situation “undermines the preservation of international peace” and the North Korean regime “poses a serious threat to the security of its neighbors.”
Calling it “the responsibility of all,” Macron called on the international community to “act in a concerted, firm and effective manner, as it has just done in the (U.N.) Security Council, to bring North Korea back to the path of dialogue.”
France is a member of the Security Council, which approved fresh sanctions on North Korea this month for its recent intercontinental ballistic missile testing.Residents of Lisle and Warrenville have been collecting signatures for a ballot measure to have their towns absorbed into Naperville, according to the Daily Herald. Another petition is rumored to be taking place in Woodridge.
An unidentified man was reportedly collecting signatures for one of these petitions outside a library in Warrenville on Friday. The petitions apparently would add a measure to the April 4 ballot.
"I've been mayor for 12 years and I've never heard of anyone interested in annexing to Naperville," Warrenville Mayor David Brummel told the Daily Herald. Brummel said he opposes any effort to combine the towns.
A post on the City of Warrenville Facebook page states that the petition was not initiated by the city, and it is not endorsed by the city council.
Facebook screenshot
Naperville Mayor Steve Chirico said he had met with a Lisle resident about annexation, but did not hear anything else on the matter.
"I don't know what they're trying to accomplish," Chirico told the Daily Herald "Why consolidate unless you can deliver services faster or better?"
Officials from Naperville, Lisle, Warrenville and Woodridge said annexation is complex and is not likely to happen.
Image via ShutterstockQ: When do I earn Points and Tier Credits for my spend on the M life Rewards MasterCard?
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A: Yes, only M life Rewards members with a US resident address are eligible to apply.
Q: Do I only earn Points and Tier Credits at M life Rewards Destinations3?
A: Actually, you earn both Points and Tier Credits everywhere you make purchases with your M life Rewards MasterCard. Use it for everyday purchases and on your next visit to your favorite M life Rewards destination.
Q: How can using my M life Rewards MasterCard help me get back to my favorite M life Rewards destination even faster?
A: You earn rewards everywhere you make purchases with your M life Rewards MasterCard. For example, with each $1 spent on gas or at the supermarket you will earn 2 Points and 2 Tier Credits1. So now you can turn refueling at the pump into a relaxing trip at the spa.Karen Bleier/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
If there is one theme that will be the topic of digital business this year, it is mobile.
ComScore, which tracks Web and mobile usage, published a report about what happened in 2012, and what to expect in 2013.
It shows that the effects of a movement toward mobile are everywhere, from shopping to media to search. According to the report, “2013 could spell a very rocky economic transition,” and businesses will have to scramble to stay ahead of consumers’ changing behavior.
Here are a few interesting tidbits from the 48-page report.
The mobile transition is happening astonishingly quickly. Last year, smartphone penetration crossed 50 percent for the first time, led by Android phones. People spend 63 percent of their time online on desktop computers and 37 percent on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, according to comScore.
Just as they compete on computers, Facebook and Google are dominant and at each other’s throats on phones.
Google’s map app for the iPhone, which had been the most used mobile app, lost its No. 1 spot to Facebook after Apple kicked Google’s maps off the iPhone in October. Now, Facebook reaches 76 percent of the smartphone market and accounts for 23 percent of total time spent using apps each month. The next five most used apps are Google’s, which account for 10 percent of time on apps.
Photo
As mobile continues to take share from desktop, some industries have been particularly affected, and they are seeing significant declines in desktop use of their products as a result. They are newspapers, search engines, maps, weather, comparison shopping, directories and instant messenger services.
The most visited Web sites are not so surprising: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. Facebook continues to take up most of our time online.
But there were a few surprises from younger, smaller Web companies. Tumblr was No. 8 on the list of sites, ordered by time spent on them. And several Web sites were breakout hits last year, as measured by growth and visitor numbers: Spotify (music), Dropbox (online storage), Etsy (shopping), BuzzFeed (news), JustFab (shopping), SoundCloud (music) and BusinessInsider (news).
Search, one of the biggest and most reliable Web industries, is at a crossroads, comScore said. Even though the search market continues to be extraordinarily profitable, there is a desire for it to evolve and offer new services to users.
Here is some evidence: Searches on traditional search engines, dominated by Google, declined 3 percent last year, and the number of searches per searcher declined 7 percent. Yet searches on specialty sites, known as vertical search engines, like Amazon.com or Whitepages.com, climbed 8 percent.
Social search, based on what users’ friends like, has put Facebook and Google on a “collision course,” comScore said, particularly in searches for local businesses like restaurants.
In social networking, the visual Web, as comScore calls it, has transformed the landscape. Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram, all of which emphasize images, each gained more than 10 million visitors last year.
Last year was also pivotal for online video, comScore said, as viewers increasingly seek the ability to watch video when and where they want. Watching TV shows online helped last year break viewing records, especially during the Olympics.
In the United States, 75 million people a day watch online video and stream 40 billion videos a month, and viewing is driven by YouTube.
There has also been a turning point for video ads. They cost more than typical ads, and have always lagged behind viewership. But in 2012, 23 percent of videos were accompanied by an ad, up from 14 percent the year before. More TV ad dollars are coming to online video, comScore concluded.
Though e-commerce spending grew 13 percent last year, it was a disappointing holiday season online, largely because of economic pressures. Purchasing on mobile phones is beginning to make a dent in e-commerce, comScore said, with mobile shopping accounting for 11 percent of e-commerce in the fourth quarter of 2012, up from 3 percent in the period two years earlier.I am an advocate for an equal society, but just because I am a woman, this does not mean I am a feminist. Feminism began as what can only be described as a challenge for an equal
society, when women were not allowed to vote, own a property or even earn money.
These women’s liberation movements fought for a balance in democracy.
And women succeeded. From 1918 onwards, feminism thrived and grew, into the first and second movements, giving women a chance at something that they had never experienced. A vote, education and the right to work after marriage.
In countries other than our own and those of the Western world, women are still being treated like second class citizens and the need for an equal society could flourish through feminism. They are still in an era where feminism is really about equal rights.
Unfortunately here in Ireland and most developed countries, feminism has seen a shift, moving away from equal rights for all and towards the mindset that men’s rights do not exist, or are not as important as women’s rights.
I have seen countless tweets and Facebook posts about how we should rise up and kill all men or how men are the root of all our problems. When did this become part of feminism?
Do not get me wrong, the plight of women does not go unheard of in my life. Getting catcalled, harassed and having men think that they have a human right to be given attention, just because I am standing alone is normal to me. But when exactly did feminists forget that men face real problems too?
In a society where our mental health is one of our most valued possessions, it falls through the cracks, especially for men.
Nearly 300 more men died by suicide than women in Ireland in 2015, and the same kind of statistics can be found in the years before, because ‘men don’t cry’?
There is a stigma surrounding a man talking about his feelings or his mental health, just in case he seems ‘weak’ or ‘unmanly’. If this statistic alone is not enough to convince feminists that society disadvantages men too, then what is or what will ever be enough?
Feminism used its voice in the media to portray what they wanted. Where a movements voice in the media is its center point, it is what everyone hears and focuses on.
It used this to create the illusion that women are the only downtrodden gender. That men are the only culprits for crimes such as violence, domestic abuse and cat calling, creating feelings of mistrust and suspicion towards all men, even though it is a minority perpetrating these crimes.
What does this mean for society?
This bias in the media has indicated that some women are adopting a mindset that their husband need to help out more at home or doesn’t do any housework. Despite them working all day and being the only person who earns money in the home. How can this be equality?
The meaning behind the word feminism has been moulded and changed from equal rights for men and women, to women advocating solely for women’s rights.
Now women are abandoning feminism in their droves, leaving behind the extremists, who are screaming for blood instead of equality.
In a survey done in the UK, only seven per cent of women surveyed considered themselves feminists. However 74 per cent believed in gender equality.
We are using an old and outdated definition of feminism to fight for equal rights in a society where the meaning of equality has changed. We are no longer fighting a male dominated society where women have no rights.
Instead, we should be fighting together to make the world a more fair and just place. Rather than women solely campaigning for women’s rights or men campaigning solely for men’s rights. We need to campaign for equal rights for both sexes.
Feminism has advanced society, there is no doubt about that. But feminists need to realise that women are not always the victims. Men face issues of their own, which may have been created by feminism in the first place.
There are plenty of examples of how feminism has actively fought men in their pursuit of equality. For example, feminism fighting paternal rights and feminism fighting educational changes to help boys. Whereas when questioned about what feminism has done for men’s rights, they have no answer.
Feminism was meant to be a battle for equal rights, but it is not. Equality is not a battle for just one gender, it is a battle for the human race as a whole.
I do not think I can ever call myself a feminist. I believe that society equally disadvantages both men and women.
If campaigning for women’s rights or men’s rights is what you are passionate about, then more power to you. I am just sick of hearing the word feminism.
Lucy ManganInvestigating how languages emerge and evolve. Using climate-change data to predict dust storms and bacterial meningitis outbreaks in Northern Africa. Understanding whether age-related diseases may stem from a common driver. Determining whether the presence of oxygen can be used to predict life on distant exoplanets.
Harvard scientists are known for pushing boundaries, but the projects funded through the 2017 Star Family Challenge for Promising Scientific Research are poised to take that reputation to new heights.
Created through a gift from James A. Star ’83, the annual challenge funds high-risk, high-reward research that might not receive funding through other programs.
“I want to salute the winners of the 2017 Star Family Challenge,” Star said. “This is a wonderful set of projects, and I look forward to hearing about them. I also want to thank Professor Randy Buckner and his committee for taking over from [former chairman] Doug Melton and moving the challenge forward.”
As part of the program, the faculty members selected for the awards — Jesse Snedeker, Elsie Sunderland, Caroline Buckee, Amy Wagers, and Robin Wordsworth — made short presentations on their work to a standing-room-only crowd in the Faculty Room of University Hall.
“We live in a time in which the funding of science faces threats,” said Buckner, a professor of psychology and of neuroscience. “It is unlikely the funding of science is going to become more risk-taking, more imaginative, or more centered on the blue-sky projects which excite so many people here today.
“The need for the type of funding the Star Family Foundation is providing is going to become ever more critical,” he continued. “This support means a very great deal.”
Jesse Snedeker
“Language is ubiquitous,” said Snedeker, a professor of psychology, describing her project. “Everywhere in the world you will find people talking to one another. These languages have many properties in common — they all use nouns and verbs, they all have grammatical rules, and all languages are acquired by young children over a very short period. But … there is also remarkable diversity of language — they can vary in their words, in the specific grammatical structures that they allow, and in their sounds.”
The basic question Snedeker hopes to address is one that has long been at the center of psychological research: Where does language come from?
It’s an extremely difficult problem, she noted, because while the first humans left Africa at least 60,000 years ago, written records of language begin only about 5,000 years ago. What researchers can examine are the languages created by deaf communities.
Working with the deaf community in Nicaragua, Snedeker and colleagues plan to collect data on shared words, grammatical rules, and social networks among students from the 1970s through the 1990s with the goal of understanding how language changed over time.
“What other researchers have discovered is that the first cohort — those students that came into the schools in the ’70s — had shared signs for certain words and ordered narratives, but they do not reliably mark which argument is the subject and which is the object with either word order, like English, or case marking, like Russian or Turkish,” Snedeker said. “But by the time the later cohorts come in, they use verbal inflection about 50 percent of the time, and subject, object, verb word order the rest of the time.
“This rapid pattern of evolution of language … raises some interesting questions,” Snedeker added. “The first we’re going to be asking is: Why haven’t these older signers picked up on what the younger people around them are doing? They’re part of a larger community, yet they haven’t adopted the regularities that the 20- and 30-year-olds are using.”
Working with Martin Nowak, a professor of biology and mathematics and director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and Annemarie Kocab, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology, Snedeker hopes to create computational models that can provide new insight into the social dynamics that drive language.
Amy Wagers
When you consider the greatest risk factor for many diseases, says Wagers, the Forst Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, it all comes down to one word: aging.
There is growing evidence that diseases such as cancer, cardiac disease, and cognitive decline — today viewed as separate medical challenges — could be treated by targeting their age-related roots, Wagers said.
“The underlying goal of this project is to understand the fundamental physiological processes of the natural process of aging, and then understand how those impact health,” Wagers said. “[With] that understanding, can we develop therapies or other interventions that allow us to take aim at that root cause, or develop strategies that could be applied across different diseases of aging which have typically been thought of as independent.”
The notion that many age-related diseases may share a common driver was inspired in part by the discovery of mutations in circulating blood cells that accumulate with age and lead to clonal hematopoiesis — problems in the formation of blood. Wagers and colleagues hope to investigate a new hypothesis — that those mutations, and the problems they cause, may be a common driver of age-associated dysfunction across organ systems.
“What this project will allow us to do is clarify the relevance … of these age-related [mutations],” Wagers said. “This will allow us to understand whether there is therapeutic value in targeting those clones.”
Working with Lee Rubin, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology, and Richard T. Lee, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology and of medicine, Wagers plans to use CRISPR technology to introduce specific mutations associated with clonal hematopoiesis in humans into young and middle-aged mice, and monitor the rate of emergence of age-associated pathologies in three different organ systems: skeletal muscle, the brain, and the heart.
Elsie Sunderland
Seasonal change and illness often go hand in hand, but in West Africa, the combination can be deadly.
Every year, dust storms across the region are accompanied by devastating epidemics of bacterial meningitis, which has a mortality rate of 50 percent when left untreated, said Sunderland, the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and an associate professor of environmental science and engineering at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Though it’s thought that the dust irritates the throat, making people more susceptible to disease, Sunderland plans to test an alternative hypothesis — that meningitis bacteria are carried on the winds that drive those dust storms.
“Microbes can be transported on aerosols like dust,” Sunderland said. “And these dust storms are very much a function of global climate … so the intensity of these storms has been changing quite a bit over the last number of years. This is a very dynamic phenomenon that we are trying to link to the spread of meningitis in the area.”
Sunderland’s partner on the project is Buckee, an infectious disease epidemiologist from the Harvard Chan School, who said that while there has long been evidence of correlation between the dust storms and the outbreaks, the mechanism behind the link has been unclear.
Along with Buckee, Sunderland has recruited help from Tovi Lehmann of the National Institutes of Health, who samples insect populations on wind currents in Mali using helium balloons, and Stephen Bentley, a bacterial genomics expert at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
The group plans to use helium balloons and microbial collection devices to sample aerosols transported by winds in Mali, sequence the bacterial genomes that are collected, and assess the risk of atmospheric spread of meningitis and other windborne pathogens.
“The idea is to provide some metrics to use for modeling to better understand these outbreaks, and to potentially use for forecasting,” Sunderland said. “That’s a major benefit for the practice of public health and being able to identify where vulnerable populations are.”
Robin Wordsworth
With every discovery of a new exoplanet, interest in the idea that one may hold extraterrestrial life gains momentum. But how will that life be detected if the technology doesn’t exist to send probes into deep space?
One possible method, says Wordsworth, an assistant professor of environmental science and engineering at SEAS, may be in detecting oxygen in the atmosphere of other planets.
“What’s really fascinating and exciting about this to me is that for the first time on a large scale this question of extraterrestrial life is no longer something which is purely in literature or science fiction,” Wordsworth said. “It’s something we can start to address scientifically.”
Though there is wide evidence that oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere is due to the presence of life, there is debate about whether the gas is a reliable biosignature, because recent research has shown that some planets can produce oxygen-rich atmospheres abiotically.
In an effort to resolve that debate, Wordsworth and collaborators David Charbonneau, a professor of astronomy, and Dimitar Sasselov, Phillips Professor of Astronomy and director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, plan to construct advanced planetary evolution models that incorporate atmospheric, surface, and interior processes to simulate the early years of a planet’s development — the period that most affects a planet’s oxygen accumulation.Today I sat back and wondered where my life is at. Where all the good times went, and when will they come again? I |
of confidence in US sovereign credit quality.The result in the fabled “Poom” of iTulip’s 1999 Ka-Poom Theory, a theory of the final stage of the disinflation and reflation process of the asset price inflation cycles that began in the early 1980s, began to end in early 2008 with the onset of debt deflation.We explore the fiscal deficit shock idea in more detail in Flow of Funds in a Transformational Depression ($ubscription) __________________________________________________Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. took to Twitter Wednesday morning to tell his 24,000 followers that the “senseless” murder of Christopher Lane by three black teenagers in Oklahoma is “frowned upon.”
“Praying for the family of Chris Lane. This senseless violence is frowned upon and the justice system must prevail,” Mr. Jackson said.
Mr. Lane, a 23-year-old native of Australia, was visiting the town of Duncan where his girlfriend and her family live, when he was gunned down by three young men who said they were “bored.”
“They saw Christopher go by, and one of them said: ‘There’s our target,’” Police Chief Danny Ford said Monday “The boy who has talked to us said, ‘We were bored and didn’t have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.’”
Laura Ingraham, Allen West and others have wondered if Mr. Jackson would be taking action in this case, since he so vigorously supported Trayvon Martin.
After his comments today, though, it doesn’t seem Twitter users are buying his condolences.
“frowned upon? FROWNED UPON?!! Use all the vigor of your outrage to help stop this violence! Not frown upon it!!!” one person commented.
“But I guess you aren’t ‘Outraged’ and won’t be marching over it huh?” another asked.
Another said, “Thanks for that tepid, milquetoast response. ‘Frowned upon’?? Why not be REALLY harsh and call the boys ‘naughty’ or ‘fresh’?”
About an hour later, Mr. Jackson went back to bashing conservatives.
“5 conservatives on the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act. Conservative governors are pushing to constrict the vote,” he said.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.CHELTENHAM Gold Cup winning trainer, Jim Culloty, warned that rural Ireland is under siege after thieves stole more than €15,000 from his racing stables.
CHELTENHAM Gold Cup winning trainer, Jim Culloty, warned that rural Ireland is under siege after thieves stole more than €15,000 from his racing stables.
The thieves raided the Mount Corbitt racing yard outside Churchtown, Co Cork at exactly the same time as the three-time Cheltenham Gold Cup winning jockey was masterminding his first victory as trainer with Lord Windermere.
They fled with the trainer's 2007 Toyota Hilux 4x4 as well as assorted equipment, including generators, a chainsaw and tools.
A garda manhunt is now under way for the thieves, who escaped with over €15,000 in goods.
Mr Culloty warned that his story was no different to thousands of other householders and farmers around rural Ireland who have been targeted by "a plague of robberies and burglaries" over recent years.
"The number of thefts is definitely on the increase. The whole thing has gone beyond a joke. Something has to be done," he said.
"The whole thing is a scandal... I feel sorry for the gardai. The thieves don't give a damn because they know even if they are caught they will probably be treated leniently by the courts," he said.
Mr Culloty said the real tragedy was that thousands of rural dwellers now lived nightly in fear of their properties being targeted by criminal gangs.
The thieves did not attempt to break into Mr Culloty's two- storey farmhouse home located just 50m from his stables and storehouses.
SURVEILLANCE
The house has an elaborate alarm system to protect Mr Culloty's racing memorabilia and trophies, which now include four Cheltenham gold tankards.
Gardai suspect the thieves had mounted surveillance on Mount Corbitt, which has electronic security gates and CCTV security camera systems.
The trainer said he was not going to allow the thieves to spoil his Cheltenham celebrations.
"I got a call on Friday to tell me what had happened. But not for one second did it spoil winning the Gold Cup. No one was hurt so that is a bit of a relief. But the most disappointing thing is that the gardai seem to think the thieves had local knowledge.
The thieves fled through a rear gate to the property – and were so well prepared they had taken it off its hinges rather than make noise by attempting to smash its padlock.
The trainer and his jockeys, Davey Russell and Robbie McNamara, arrived home to a heroes' welcome in Churchtown last Sunday from the legendary Cotswolds venue.
"They obviously saw myself and my wife and children were over there in Cheltenham and decided to strike," he added.
Mr Culloty and Davy Russell proudly displayed five Cheltenham gold tankards in the stable yard – two from Lord Windermere and three from Mr Culloty's triple Gold Cup triumphs with Best Mate as a jockey.
Mr Culloty is now one of only four men to have recorded success in the Cheltenham Gold Cup as both a winning jockey and trainer.
Irish IndependentChelsea have an unexpected rival in the battle to sign young Brazilian Talisca. Jose Mourinho had marked out Talisca as the footballer to watch in Portugal this season and he was certainly correct in that claim as the 20 year old took the league by storm. Mourinho had also said that if hadn't been for work permit issues then Talisca would be in the Premier League. That meant piles of transfer rumours and Chelsea regularly having their representatives check up on Talisca only adds fuel to the fire.
The Premier League club had someone watch Talisca at the weekend and Portuguese newspaper O Jogo said that was part of Chelsea's efforts to sign the player in january, and then likely loan him back to Benfica for at least the rest of the current season. Talisca has a buyout clause of €45m but Chelsea would expect a significant discount on that and there could be truth that they're eyeing a january deal, which would give Benfica a cash boost - just as with Nemanja matic a year earlier.
However, on Tuesday O Jogo say there's now competition. french club Marseille also had someone watch Talisca at the weekend and reports in the French suggest there's much interest from the club who Marcelo Bielsa currently manages. Marseille are having a great season in Ligue 1 and will be aware they need to back Bielsa or risk trouble in paradise.
Marseille may be keen on Talisca but they wouldn't be able to get near Chelsea's financial pull on either transfer fee or wages. Furthermore the French club wouldn't really be considered a step up on Benfica. If it comes to a battle, there's little doubt Mourinho will win.Paying tradesmen cash in hand to avoid tax is "morally wrong", a Treasury minister has said. Just how ethically dubious is the practice, if at all?
Here's how it goes. The kitchen needs replacing, or the boiler has expired. But money is tight, so you strike a deal with the contractors who pop round to give you a quote.
You settle up with a wad of banknotes and get a discount. They slip the cash into their back pockets, out of sight of the taxman.
Treasury Minister David Gauke has declared that the practice is "morally wrong".
He told the Daily Telegraph that off-the-books arrangements like this meant a shortfall for the Treasury and higher tax bills for other Britons. The black economy is thought to cost the exchequer some £2bn a year.
Image caption It might be illegal - but is it as bad as trillion-pound avoidance by the super-rich?
In an era of fiscal austerity, with greater attention than ever on the tax arrangements of celebrities like Jimmy Carr it is hardly surprising that the debate has widened.
This, however, raises two immediate dilemmas. Firstly, is tax evasion always equally wrong regardless of the scale involved?
And secondly, does the customer who doesn't ask questions about why he or she is getting a cash discount share moral culpability with the trader who cheats the tax system?
In effect, it's a matter of philosophical contention whether all evasion and avoidance is always bad, or if handing over cash and not asking too many questions is the consumer equivalent of parking on a double-yellow line.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Mr Gauke said cash payments were "facilitating" the hidden economy
A utilitarian might weigh up the evasion according to scale and how it affects the greater good. Others, however, might look to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant's "categorical imperative", which implies that any rule or code must be universally applied if it is to have any moral value.
For Julian Baggini, author of several books on philosophy, breaking the law by knowingly evading tax is always immoral. But this is not to say, he believes, that it is always equally so.
"It's wrong because as a citizen in a democratic society you agree to abide by the same laws," he says. "If you don't like them then you work to change them through the democratic process.
It is morally wrong not to pay tax one is obliged to pay. It is another thing to constrain freedom of transaction Prof Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford
"But there are degrees of wrongness and compared to the global scale of tax avoidance this is minor. It's important when you raise something as being wrong to maintain that sense of perspective."
Certainly, on blogs, message boards and social networking sites, some questioned why the minister was focusing on the topic at a time when millions of Britons were struggling to make ends meet - and in the week when a report by the Tax Justice Network suggested the global elite hid at least £13tn ($21tn) in tax havens by the end of 2010.
Some will protest that it is not for a householder, say, to demand to scrutinise their cleaner's annual tax returns.
Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, says that ultimately, the moral obligation for settling a VAT bill lies with the trader and not the consumer so long as the task is the former's legal responsibility.
"It is morally wrong not to pay tax one is obliged to pay - it is another thing to constrain freedom of transaction," he says.
Image caption Is it up to the tradesperson alone to take responsibility for their tax bill?
"People should be free to ask to pay in cash, or bank transfer or by any method. Those personally concerned to prevent tax evasion could ask to pay in non-cash methods - and those methods should be accepted."
For Baggini, however, that argument is not good enough. Not asking questions, he believes, is as much of a conscious act of omission as failing to settle up with HMRC.
"There is such a thing as culpable ignorance," he counters. "If you choose not to know you are blameworthy of that ignorance."
The minister said there was nothing wrong with paying in cash, but doing so with the purpose of avoiding tax was wrong.
Inevitably, attention quickly turned to the question of whether the minister had always applied his own categorical imperative. He insisted that he had "never said to a tradesman, 'If I pay you cash, can I get a discount?'"
The sentiment was not universal, however. Asked subsequently if he ever had paid in cash to keep costs down, London Mayor Boris Johnson said: "I've certainly paid a lot of cash in hand."
The debate will continue unabated. So too, no doubt, will the practice of settling up with the kitchen fitter or plumber in £20 notes.New Delhi: Will India succeed in improving its ranking in the next edition of the Doing Business report published by the World Bank?
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) believes it has done enough in the past one year to move the country up in the rankings, but not enough to make it to the desired Top 50 countries in the world in terms of doing business. The Union government made its case before a mission from the World Bank on Monday.
The World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index 2015 ranked India at 142, after it slipped two places, among 189 countries measured.
If India succeeds in improving its rankings, the NDA will claim that this is the result of the structural reforms it has pursued in incremental fashion since taking charge of the country in May last year.
Making a case for a better regulatory environment in India, the government pitched reforms such as doing away with the minimum paid-up capital for companies, single-step incorporation of companies, and reduced documentation for exports and imports, to a two-member team from the World bank collecting data for the Doing Business Report, 2016.
The World Bank defines ease of doing business around the rules and regulations that assist in creating a “dynamic private sector".
“Doing Business promotes rules that establish and clarify property rights, minimize the cost of resolving disputes, increase the predictability of economic interactions and provide contractual partners with core protections against abuse," the Bank said in its 2015 report.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set his government the challenging task of improving India’s rank to the Top 50 by 2017 to attract investors. Accordingly, the NDA has since launched a drive to improve the country’s business environment, unveiling several labour reforms, swifter approvals for businesses to boost manufacturing and job creation and efforts to bring transparency and stability in tax rates.
The reforms the government mentioned to the World Bank team include doing away with the requirement of having a seal and filing a declaration of commencement for companies, facilitating loans or guarantee to a fully owned subsidiary company, simplified processes to approve related-party transactions, taking board resolutions off the list of mandatory disclosure requirements, facilitating revival and rehabilitation of small and medium-sized businesses, and constituting Customs Clearance Facilitation Committees at ports to facilitate expeditious clearance of goods.
Officials from the department of economic affairs, department of industrial policy and promotion (DIPP), ministry of corporate affairs and the central board of direct taxes met the delegation from the World Bank on Monday.
The government said in a statement that the team “appreciated the efforts made by the government and promised to take note of initiatives taken..."
The Doing Business rankings are based on consultations by the World Bank with legal and accounting professionals, government officials and business practitioners, across countries.
Onno Ruhl, the World Bank’s country director for India, observed at the release of last year’s ranking that though India was carrying out reforms and improving its position on various indices, it needed to outperform its peers for a better rank.
D.K. Srivastava, chief policy advisor at consulting firm EY, said, “For the ease of doing business rankings, the World Bank utilizes about 10 indices. The government has so far only attended to entry-related issues that are likely to be facilitated and might improve India’s ranking this time even though not very significantly. For other indicators, little action has been taken so far. So achieving a ranking in the Top 50 is likely to take longer than two years. It is an uphill and time-consuming task that will require more effort from the government."
DIPP also issued a framework for assessing state-level reforms to enable ease of doing business on Monday, coinciding with the visit of the World Bank team. DIPP is looking to rank all state governments as the business environments in states is seen as an important factor in attracting investments.
The department also set up a panel in April to recommend a simpler mechanism to replace the myriad permissions currently required to start a business and has integrated 14 central government services on the eBiz platform that aims to provide a single-window clearance mechanism for businesses so that they can apply for all required approvals at one place online to cut red tape and improve transparency.It is enough to make Tulowitzki roll his eyes and shrug his shoulders. He's not interested in the rumors, nor is he interested in being traded, regardless of what is churned out by the rumor mill.
DENVER -- The trade rumors have become a part of the daily routine for Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki. And with the July 31 non-waiver Trade Deadline 10 days away, the rumor mill will be grinding faster than ever.
DENVER -- The trade rumors have become a part of the daily routine for Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki. And with the July 31 non-waiver Trade Deadline 10 days away, the rumor mill will be grinding faster than ever.
It is enough to make Tulowitzki roll his eyes and shrug his shoulders. He's not interested in the rumors, nor is he interested in being traded, regardless of what is churned out by the rumor mill.
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"I didn't sign my contract because I wanted to be somewhere else," Tulowitzki said of the 10-year, $157.75 million deal that includes an option for 2021 that would add another $11 million to the total value. "I signed my contract because I want to be with the Rockies."
That hasn't changed. Things have been more challenging since Tulowitzki signed that deal in 2010.
Tulowitzki arrived in the big leagues in 2007, the year the Rockies made their late-season miracle run to the postseason, winning 14 of their final 15 regular-season games to claim the National League Wild Card. Colorado then swept Philadelphia in NL Division Series and Arizona in the NL Championship Series before sitting for nine days and waiting for a World Series in which it was swept by Boston.
The Rockies were back in the postseason in 2009, although this time they were a first-round victim of the Phillies. They were competitive in 2010, going 83-79.
They have not had a winning season since.
Colorado finished in last place in the NL West two of the past three seasons, and the club is in last place right now as well. It's enough to make a superstar moan and groan about wanting to play for a contender, setting the stage for a trade.
Not Tulowitzki.
Video: TEX@COL: Tulo launches a two-run homer to left-center
"I've never said one thing about [a trade]," said Tulowitzki. "There's been a lot of speculation and people talking for me. It's just been a lot of rumors."
Oh, Tulowitzki wants to win. He wants to do it with the Rockies, though.
"My favorite player is Derek Jeter," Tulowitzki said. "It always has been. One of the things about him was how he stayed with one team his whole career."
And despite the media speculation, Colorado really isn't looking to move Tulowitzki.
That's fine with Tulowitzki. It is, however, rumor time, again.
Yes, Tulowitzki has battled injuries in recent times. He was limited to 264 games the past three seasons, and played in as many as 130 games only twice in the six seasons prior to the current one, with many of the ailments the residual effect of a torn left quadriceps tendon suffered at AT&T Park on April 29, 2008.
Tulowitzki, however, has continued to adapt his workout routine to look at ways to strengthen the leg and increase his flexibility. And this year, in particular, the Rockies have monitored his workload, careful not to let his legs get weary.
So far, so good. Tulowitzki went into Tuesday night's game against the Texas Rangers at Coors Field hitting.320, and having reached base safely in 41 consecutive games, matching Andres Galarraga and Todd Helton for the second-longest streak in franchise history to the 46-gamer of Michael Cuddyer. The streak ended with an 0-for-4 in Colorado's 9-0 loss.
Tulowitzki entered Tuesday hitting.376 (56-for-149) since May 29, tops in the Majors, and already had as many RBIs this season (52) as he did in an abbreviated 91-game 2014 season.
All of that could perk up the interest of teams looking to add a run-producing bat to the middle of their infield.
It, however, also creates anticipation for the Rockies that Tulowitzki could be the player who is the core of a resurgence in the next year or two.
Tulowitzki certainly feels that way.
"We've got some good, young talent here and on the way," said Tulowitzki. "We have the makings of a team that can win. To win here would be very satisfying."
Tulowitzki could enjoy what Helton enjoyed in 2007.
Prior to the 2007 season, Helton approved a potential trade to the Red Sox, who backed out at the last minute. The Rockies were a surprise that season, making the only World Series appearance in franchise history, and it was Helton who was the catalyst to the team's late-season rampage that saw it win 21 of 22 games, including beating the Padres in a Game 163 for the NL Wild Card, and the NLDS and NLCS sweeps.
No, Helton did not get a World Series ring that the Red Sox players received, but he had a great feeling of satisfaction about being a part of what remains the biggest season in Rockies history.
"You could tell how special it was to him," said Tulowitzki. "He was part of something from the start."
That is something that would be special for Tulowitzki, too.- The best DI to get the farthest away from sheik is not straight away, instead it is down and away.
F-tilt is never a true follow up.
Not really sure how to preface this as I suck at writing.Umbreon asking me to test out certain things got me interested in this project and some others (like b-throw) that I'll be researching at later points.So here is something important that I have learned about Sheik's d-throw via testing in dolphin.here is a "side by side" comparison of marth being down throw by sheik at 100%. The first one will be marth DIing straight away and the second one will be shown to be DIing down and away. The frame that this captured is the frame before sheik becomes actionable.as these pictures show, the second marth is lower and farther out than the first marth.I'm not going to say that DIing down and away is always the "best" DI but it will force you to be farther away from sheik and closer to the ground.If players start incorporating this DI on d-throw thenThe only attack that becomes guaranteed is Dash attack. Below, I went through and tested every character (sorted by gravity) as to when Dash attack starts being a combo and when it stops comboing. MOST of these are actually frame tight. too early or late and they'll be able to jump out.I address what happens if you don't want to DI as far as possible away when you get to G&W.No follow ups ever guaranteedno follow ups guaranteedno follow ups guaranteedNo follow upsNo follow ups guaranteed just barely. if they DI only out you can get dash attack starting at 40% until ~58% if youre frame perfect.If you get a grab at 0% any sub optimal DI lets sheik's jab connect. frame perfect timing if they DI away.Dash attack 0% - 130%at almost all %s it is a frame perfect link. end dash too early and it will miss, dash too long and he can jump out. at 0% you must dash for exactly 1 frame. at 130% you must dash for exactly 18 frames.Dash attack starts working at 65% and ends at 90%at 65% its dash for 10 frames exactly otherwise you'll miss or he'll techat 85%-90% its dash for 14-15 framesand its frame perfect at every %anything below 65% or above 90% will get you closebut no cigarNo follow upsNo Follow upsNo follow upsNo follow upsNo follow upsNo follow ups10% - 55%No follow upsNo follow upsNo follow ups0-22%no follow ups0-115%not a true combo but Ike's jump animation causes him to get hit.No follow ups0-86%0-130%Snake's hitstun animation isn't too kind to him0-85%0-125%0-75%after about 65% it stops becoming a true combo but mario doesn't have anything fast enough to get out until after 75% including DJ. if you DJ, you'll just burn it the frame you get hit.0-112%0-103%Same as Mario, don't double jump before 103%. up-b also does nothing to helphere is where most of you ask "well, what if I don't want to go that low? can I go higher to avoid dash attack by DIing out?"the answer is yes, but.... Fair is still possibleG&W can not do anything out of this (I messed up too, he shouldn't get out of stun at all)0-104% you can always beat DJ coming out by 1 frame.105%-130% you will hit frame 1 of DJ.0-40%0-114%0-80%0-110%0-65%unusually long dash time0-65% possible65% - 75% you will trade with frame perfect nair if you are frame perfect. DJ is too slow for her. Dash for 11-12 frames75% - 95% you slide under her nair and DJ is still too slow. technically possible to airdodge out. dash for 12-15 frames95%+ peach can finally DJ out0-75%0-85%0 - 25%25% - 55% oddly enough, strong hit isn't guaranteed but weak hit is even though its not a true combo due to zelda's tumble animation. if Zelda buffers a jump, strong hit will connect if she delays jump, she'll get hit by weak hit.Nayru's love doesn't let you escape since sheik is under you.if zelda does nothingif zelda jumps out without buffering0-57%Dash for 1-5 frames for 0%10 frames for 40%11 for 57%0-25%0% Dash for 1-4 frames20% dash for exactly 6 frames0-15%Don't dash under 4 frames. you'll just missWendy Davis, the Texas Democrat who gained overnight celebrity in June when she – shod in pink sneakers – filibustered an abortion bill in the Texas Legislature for 13 hours, reportedly will run for governor of the heavily Republican state in 2014.
According to the Associated Press, two Democrats with knowledge of her decision but who requested anonymity said the Fort Worth-area state senator had made her decision. On Twitter Ms. Davis said she would make a big announcement on Oct. 3.
Though the abortion bill eventually passed in a special legislative session ordered by Republican Gov. Rick Perry, the filibuster put Davis in the national spotlight and raised the hopes of Texas Democrats, who haven’t occupied the governor’s mansion since incumbent Ann Richards lost to George W. Bush in 1994.
Governor Perry, the longest serving Texas governor, announced in July that he wouldn't seek reelection. The former – and possibly future – Republican presidential candidate succeeded Mr. Bush in 2000.
While Ms. Davis would be the most high-profile gubernatorial candidate the Texas Democrats have fielded in a long time, she has a long, hard road ahead: Texas Republicans have won every statewide office from the mid-90s to the present, and they have near 2-to-1 majorities in both the Texas House and Senate.
The uphill climb for Texas Democrats has made drumming up financial support, or even enough manpower to run a competitive campaign, very difficult, says Cal Jillison, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
In 2010, Perry easily defeated Democrat Bill White, with 55.1 percent of the vote to Mr. White’s 42.4 percent.
Davis will likely face off against GOP favorite and conservative stalwart Attorney General Gregg Abbott, who has already raised more than $20 million for his campaign.
While Davis has been moving around the country since her filibuster in a fundraising effort, her best efforts might not add up. Democrats outside the state are unlikely to invest in Texas elections, Professor Jillison says.
Though Jillison estimates that Davis will raise $20 million – this could become pocket change in comparison to what Republicans will likely offer Abbot's campaign. If it becomes apparent that Davis is a real threat to the GOP nominee, a host of Republican donors will be on stand-by to write more checks to bolster Abbott's campaign, he says.
And in a state where there are no limits to campaign contributions, the race for the governor’s seat could very well hinge on who has enough funding to get their message out.
While Davis's pro-choice campaign won her celebrity nationally, among more conservative voters in Texas, it won her notoriety.
"The Republicans will certainly try and tie that abortion filibuster around her neck," says Jillison, adding that it is essential that Davis becomes seen as an advocate for other issues that will be more palatable to the Texas electorate.
Despite the challenges Davis faces, an aggressive campaign against Abbott could have huge national implications, Jillison argues.
While demographic shifts are expected to push the state from the red to blue columns politically in the next 20 years, he says, the Democratic Party could be persuaded to invest in Texas elections sooner if Davis runs a truly competitive campaign.
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Second in population only to California, Texas has 38 electoral votes.
“If Texas ever became competitive, let alone turned blue, Republicans would have no path to the White House,” he says.WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) must reassess its analysis of the climate impacts of expanding two massive coal mines in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin (PRB). The two mines approved for expansion (the North Antelope Rochelle and the Black Thunder mines) are responsible for roughly a quarter of all of United States’ coal production each year and, over the lifetime of their expansions, they will add two billion tons to the United States’ total coal production.
Sierra Club and WildEarth Guardians sued over BLM’s decision to expand the mines, arguing that the additional two billion tons of coal would drastically increase both the amount of coal mined in the U.S. and the amount of carbon emissions emitted by coal burning power plants.
The Tenth Circuit found BLM’s analysis on carbon emissions from the expansion to be glaringly insufficient when considering the uptick in coal production’s impact on energy markets - namely that the uptick would drive down the cost of coal based generation, deter investment in clean energy, and result in increased carbon pollution that causes climate change. Today’s decision will have a dramatic impact on how the BLM and the Department of the Interior assess future land leases for fossil fuels - giving the public a clearer picture of how public land used for extraction by fossil fuel companies will impact the most significant environmental threat facing the world today.
In response, Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, released the following statement:
“The Tenth Circuit Court just secured a major victory for those that care about protecting public lands and our climate. Today’s decision sheds new light on the destructive consequences of leasing our most precious lands to corporate polluters who value their balance sheets more than public health.
“This decision marks a major step in our efforts to hold coal, oil, and gas companies accountable for their reckless contributions to climate change and to force the doting Trump Administration to take our environmental laws seriously.
“Our public lands belong to all Americans -- now and in the future -- and our federal government should manage these lands in a way that reflects that. Climate change is the most pressing environmental issue we face, and this decision recognizes a simple truth: BLM’s choices matter. It can no longer stick its head in the sand and ignore its contribution to the climate problem.”
Jeremy Nichols, Climate and Energy Program Director for WildEarth Guardians, released the following statement:
“This decision reflects America’s core values in its protection of public lands, and its progressive innovation. To languish in the past and cling to the dying coal industry, would be to reject our history as ingenious revolutionaries. We should be looking forward, to what is next in the energy industry, not back. The Court indicated today that it does not want to fly in the face of the market, despite the Trump Administration’s incorrect assertion that coal is coming back. Burning coal has consequences, and the Court’s decision today recognizes that our environment is more important than pandering to an obsolete industry.”In a major breakthrough for the Modi government, members of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), a key anti-proliferation grouping, have agreed to admit India, diplomats said. The development is a big win for Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he meets President Barack Obama in Washington.
KEY DEVELOPMENTS:
Diplomats with direct knowledge of the matter said a deadline for the members of the 34-nation group to object to India's admission had expired on Monday, without any of them raising objections. Under this so-called'silent procedure', India's admission follows automatically, diplomats from four MTCR member nations told Reuters on condition of anonymity. Admission to the MTCR would open the way for India to buy high-end missile technology. This entry also makes more realistic India's aspirations to buy state-of-the-art surveillance drones such as the American Predator. India also makes a supersonic cruise missile, the BrahMos, in a joint venture with Russia that both hope to sell to third countries. Membership of the rules-based MTCR would require India to comply with rules - such as a maximum missile range of 300 km - that seek to prevent arms races from developing. India's foreign ministry said before Modi departed on a five-country tour last weekend that the MTCR process was "looking good". Spokesman Vikas Swarup, who was travelling with Modi, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This entry also makes more realistic India's aspirations to buy state-of-the-art surveillance drones such as the American Predator. This entry also makes more realistic India's aspirations to buy state-of-the-art surveillance drones such as the American Predator.
WHAT IS MTCR (Missile Technology Control Regime)
- Established in 1987 as voluntary grouping.
- Aims to limit spread of ballistic missiles.
- Limit unmanned delivery systems that could be used for weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
-34 member grouping consists of world's key missile manufacturers.
-Members urged to restrict export of missiles.
-Restrict export of technology capable of carrying 500 kilos payload at least 3000 kms
- Since 2008, India amongst 5 countries that are unilateral adherents to MTCR.
-MTCR entry could help India become significant arms exporter.
-India joined Hague Code of Conduct (HCoC) last week.
-HCoC against ballistic missile proliferation crucial for India's entry to MTCR.
ALSO READ: India to overlook Chinese objections, sell BrahMos missiles to VietnamNew concept art has surfaced which suggests that Next Level Games, the developer behind Punch-Out!! for Wii and Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, was working on a Metroid game for the 3DS.
The concept art, which includes one image of protagonist Samus Aran in her iconic suit and several boss characters, appear on an online portfolio belonging to artists Nelson "Dedos" Garcia and Xochitl. Their portfolio also has concept art for Next Level's Punch-Out!!, which they worked on as well from 2007 to 2009.
An unnamed source related to the project told Destructoid that it was real, and that it was shelved in favor Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, another 3DS game Next Level and Nintendo released last year. "It was about as bare-bones as it gets, but it was still pretty fun," the source said.
The most recent game in the Metroid series was 2010's Metroid: Other M, the Team Ninja-developed action game for Wii that many fans bemoaned for its treatment of Samus' character.
"We have the Prime style of Metroid game and we have the more traditional style of Metroid game," Nintendo's Shinya Takahashi said back in June. "We feel that we do need to take care of both of these styles of play. And the hope is that at some point in the near future we'll be able to share something about them."Berlin has become the first city in Germany in which rent-control legislation has come into force in a bid to put the brakes on some of the fastest rising rents in Europe.
From Monday, landlords in the capital will be barred from increasing rents by more than 10% above the local average. Such controls were already in place for existing tenants but have now been extended to new contracts.
Germany to impose rent-rise caps on inner-city properties Read more
“The rent ceiling is very important for Berlin because the difference between the rent paid in existing contracts and new contracts is so high,” said Reiner Wild, managing director of the Berlin Tenants’ Association. “The other problem is that we have 40,000 more inhabitants per year. Because of this situation the housing market is very strong.”
Berlin is pioneering the rent cap after the national parliament approved the law, aimed at areas with housing shortages, in March. Berliners say flat-hunting is becoming increasingly competitive.
“We were looking for the best part of a year,” said Vlasis Tritakis, a student. He, his partner Sofia and their 18-month-old son moved out of a flat-share into a one-bedroomed apartment in the district of Kreuzberg in April.
But sooner or later they will have to find a place big enough for his son to have a room of his own. They say they don’t stand much of a chance against competition from potential tenants with better finances. “I don’t know how we will do it,” said Tritakis.
Although rents are still low compared with other European capitals, Wild says it is vital to keep the city affordable for lower-income residents. “We don’t want a situation like in London or Paris,” said Wild. “The reality in Paris or London is that people with low income have to live in the further-out districts of the city.”
Berlin's housing bubble and the backlash against hipster tourists | Jochen Hung Read more
Wild said his organisation would like to see more action taken to address the problem, including the building of more affordable housing.
Kerstine Appunn and her boyfriend took three and a half months to land a spacious two-bedroomed flat in Prenzlauer Berg, one of Berlin’s pricier |
: Handmade
Half-handmade
Moulded Handmade teapots are formed into shape by an artist who hand cuts the pieces and assembles them into shape using traditional tools such as wooden picks and paddles. In preparing Zisha clay to make the various parts of a handmade teapot, it is folded many times, somewhat like in the manufacture of Japanese katana (samurai sword). This folding strengthens the clay and creates micro channel air pockets in the clay which allows air to move in both directions through the teapot. This “dual-porosity” characteristic is thought to provide additional oxygen to the tea while brewing and as wine drinkers know, oxygen intensifies flavour.
Half-handmade is assembling machine-moulded pieces by hand with traditional tools. Many good teapots using Zisha clay are made in this way.
Moulded teapots are made by a mass-production process of assembling pre-moulded pieces by machine, such as the two halves of the teapot and lid and attaching a pre-moulded spout and handle. Even though moulded teapots are not as valuable as handmade or half-handmade teapots, many are made with Yixing clay and are still superior for tea-making than glazed or porcelain teapots.
There is a certain pride in owning a handmade teapot, especially if it is made by a famous artist. The making of teapots is a highly skilled art and some Zisha teapots from famous artists are collectors’ items and fetch very high prices, especially if from the 1980’s or 1950’s or even from the Qing Dynasty (1644 –1912). Antique teapots are prized because no two are alike, with each one having a unique history, patina, “taste” and “personality”. Knowing antiques requires highly specialized knowledge so only deal with an expert you can trust.
CLAY
Quality of Clay
Yixing (Yee-zhing) clay is the famous clay from the Yixing region of Jiangsu Province in Central China from which the finest teapots have been made for centuries. There are many types of Yixing clay but they can generally be grouped into two grades of quality: “Earth-clay” made from mud
“Stone-clay” made from rock (Zisha) “Earth-clay” is typically used to make mid-grade quality teapots which are widely available in many designs at affordable prices. It’s natural colour is white. The superior “stone-clay” is known as Zisha or “Purple Clay” (even though the colour of the clay may not necessarily be purple) and comes naturally in a variety of colours. So Zisha Clay is also known as “Natural” or “Original” Clay.
The unique granular structure and mineral composition of Zisha clay gives it excellent heat handling properties that are unsurpassed for maintaining a stable temperature in a teapot, thereby mitigating temperature fluctuations which can diminish the flavour of tea. The mineral and metal content of Zisha includes iron oxide, kaolinite, quartz and mica, making these teapots very strong when fired and resistant to damage when compared to more delicate Western pottery. High quality Yixing clay is 3-6 times less absorbent than other clays which helps these teapots to retain the fragrance of teas. Chart: Quality of Yixing Clay Yixing “Earth” Clay (this example is artificially coloured to look like Zisha “Wuni” Black Clay) Yixing “Stone” Clay
(also called Zisha “Purple” Clay, “Natural” or “Original” Clay).
Composition of Clay
There are 3 basic compositions of clays which are often mixed together in an infinite variety of combinations. Zisha Clay. (Also called “Qing Shui Ni” when not mixed or coloured).
Mixed (Pingni). Can be any combination of Yixing, non-Yixing and artificial clays
Artificial (Coloured clay). May also be used in mixed clay.
Chart: Composition of Clay Yixing Zisha “Purple” Clay. This example has no mixed clay so it could also be called Qing Shui Ni Mixed Clay (Pingni) Artificial (Coloured) Clay
Colour of Clay
When clays are mixed, they are called Pingni. “Natural” or “Original” Zisha clays are often mixed together to make traditional and new colours. Natural and artificial colours can be mixed or overlayed with each other in various designs. Quite often a small quantity of Yixing earth-clay or even Zisha is added to a lower grade non-Yixing clay and the teapot is then sold as a “Yixing Teapot”. While technically correct, this can be mis-leading.
“Artificial” clay (Yixing “earth” clay and/or non-Yixing clay) is clay that is coloured with artificial dyes, often duplicating natural Zisha colours. These teapots do not perform as well as Zisha teapots and will not look as nice over time as the colour will fade compared to teapots made from Zisha clays which retain their natural colour.
Assessing the quality of a teapot by the colour of the clay is a highly specialized skill and the source of much debate among experts. Here’s a few guidelines to help you understand Chinese teapots by their colours.
The natural colour of Yixing “earth clay” is white. Zisha clay comes in a variety of natural colours, of which the most prized are: Red (Hongni)
Purple (Zhini)
Green (Luni) – usually mixed with other clays or overlayed
Chart: Colours of Zisha Clay Hongni (Red) Zhini (Purple) not to be confused with Zisha (“Purple Clay”) which describes the entire class of natural colour, high-mineral Yixing clays made from stone Luni (Green) Duani (Yellow) Heini or Wuni (Black)
There is an another type of Zisha red clay called Zhuni which is extracted from a rare type of rock vein. The teapots made from this clay are made oversized and fired at a special low temperature (about 1,080F / 582C) and for a much longer time than other teapots. Zhuni teapots shrink during firing, making the clay extremely hard and dense. If you look closely, you can see fine “wrinkles” in the clay from the shrinkage. Even though the firing is performed with the highest degree of precision, the process is so sensitive that over half an entire batch of teapots will crack leaving just a few good ones. Zhuni teapots usually have a distinct red or orange colour and produce a high pitched sound when tapped. Needless to say, Zhuni teapots are very rare and very expensive. The markets abound with teapots claiming to be “real Zhuni”, both new and antique, so don’t even consider buying one of these unless you have access to a trusted expert who can verify the clay for you. Zhuni
Different types of clays are fired at low or high temperatures to make certain types of teapots. Teapots made from more porous clay are low-fired and are made thicker to hold heat longer which is good for Chinese Black Teas (called Red Teas in China) and Pu-Erh Teas. High-fired teapots for teas such as Green, White and Oolongs use a finer, thinner clay and will cool faster, preventing these more delicate teas from “cooking” in the teapot. High-fired Zisha clays tend to have more of a reddish colour while low-fired Zisha clays tend to have more of a brown colour. High-fired teapots are less porous and retain aroma compared to low-fired teapots which are more porous and used for less aromatic teas. Chart: Firing Type High-Fired Zisha Clay Low-Fired Zisha Clay
New high quality, high-fired teapots have a clear and distinct ring like a little bell when you lift up the lid about a quarter of an inch and allow it to drop gently on to the teapot (make sure you are holding the teapot on the flat of your hand so it is not damping the teapot in any way). In most cases, the higher the pitch and the longer the ring, the finer the quality.
Teapots used for Black and Pu-Erh Tea are thicker and made from a more porous clay than other teapots and don’t have the distinctive bright ringing sound – but this has nothing to do with the quality. These types of teapots are selected by an examination of the clay which usually has a rougher texture than teapots used for other teas.
Older teapots have a distinctive patina from the infusion of tea oils and constant use which can dull the pitch. Many new teapots have a similar shine from a wax coating that is applied to protect the clay and make them look nice on the shelf. (see how to remove this coating below in
Antique teapots have a history (verifiable or not) and have been infused with tea oils over many years. They can produce a decided “thunk” rather than a clear ring because of the accumulation of oils in the clay but can still be of the finest quality. But remember, you are in the antique game now so buyer beware!
SHOPPING CHECKLIST
New high quality, high-fired teapots have a clear and distinct ring like a little bell when you lift up the lid about a quarter of an inch and allow it to drop gently on to the teapot (make sure you are holding the teapot on the flat of your hand so it is not damping the teapot in any way). In most cases, the higher the pitch and the longer the ring, the finer the quality.Teapots used for Black and Pu-Erh Tea are thicker and made from a more porous clay than other teapots and don’t have the distinctive bright ringing sound – but this has nothing to do with the quality. These types of teapots are selected by an examination of the clay which usually has a rougher texture than teapots used for other teas.Older teapots have a distinctive patina from the infusion of tea oils and constant use which can dull the pitch. Many new teapots have a similar shine from a wax coating that is applied to protect the clay and make them look nice on the shelf. (see how to remove this coating below in How To Season A New Teapot Antique teapots have a history (verifiable or not) and have been infused with tea oils over many years. They can produce a decided “thunk” rather than a clear ring because of the accumulation of oils in the clay but can still be of the finest quality. But remember, you are in the antique game now so buyer beware!SHOPPING CHECKLIST Here is a checklist of points to keep in mind when you are shopping for a teapot: What kind of tea will I be making?
What size of teapot do I need for the number of people I will be serving most often?
Will the shape allow the proper expansion for the tea leaves I will be using?
What is the method of manufacture? - Handmade, Half-Hand made or Moulded
What is the quality of the clay? – Yixing Zisha, Yixing “Earth Clay” or a Non- Yixing clay
What is the composition of the clay? – “Natural/Original” Zisha (non coloured, non-mixed), Mixed or Artificial
What is the right type of firing for the teapot needed? – Low-Fired or High-Fired
Is the colour of teapot consistent with the seller’s description?
Are there any chips, cracks or hidden hairline fractures?
Is the top hole the correct size for the type of leaves being used and is the size appropriate for the fragrance of the tea?
Does the lid fit securely in the top hole but is easy to remove?
Is the spout hole large enough to allow the tea to pour freely?
Does it have a strainer installed? Is the teapot properly balanced and comfortable to handle?
Does the teapot make me feel good when I handle it?
HOW TO SEASON A NEW TEAPOT
New teapots come with a wax coating to protect the clay and make them look shiny on the shelf (and also make them look like more expensive antique teapots). This coating must be removed before making tea. Here’s how to remove the coating and season the clay: 1. Rinse the teapot in hot water and brush vigorously inside and outside with toothpaste (which is gently abrasive) and a toothbrush. Yes you read this right!
2. Put a large pot of water on the stove lined inside with a cloth. The pot should be large enough to completely submerge the teapot
3. Wrap the lid in another cloth and place in the large pot with the teapot. The cloths prevent breakage by stopping the teapot and lid from hitting the sides of the pot and each other when the water is boiling
4. Bring the water to a boil, cover and boil the teapot and lid for 30 minutes
5. After 30 minutes, turn off the heat and allow the water to cool
6. Remove the teapot and lid and rinse thoroughly in warm water
7. Optional - If you really want to season your teapot like a pro, re-fill the large pot with water, bring to a boil and add 2 – 3 tea-scoops of the tea leaves that you will be using for that teapot. Turn off the heat, cover the pot and steep the leaves for about 30 minutes to make a strong tea. Strain out the leaves and any small particles. Repeat Steps 2 to 6 using this strong tea instead of water. (Straining removes small leaf particles from the water that can clog the pores of the clay and reduce the teapot’s effectiveness). Your teapot is now ready to start making tea Always pour any extra tea you might have over your teapot and give it an occasional polish with a soft cloth. This will help to build up the oils allowing your teapot to contribute its own “taste” to the tea and create its own unique patina.
If you should ever decide that you wish to use a teapot for making another type of tea, simply re-season the teapot per the above steps. There may be a break-in period with older pots.
GLASS & PORCELAIN TEAPOTS
Glass and porcelain teapots are “flavour neutral “ and unlike clay teapots, do not change the taste of tea in any way as their impermeable surfaces do not absorb any tea oils and can be rinsed clean after each use. These are good for testing and comparing teas. You might want try a new tea in a glass or porcelain teapot before you make it in your clay teapot to compare how your clay teapot is affecting the taste.
If you want to save money or are a traditionalist, you can use a gai wan which is an inexpensive porcelain cup with a lid and base that comes in many sizes and can be used for all teas. Glass teapots are often used for Green, White and “blooming” teas as they do not absorb the delicate tea fragrance like some clay teapots and you can see the leaves expanding in a pretty display. But a high quality, high-fired Zisha clay teapot is still superior to glass and porcelain and like all clay teapots, improves the taste of tea.
MORE INFORMATION
Download this guide by Daniel Lui as a PDF file.Former administrative reform minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was seen springing a surprise by winning Sunday’s vote for the New Democracy leadership.
With around half of the votes counted, Mitsotakis had just edged ahead of his rival Evangelos Meimarakis, who led the party briefly between July and November. Mitsotakis was expected to dominate in Attica, securing him the presidency of the party despite the fact that he trailed Meimarakis by more than 10 percentage points in the first round.
Central Macedonia Governor Apostolos Tzitzicostas jumped the gun by congratulating Mitsotakis at around 9 p.m., a few hours before the final results were expected.
Some polling stations remained open past the 7 p.m. deadline to accommodate people who were queuing to vote.
It was estimated that around 320,000 people, or around 80 percent of those who voted in the first round last month, devoted part of their Sunday to have a say in who will lead the main opposition party.
There appeared to be no technical problems with the voting process. The only incident of note during Sunday’s election was members of the anarchist group Rouvikonas (Rubicon) raiding a polling station in the Athens suburb of Nea Philadelphia and destroying ballot papers. There were no injuries or arrests.Middle Class abused by the rich and powerful
By Charles L. Hopkins Sr. Inwood: journal-news.net |
The “American middle class” is still taking a beating by the federal government, big business CEO’s and foreign countries with no relief in sight.
We can’t afford to provide our retired citizens on Social Security a raise or prevent drastic cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. Our veterans continue to have reductions to their benefits and health care shoved down their throats. The unemployed are finding it tougher to gain employment and their families continue to do without.
Reductions in education are in the works for our children and those desiring to further their education.
The government states that lack of money is the problem. The problem is they have no problem finding money to fund Wall Sreet bailouts, the stimulus package, disaster relief and foreign aid to countries when requested, provide protection for illegal aliens and their own personal agendas.
Apparently, our government leaders don’t hear our voices when contacted. Big business has no conscience when outsourcing American jobs, and foreign countries continue to stab the U.S. in the back with one hand while receiving a handout with the other.
Personally, I have a problem when our president and vice president allow a foreign president to degrade our immigration policy on the White House lawn. I am further angered when every member of the House of Representatives (435) and the Senate (100) allows this same person to take the same stance on the floor of Congress in their presence.
Is another revolution in this country closer than we think? Has the American middle class had just about all it can take?
Stop and think about what could happen if the American middle class took to the streets like some of the citizens in the Middle Eastern countries as of late. Would our military fire on our own citizens since much of the military is comprised of guardsmen and reservists and mostly are the American middle class, or would they defend and protect the U.S. Constitution and its people from destruction and devastation from within?
Hopefully, we never have to find out but always remember: The 2nd Amendment guarantees the 1st Amendment. Our Founding Fathers made sure of that and they must have had a good reason for it.Guy Fieri's hot car found in teen's storage locker CRIME
Food Network celeb Guy Fieri Food Network celeb Guy Fieri Photo: Handout Photo: Handout Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Guy Fieri's hot car found in teen's storage locker 1 / 3 Back to Gallery
A brazen thief rappels from the roof of a San Francisco car dealership, a celebrity chef's prized car is stolen, and a year later, a man in black opens fire on a young couple.
It was all a mysterious kaleidoscope of crime until last weekend, when investigators tied it all to a storage container in Richmond where they found a bright yellow Lamborghini and a teenager with a gun.
Now, there's a whole new mystery as investigators try to find out who this 17-year-old kid is, why he allegedly shot at two people in Mill Valley last month and what other crimes he may have committed. And, while they're at it, what the heck he thought he was going to do with a stolen $200,000 car.
The "Mission: Impossible"-style heist on March 8, 2011, at the exclusive Van Ness Avenue dealership baffled San Francisco investigators, who later that week spotted the car on surveillance cameras rumbling across the Golden Gate Bridge and breezing into wealthy Tiburon.
The convertible, known to car buffs as a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, was found Saturday in the possession of a 17-year-old San Rafael resident, who was allegedly keeping it in a rented Richmond storage locker.
The teen, whose name was not released, is also believed to be the motorcycle-driving gunman in black who opened fire last month on a couple sitting in a pickup truck in a quiet Mill Valley neighborhood.
"Our suspect in the shooting was found to be in possession of the vehicle," said Marin County Sheriff's Sgt. Mark Hale. "We're still trying to determine the source of where the vehicle came from and if there were others involved in the theft of that vehicle."
The suspect is being held in Marin County Juvenile Hall on suspicion of attempted murder and possession of the stolen Lamborghini. The Marin County district attorney is expected to file formal charges Tuesday, when prosecutors will also decide whether to charge him as an adult.
Crime No. 1
The strange tale began more than a year ago in the middle of the night when the daring thief climbed to the roof of the British Motor Car Distributors dealership, at 901 Van Ness Ave., attached a climbing rope and rappelled into the showroom.
The burglar ignored expensive Bentleys and Lotuses and selected the distinctive yellow 2008 model roadster owned by Guy Fieri, who stars in the Food Network on "Guy's Big Bite," "Minute to Win It" and "Diners, Drive-ins and Dives."
He then cut the lock to the dealership doors and brazenly drove off in Fieri's car. Except for the security camera videos that detectives viewed later that week, there had been no sign of the car.
Crime No. 2
Then, on April 13, a gunman wearing black clothing and a black helmet and riding a black motorcycle fired five shots at a couple in a pickup truck on the 100 block of Evergreen Avenue in Mill Valley.
The victims, identified by relatives as Landon Wahlstrom of Mill Valley and his date, a senior at Terra Linda High School in San Rafael, were cut by flying glass but were otherwise uninjured.
Wahlstrom, reached by phone, declined to comment about the motive for the shooting, but his uncle, Randy Wahlstrom, said he was told it was over a girl.
Landon Wahlstrom and the suspect had both attended Redwood High School in Larkspur. Wahlstrom's uncle said his nephew told him the suspect liked his female friend and took umbrage about something Wahlstrom apparently wrote on Facebook.
"Can you imagine a 17-year-old kid trying to kill two people?" Randy Wahlstrom said. "He's a live wire, and he meant to kill. It blows my mind. I don't know how none of the kids got hurt."
Lars Christensen, principal of Terra Linda High School, confirmed that the female victim was a student at his school and said he understood the suspect was in an independent study program outside the San Rafael school district.
"I don't believe she knew him well, but she knew who he was," Christensen said. "I know she was questioned. I don't know if that led to this other person's arrest or not."
As for her well-being, he said, "the assistant principal and I have been in touch with her and her family on multiple occasions. She's doing fine. She was remarkably composed and has remained so."
Stashed in Richmond
Hale said sheriff's investigators, acting upon information relating to the shooting, went to CSI Mini Storage at 855 Parr Blvd. in Richmond at about 7:05 p.m. Saturday. They served a search warrant on the teen's storage container and found the motorcycle and other items believed to have been used during the shooting, and Fieri's Lamborghini, which was still in good shape, Hale said.
The general manager of CSI, which has 2,000 storage units on 20 acres, said the 8-by-40-foot locker had been rented before the date of the car theft. The manager, who declined to be identified, said renters have to be at least 18 and show ID. Registration, a driver's license and proof that the car is running are also required for those who use the units specifically for storing cars, he said.
He wouldn't say whose name the unit was rented under.
"We're not at liberty to talk about the private matters of our clients," the manager said, adding that he had no idea the Lamborghini was stored there. "This is a very safe, secure facility. We are surprised."
Chef thanks authorities
Fieri, who in one of his shows explores classic "greasy spoon" restaurants around the country in his red 1967 Chevy Camaro SS convertible, thanked the Marin County Sheriff's Department and Mill Valley Police Department for helping recover his car, which can hit 60 mph in less than four seconds and is capable of topping 190 mph.
"I'm glad we can put this behind us, and feel better knowing that justice is being served," he said in an e-mail.
The suspect, who had a loaded handgun when officers arrested him at the storage center, was also booked for possession of a loaded firearm and resisting arrest.“Can you escalate?” You hear these words in the opening sequence of Mr. Robot’s premiere, a flashback to a high-stakes decision for Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), hoodie-headed misfit and schizoid cybervigilante. Does he execute the hack that could crash so-called Evil Corp, the linchpin in the global economy? Does he let the operating system of a “kingdom of bulls—” culture keep running? The line is also one of several moments when creator Sam Esmail’s self-aware psychological thriller could be talking about itself. Season 1 was an audacious and immensely entertaining statement—my favorite show of 2015. Can it sustain, even escalate?
The two-part premiere tackles the question by internalizing the terror and drama of the challenge. We find Elliot in self-exile in the catastrophic aftermath of the Evil Corp takedown, spooked by the potential of his creator-destroyer power and encrypted cipher of his own mind. He continues to narrate his life to us, his imaginary friend—but he’s unsure if he trusts us anymore. He’s at odds with his father-figure alter ego: Mr. Robot (Christian Slater), the embodiment of his “f— society!” fury. Elliot tries to tune out his nagging insistence of greater heroic endeavors by committing to the comfortably numb life he once railed against. His daily, dull loop includes chores, cathartic journaling, therapy and church groups, watching sports, and dining out with new friend Leon (Joey Bada$$), who is obsessed with Seinfeld, that great satire about self-involved do-nothings. In a show meaningfully beholden to pop influences, most notably Fight Club, season 2 Elliot is Brad Pitt’s anarchist beating a panicky retreat into the guise of Edward Norton’s impotent milquetoast. (We’ll explore this more when we recap the premiere, but season 2’s touchstone appears to be Ken Kesey’s counter-culture classic One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, which was made into the Oscar-winning film starring Jack Nicholson. Think of Elliot as the withdrawn, fogged Chief and Mr. Robot as rebel joker McMurphy, trying to awaken his sleepy friend and activate him to revolution. Playing the role of Nurse Ratched, agent of the numbing, ruling loop of order: Pop culture? Evil Corp.? Ourselves? Debate.)
Mr. Robot’s insistence on remaining a fixture in Elliot’s life winks at a concern: keeping Slater’s high-concept phantom intrinsic to the franchise. Esmail, who’ll direct every episode this season, attacks the problem with gusto. The opening scenes are spellbinding—they move fluidly from long flashbacks to crisp montages set against surprising musical cues to surreal, violent rows between Elliot and Mr. Robot. By premiere’s end, my imagination was captured anew for Elliot’s mystery and existential dilemma: developing an integrated, authentic identity that can engage a fallen culture with integrity and grace, but balanced redemptive spirit.
Control—the want of it, the illusion of it, the folly of it—is a major theme. Vile conspiracy theorists, S&M, and an automated house gone haywire provide powerful metaphors. Elliot’s sister and fsociety cofounder, Darlene (Carly Chaikin), aims to ensure the revolution is on point and well televised as the world fights back with a performance of “keep calm and carry on” denial. Their childhood pal Angela (Portia Doubleday), having sold out to Evil Corp, struggles to rationalize her hypocrisy and retain her newfound significance. The premiere suffers from a premise of scattered characters and broken relationships, which subverts emotional resonance, and the decision to be a two-hour event. Perhaps wanting to preserve the season’s design and flow, Esmail pads the time with lengthy set pieces—another fsociety strike set to Phil Collins, for example—instead of significant character development. Hopefully upcoming episodes will be more focused. But there’s an abundance of artfulness, and Malek is electric. In Elliot’s journey I trust…even if he doesn’t trust me. B+Construction work is under way at the new Lord and Taylor store at Crossgates Mall Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2013, in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Construction work is under way at the new Lord and Taylor store at Crossgates Mall Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2013, in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Photo: Lori Van Buren Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Tech boom luring stores to region 1 / 8 Back to Gallery
Guilderland
A strengthening Capital Region economy convinced a revitalized Lord & Taylor to return to Crossgates Mall, where it will open in the autumn of 2014.
Other stores are noticing the region's rebounding economy, with its rising wages and thriving technology sector.
Designer Michael Kors has signed a lease for a new store at Crossgates that will open next spring, and Crate and Barrel will open a "pop-up" store during the Christmas shopping season, one of only four it will run nationwide, said Joseph Castaldo, mall general manager.
If all goes well, Castaldo hopes Crate and Barrel will be enticed to stay.
What has changed in the past decade?
The Capital Region has gotten wealthier. While median income in constant 2011 dollars fell in both New York state and nationwide, it rose in the Capital Region, said Rocky Ferraro, who heads the Capital District Regional Planning Commission.
Shoppers age 45 and over also have been increasing their share of the overall population locally, and they typically have more discretionary income to spend.
And one in four households in the Capital Region now earns more than $100,000 a year, compared to just over one in five nationwide, according to data from the planning commission.
More Information Economic difference Wealth rises (median household income in 2011 dollars) Year Cap. Region NYS U.S. 2000 $58,385 $58,578 $56,689 2011 $59,339 $56,951 $52,762 Older, but with more discretionary income (share of population age 45 and over) 2000 37.2 percent 2010 42.5 percent 2020 (projected) 44.8 percent Source: Capital District Regional Planning Commission
And don't discount the impact of the region's burgeoning technology sector.
"When we do leasing for any tenant, whether Lord & Taylor or Dave & Buster's (a restaurant and games chain that will open later this month), the boom in the nanotech college, GlobalFoundries, the Global 450 consortium, all of that has been a selling point," Castaldo said. "It changes your whole demographic profile."
Castaldo said the investment of billions of dollars tells merchants the research centers and semiconductor plants are not going away.
Ted Potrikus, senior vice president of the Retail Council of New York State, also credited the proximity of the NanoCollege for the new interest by retailers.
"A company like Lord & Taylor wouldn't make the investment it's going to take — this isn't a kiosk opening for the holiday season — (until) they've done the math and taken a look at the population and the area," he said.
"The tech boom has brought in people who didn't live here before," said Howard Carr, president of The Howard Group, an Albany-based commercial real estate firm. "We now have a number of jobs that are higher-paid."
Lord & Taylor also has undergone changes, following its sale by Federated Department Stores, parent company of Macy's and Bloomingdale's, to privately held NRDC Equity Partners, which now operates it under its Toronto-based Hudson's Bay Co.
"It's not the same Lord & Taylor that was here" from 1994 to 2005, said Castaldo. "They've really gone upscale."
Carr agrees.
"The Lord & Taylor I saw in Toronto this past April, it's just a nicer store," he said. "It's brighter, and it has a sharper presentation."
Upscale department stores such as Lord & Taylor are doing better than those that cater to middle-income clientele such as J.C. Penney and Macy's, said Natalie Everett, department stores industry analyst for IBISWorld Inc.
While they're struggling, "more well-to-do department stores such as Lord & Taylor are doing well and are indeed expanding their brands into new markets," Everett said. "Higher-end department stores cater to higher-income consumers, who were not as affected by the economy in the first place."
Could other stores follow Lord & Taylor to the Capital Region?
That's what happened after The Fresh Market had a successful opening in Latham several years ago. Trader Joe's soon followed, and Whole Foods will open its first area store at Colonie Center.
Nothing would please Guilderland resident Muriel Drakes more than to see that repeated. The retired state worker, who once held a part-time job at Filene's and was involved in a grassroots campaign to attract Trader Joe's here, would love to see a Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom's or even a Saks Fifth Avenue.
"I'd like to get a whole brand new group of women and men," she said, "who like upscale stores."
eanderson@timesunion.com • 518-454-5323Islanders who want assistance dying will need two independent witnesses for the request to be considered, Health PEI confirmed to CBC News Wednesday.
The Island's health authority has drafted, and is now reviewing its own regulations in response to the Supreme Court of Canada decision that made assisted dying legal as of June 6.
In the meantime the College of Physician and Surgeons of Prince Edward Island is handling any requests from Islanders. The college's guidelines also require two independent witnesses.
Let's be honest here, we're talking about ending a life. — Dr. Tom Dorran, Health PEI
Health PEI confirmed it will follow the P.E.I. college's lead.
Right now, P.E.I. is the only jurisdiction in Canada asking for two independent witnesses. Most require only one independent witness, and in some cases no witnesses are needed at all.
Important safeguard
Health PEI's acting executive director of medical affairs, Dr. Tom Dorran, says it's a safeguard in the federal legislation.
Requiring two independent witnesses is a reasonable safeguard given this is about taking a life, says Health PEI acting executive director of medical affairs, Dr. Tom Dorran.
"Let's be honest here, we're talking about ending a life. So we have to have the appropriate checks and balances in place to make sure that this process is well and truly what the patient wants and that it is done in an absolutely transparent manner," said Dorran.
"That there's no undue influence on the patient. That there's no beneficiary that may be involved in this process. So this is what we've chosen to go forward with, to make sure this is a robust, transparent, free of any undo influence process."
Dorran doesn't believe this will stand in the way of valid requests. He says witnesses can be a friend, a pastor, or any member of the community who knows the person making the request but won't benefit directly from their death.
Reaching out to doctors
Health PEI hopes to have its regulations finalized and approved by its board this fall.
That work includes compiling a list of doctors comfortable with assisting their own patients or patients referred to them from a doctor not comfortable with performing the procedure.
Health PEI said its regulations could change once Health Canada releases its rules around assisted dying, regulations that are still in the works.Heyoka Profile Blog Joined March 2008 Temple of EE-Sama 22468 Posts Last Edited: 2013-06-05 01:11:01 #1
Next weekend is the finals of the first WCS season, and OnGameNet/Blizzard are reserving seats for TeamLiquid members who are in Korea and want to attend.
The event will be held at two different venues, Young-san Ongamenet e-Sports stadium June 7th and 8th, and Jamsil Arena June 9th, both in Seoul. Jamsil Arena was used as the volleyball stadium in the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Next weekend is the finals of the first WCS season, and OnGameNet/Blizzard are reserving seats for TeamLiquid members who are in Korea and want to attend.The event will be held at two different venues,June 7th and 8th, andJune 9th, both in Seoul. Jamsil Arena was used as the volleyball stadium in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Greetings, to fans of StarCraft II eSports around the world!
Earlier this year in April 3, we announced a World Championship Series(WCS hereon in) for StarCraft II., a great joy to share with our fans.
During the 8 weeks following the WCS League announcement world’s best StarCraft II players from Korea, Europe, and America regions came together to test their mettle.
The final 16 players from the 3 regions who remain standing after the tournament will now take the battle to Seoul, Korea, for the Season Finals from June 7 to 9.
Don’t miss this opportunity to take part in the StarCraft II Season Finals where the world’s best players will dish it out on each other!
How To Attend
If you would like a seat, please name and email address. The first 100 will be guaranteed, and if there is overwhelming demand more may be added. You will receive entry by giving your name at the event so make sure it is correct, and send it by June 3rd.
OGN will reserve a block of seating until 2 pm, with some special conditions.
When the gate opens at 10:00am, there will be plenty of seats both |
.S. court.
“I was young and stupid and, you know, did something I shouldn’t have... and, you know, spent four and half years in jail for it, and wanted to turn my life around and do something good for a change,” Rosenberg, fighting back tears, told Israel’s Channel Two television.
“For me, it was kind of like seeking redemption, or something, for my past.”
LEGAL PROBLEMS LOOM?
Rosenberg’s legal troubles may not be over.
Yahel Ben-Oved, one of her lawyers in the phone-scam extradition, said Rosenberg won early release from prison on condition she remain paroled either on U.S. or Israeli soil.
“I believe she may have violated this by going to Syria,” Ben-Oved told Reuters. “This could be a problem for her.”
U.S. officials said they were looking into the case. Rosenberg declined a Reuters request for an interview, saying she would speak to foreign media later in the week.
On landing at Tel Aviv airport, Rosenberg was questioned by the Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency said. Israel bars its citizens from traveling to Iraq or Syria, both designated as enemy countries. But an Israeli justice official told Reuters on condition of anonymity it looked unlikely she would be charged.
Rosenberg’s native Canada, from which she emigrated alone to Israel, had also urged her to get out of Syria. Canadian officials did not immediately comment on her return.
Speaking on Army Radio, Rosenberg said she had taken part in “some pretty major firefights” with Islamic State insurgents holding lines just 2 km (1 mile) away from her positions.
“But in the past few weeks I think a lot of the dynamics have changed there, in terms of what’s going on in the war,” she said. “The Iranian involvement is a lot more pronounced. Things changed enough that I felt that it was time to come home.”
Iran, Israel’s arch-foe, backs Shi’ite militia that have led much of the fighting against Islamic State in Iraq over the last year. It also supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has lost swathes of eastern Syria to Islamic State.
Kurdish sources confirmed Rosenberg’s service with YPG to a Reuters correspondent who also met her at a Dwekh Nawsha base. Photos she shared on Facebook showed her holding a rifle at a lookout post and, in battle gear, guarding a group of prisoners.
“She is a trained fighter with capabilities. She was not afraid,” Dwekh Nawsha spokesman Albert Kisso said on Monday.
(This story was refiled to fix a typographical error in the second paragraph)“Let them get sleep!” Similar to the way Marie Antoinette’s infamous—and not entirely accurate—phrase about a certain dessert has come to represent classist ignorance, the West’s newfound fascination with sleep is the latest example of extreme cognitive dissonance.
A 2013 Gallup poll reported that 40% of Americans are not getting the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep per night. Eager capitalists have quickly recognized this hole, swooping in with new products and new slogans and new ironies. Today, we’re being sold everything from digital gadgets to celebrity-endorsed mattresses to help us sleep better and longer. Bizarre attempts to commodify a basic and essentially free human necessity only serve to highlight how troubled our lives have become.
For the past month, for example, media mogul Arianna Huffington has been aggressively peddling her new book, The Sleep Revolution. A successful capitalist, Huffington has been praised and criticized in equal measure for the labor practices that built her massive online empire. Now, the media mogul turned lifestyle guru is hoping to sell us something that is free under the guise of luxury.
It’s an observation that rings hollow for many, especially those who lie awake at night worrying about job insecurity.
In The Sleep Revolution, Huffington observes we are collectively experiencing a global “sleep crisis,” abetted, no doubt, by the extant digital culture which demands that we be plugged in 24/7. Oddly, she suggests this crisis is tied to an individual desire to make money, rather than the interests of employers attempting to maximize the efforts of their employees. In an interview with ThinkProgress, she went a step further, blaming a masculine workplace culture that believes bragging about a lack of sleep indicates dedication: “I think it starts with men using it as a symbol of virility almost. But then a lot of women who think it’s how to get ahead in the workplace have adopted it. It seems primarily a machismo thing, like whose is bigger?”
No one is arguing against the need for sleep. But it’s an observation that rings hollow for many, especially those who lie awake at night worrying about job insecurity or how they are going to cover their next rent check. There are so many causes for sleep deprivation that Huffington’s recommended “Sleep Revolution products”—like KIND granola or a $30 SoulCycle class—are unlikely to remedy. Not to mention the obvious fact that these “first world” remedies are tokens of a particularly insidious brand of privilege. (A sugary granola bar will not help you sleep. Neither will lip balm.)
A sugary granola bar will not help you sleep. Neither will lip balm.
In this new and increasingly unstable society, many of us work so hard and for so long not because of some type of machismo, but because the current economic climate dictates that we do. In the growing freelance economy especially, an environment replete with “at will” contracts,” we represent the underpaid and the undervalued. Project Time Off states that three quarters of Americans are stressed at work. Their 2014 study found that “one third (33%) of employees say they cannot afford to use their time off and nearly a quarter (22%) of workers say that they do not want to be seen as replaceable. Roughly three-in-ten (28%) employees do not use all their time off because they believe it will show greater dedication to their company and their job.” Freelancers may not have an office to go to, but that doesn’t mean we are always—or ever—on vacation.
The driving motive to work ourselves to death at the expense of our health is not ego—it’s anxiety.
To Huffington’s credit, she seems to at least be aware of this problem, citing a 2013 study from the University of Chicago that concludes socioeconomic status has myriad effects on the quality and quantity of sleep. “Lower socioeconomic position was associated with poorer subjective sleep quality, increased sleepiness and/or increased sleep complaints,” she noted, speaking with Maclean’s magazine in April.
The driving motive to work ourselves to death at the expense of our health is not ego—it’s anxiety.
With stagnant wages that reflect America’s larger stagnation pertaining to social mobility, it is no wonder that the US Centers for Disease Control stated last year that “insufficient sleep is a public health problem.” And the National Sleep Foundation’s inaugural Sleep Health Index, published in Dec. 2014, reported that “45% of Americans say that poor or insufficient sleep affected their daily activities at least once in the past seven days.” The NSF indicated that quality—not quantity—of sleep was the primary issue affecting Americans.
Myriad studies have enumerated how sleep is negatively affected—both in quantity and in quality—by a variety of environmental and psychological stressors specifically experienced by people of lower socioeconomic status. Researchers Cassandra Okenchukwu and Orfeu M. Buxton of Harvard University found a host of environmental factors that affect sleep. “An example is poor sleep quality due to stress in a rodent-infested apartment, or keeping the windows closed and locked in a non-air-conditioned bedroom for safety worries,” they explained in a piece about how poverty affects sleep. Within the scope of American demographics in accordance with a 2009 study and a second 2010 study, this means that women, black Americans, and Hispanic Americans have the most compromised sleep.
In addition to environmental factors, a host of psychological stressors contribute to sleep deprivation. Unfortunately, sleep deprivation and poverty are cyclically connected: “People who sleep less earn less,” Megan Werft wrote last year in a piece for Global Citizen. “In fact, one study found that one more hour of sleep per night can increase wages lead to a 16% higher salary annually in the US (about $6,000).”
In a depressing example of capitalism’s flaws, society remains more than happy to capitalize on our suffering, marketing newfangled products to help us bridge the chasm between sleepless and sleep-full nights. The fact that so many cannot afford these products is explained by a classist (and therefore racist) assumption that people of lower socioeconomic status simply do not care or want to sleep better. It’s similar to the “pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps” assumption that those living near the poverty line do not want to succeed or do not want to take care of their bodies and those of their children. As a result, anyone who cannot begin our daily “journey” to dreamland at 10 pm are infantilized by the very system that disables us.
This article is part of Quartz Ideas, our home for bold arguments and big thinkers.New York City claims reforms at Rikers amid further evidence of prisoner abuse
By Fred Mazelis
25 June 2015
New York city Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed Monday to implement minor reforms at the massive Rikers Island prison complex as part of a deal with the Obama administration aimed at ending legal proceedings relating to several highly-publicized deaths of inmates.
The Rikers prison, consisting of 10 prisons with nearly 14,000 prisoners and 9,000 correction officers, is second in size only to the massive Cook County Jail in Chicago. It is regarded as among the most brutal facilities in a US prison system that holds more inmates than any other in the world.
The reform package at the prison, the sixth such program implemented since 1990, would supposedly improve what NYC federal attorney Preet Bharara acknowledged is a “decades long culture of violence” at the facility.
Rikers made nationwide headlines in recent weeks after the suicide of Kalief Browder, a young man who had been arrested in 2010, falsely accused of petty theft and imprisoned for three years because he could not make bail.
After spending extended periods in solitary confinement, Browder was psychologically broken and committed suicide after his release in 2013. The latest settlement proposes minor changes in the regime at Rikers, to be supervised by a federal monitor appointed by the Obama administration.
The official government court filing pledges “robust requirements” for reports on the use of force by corrections officers, including an “early warning” system to identify abusive guards, the use of body cameras by the guards at the complex, and an end to solitary confinement for inmates under the age of 18. It includes restrictions on the use of force, with guards no longer allowed to hit prisoners in the head.
The Rikers settlement, the latest in a decades long process of fruitless “reforms” at the prison, reflects growing fears within the political establishment over widespread popular outrage against the inhuman conditions that have been allowed to fester at this prison complex and elsewhere.
The office of US Attorney Bharara issued a report in August of last year, finding massive civil rights violations and “unnecessary force” by correction officers.
In December, the Justice Department announced that it would join an existing class-action lawsuit, Nunez v. the City of New York, involving 12 prisoners alleging abuse at the facility.
Mayor de Blasio’s statement on the settlement sought to minimize his own administration’s responsibility while proclaiming the deal’s modest provisions as heralding a new day for the city’s prison system.
“I appointed Commissioner Ponte to bring real change to a correctional system plagued by years of abuse and neglect,” said the mayor, referring to his appointment of Commissioner Joe Ponte as Corrections Commissioner last year.
In fact, since Ponte’s appointment in April 2014, instances of physical force by guards against prisoners jumped from 3,860 to 4,447. During that same period, serious injuries increased from 159 to 198.Individual instances of brutal abuse of prisoners continue to surface on a regular basis.
Only two weeks before the announcement of the settlement, federal attorneys announced indictments against Rikers Island guards involved in the 2012 death of 52-year-old inmate Ronald Spear. Spear, who suffered from end-stage renal disease and walked with a cane, made the fatal mistake of getting into a dispute with a guard. He was kicked repeatedly in the head while two other guards restrained him on the floor. The assailant bent down and told Spear, “Remember that I’m the one who did this to you.”
The guards then covered up the attack and lied about the circumstances, claiming Spear had been the aggressor.
In yet another prominent case, 25-year-old inmate, Jason Echevarria died in August 2012 after ingesting a toxic detergent while being housed in a unit for mentally ill prisoners. The guard in charge at the time, a man named Pendergrass, refused to assist the prisoner despite his agonized pleas for help in the hours before he died, saying “Don’t bother me unless someone is dead.”
Echevarria was discovered dead the following morning, the chemicals having burned through parts of his mouth, throat and stomach.
Contracts with the for-profit medical provider Corizon, formerly called Prison Health Services, were repeatedly renewed by the city over a 15-year period, despite documented reports of substandard care and staffing practices that endangered prisoners. The company reportedly hired doctors and mental health workers with disciplinary records and criminal convictions.
Nearly half of the 185 personnel files of health care workers hired by Corizon showed “no evidence that Corizon conducted a candidate background investigation of any kind,” according to the Times. Even after losing the New York contract, Corizon will remain the largest private prison health company, in what has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Corizon currently operates in more than 50 prisons in 27 US states.
In reality, the new oversight and regulatory tweaks proposed by the city will in no way halt the savage abuses being carried out daily at Rikers. The conditions at the prison complex are the product of broader social and economic conditions.
The brutality at Rikers, though certainly undeniable, is more than a case of a few bad apples. Located only a few miles from Manhattan’s glittering skyscrapers and $100 million-dollar penthouse apartments, the vast prison complex embodies the savage oppression and abuse of the US working class that flows necessarily from the unprecedented social inequality produced by 21st century capitalism.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Prominent player agent Peter Jess says clubs should do anything in their power to tempt the best players to join them, as Essendon star Brendon Goddard branded the approaches to top Bombers as "unethical".
Jess, a player manager for more than 30 years, says list managers from rival clubs were compelled to explore a "once-in-a-generation opportunity" to strengthen their lists with ready-made players from Essendon without giving up their own players or draft picks.
Essendon's Brendon Goddard. Credit:Wayne Taylor
Jess, who does not represent any Essendon players, says agents who do have Bomber clients were obliged to seek their player's market value having been presented with an unprecedented environment in which to do so.
Goddard spoke out against those clubs who sought to benefit from Essendon players using the mismanagement of the 2012 supplements program as the basis to trigger a duty-of-care clause that would allow them to break their contracts and walk for essentially nothing.DW: Mr. Sievert, in the Bertelsmann Foundation immigration report released Friday (06.03.2015), 28 percent of those surveyed said they thought that the national population would remain stable, or drop only slightly, with zero immigration into Germany. Were they right?
Stephan Sievert: No, not at all. Without immigration, our population would continue to shrink, markedly...
Stephan Sievert was surprised to see a quarter of Germans so mistaken about the country's demographic development
...A drop of around 20 million by 2060, according to estimates from the German government statistics agency, Destatis.
We talk a lot about our demographics and population here in Germany, and one would have thought that most people - almost everybody - knew the lay of the land by now. To see more than a quarter be so mistaken on the issue is really very surprising.
Last year, this demographic dip was canceled out by record immigration - Germany's net migration was an increase of roughly 400,000 people [1.2 million in, 800,000 out]. But a lot of factors - not least recession in the eurozone and conflict in the Arab World - combined to bring this about. Presumably, these immigration rates are not likely to stay this high in the long term?
Probably not. The vast majority of immigrants still come from other EU countries - from new members, like Romania, Poland or Bulgaria, but also from southern European countries like Spain and Greece. And this is something of a free market - they're coming to Germany because they see better employment prospects here. If, for example, the recession in southern Europe were to let up, then this trend might reverse. Either they could return home, or start to see Germany as a less attractive place for relocation. Certainly, we can't rely on these numbers holding. And that's why many efforts in immigration policy are currently focusing on other, non-EU countries - to make Germany more attractive elsewhere.
These population predictions are based on a steady fertility rate and net immigration into Germany of 100,000 people per year
Do the new arrivals help counter the aging population? Presumably the vast majority are of working age?
Yes, they are. The average age for immigrants into Germany is roughly 30, so of working age - this is mainly economic migration, after all - and also a great many of them are highly qualified. The quota of EU migrants with a university degree is actually higher than it is for German citizens. But, many of them also have few or poor qualifications by German standards. There's a greater discrepancy in skill levels among immigrants than the domestic population.
Suffering as the "baby boomer" generation ages is by no means a German phenomenon, it's just the same for much of the western world. But Germany's birth rate is particularly low. As of the last OECD study in 2011, the German birth rate was dead last - 236th of 236 countries - at just over 8 people per 1,000 per annum.
It's true this number is really low, because of the large proportion of the German population that is now too old to have children. But the more interesting figure is the "total fertility rate." This shows how many children the average woman has in her lifetime - and in Germany it has stood at around 1.4 since 1970. It's not budging whatsoever. Many other countries experienced this drop, especially with the advent of oral contraception in the 1960s and 70s, but the German dip was particularly sharp when compared with, say, Scandinavia or France [editor's note: France's total fertility rate is 2.0, similar to levels in Scandinavia, the UK and the US].
We're talking about 1.4 - given that it's a couple, the break-even rate must be around 2?
Yes, we tend to say around 2.1, because of course not everybody lives long enough to raise children, but basically it is 2. And 1.4 is of course just two-thirds of that. This means that each generation is one-third smaller than the one before.
In part, this can be explained because for a very long time women really faced a stark choice: career, or kids. For years, relatively few women in Germany worked, especially if they also had children. The political class is now trying to change this, and it's already the case than many more women are both working and raising children. But of course it's difficult to change this completely, because it's become a kind of social norm. Not having children is considered completely normal here, whereas in France it's much more rare.
This seems like something of a vicious cycle. On the one side there's the demand for a larger workforce, for fewer stay-at-home parents - and then there's the call for more young people to start a family. Can these two requirements be satisfied simultaneously?
Trying to provide daycare to all parents who would like it is one of the German government's current reform plans
Yes, they can. Without doubt. It's even the case that in countries where more children are being born, like France or Scandinavia, more women are still going to work. It's a question of options and flexibility: the chance to work part time, easy routes back into a job after taking maternity or paternity leave, and of course state-run childcare, either at Kindergartens or daycare centers.
Expanding daycare facilities is one of the plans currently on the table in Berlin.
There's an awful lot now being done, but of course all of it has come very late. For a very long time, we dozed on this development. Now, many improvements are being made, but the situation's already quite a mess. Years like this mean that the baby boomer generation has become a vast group - and one that's about to go into retirement - when compared to our younger generations.
What else could the government, or employers, do?
There are two options: more children, or more immigration! And more children won't help in the short term, because it would take a good 20 years until a new baby boom was ready to work. By then, all of the Baby Boomers would be years into retirement. Therefore, the main way to bolster the workforce is through immigration; provided efforts are made to ensure that the new arrivals are integrated and find work.
Stephan Sievert is a researcher with the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, an organization focused on providing critical studies and policy proposals to deal with Germany's aging and shrinking population. Sievert specializes in the procurement of skilled labor.Copyright by WPRI - All rights reserved Mayor Jorge Elorza announced steps to address the city's structural deficit. (photo by Dan McGowan/WPRI)
Copyright by WPRI - All rights reserved Mayor Jorge Elorza announced steps to address the city's structural deficit. (photo by Dan McGowan/WPRI)
Dan McGowan, WPRI.com Reporter - This report was updated on 3/8/2016
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) - Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza's decision to overhaul the city's fire department has become the dominant initiative of his first term in office, creating a bitter dispute between the new mayor and the powerful firefighters' union.
So how did we get to this point?
Here's an overview.
Remember when former Mayor Angel Taveras inherited a $110-million structural deficit in 2011? Providence is still recovering from that. The city finished with slight surpluses in both the 2013 and 2014 fiscal years, but Mayor Elorza's office reported that Providence ended the 2015 fiscal year with a $5 million shortfall. That's on top of the $8.67-million cumulative shortfall from deficits incurred during the 2011 and 2012 fiscal years, an amount that needs to be paid down by 2017. And that's just from the past. In May, Elorza released an independent review of the city's finances that showed Providence's structural deficit is projected to grow steadily over the next five years, with the gap reaching $19.1 million by 2021.
When city officials scrutinize the annual budget each year, the amount spent on so-called "callback" pay for firefighters is always a sticking point. The city typically lowballs the amount it expects to spend on callback as part of its effort to produce a balanced budget, which inevitably leads to massive overages. (See the chart below.) For example, the budget for the 2014-15 fiscal year set aside just $4 million for callback; the actual amount spent was nearly $8 million. On average, the city spent about $8.2 million a year on callback between 2010 and 2015. The explanation for why the city spends so much on callback depends on who you ask. From the city's perspective, the union contract calls for 94 firefighters to be on duty at all times, a provision known as minimum manning. Under the city's old system, there were roughly 400 firefighters split into four platoons, which meant that only six members of a platoon had to call out sick or be on vacation before members of other platoons had to be called back and paid time-and-a-half. From the union's perspective, the city could significantly reduce overtime by hiring more firefighters.
Copyright by WPRI - All rights reserved
When the mayor introduced his $696-million budget on April 29, he actually proposed hiring 52 new firefighters. In subsequent meetings with firefighters and union leadership, he never mentioned that he was planning to move from four platoons to three. Elorza maintains he didn't make his decision to move forward with the changes until May, but he had already entered into a $230-per-hour contract with an outside lawyer to help craft his legal strategy the month before. Ultimately Elorza informed the firefighters he would move to three platoons on May 20, the night before he held a press conference to outline the changes. Elorza maintains the changes will save $5 million a year in callback pay once all is said and done.
Copyright by WPRI - All rights reserved Providence Firefighters' union president Paul Doughty and Mayor Jorge Elorza
Copyright by WPRI - All rights reserved Providence Firefighters' union president Paul Doughty and Mayor Jorge Elorza
The move from four platoons to three has forced firefighters to go from working an average of 42 hours per week to an average of 56 hours a week. The new schedule requires them to work two 10-hour days followed by two 14-hour nights followed by two days off, a schedule that no other fire department in the country is apparently required to work. Mayor Elorza has offered to change the schedule to something more common – including 24 hours on and 48 hours off – but no agreement has been reached. Since the changes were implemented Aug. 2, firefighters have complained that they've been forced to work significantly more than 56 hours each week to reach minimum manning. All told, the city spent more than $2 million on callback pay during the first two months of the fiscal year. (The current budget projects that the city will spend about $5 million on callback for the entire fiscal year, which doesn't end until next June.) Elorza maintains that he expected callback to remain expensive in July and August, but it will gradually be reduced in the coming months. The two sides have also traded barbs over the massive spike in firefighters injured on duty, with the city arguing that the increase is not related to fatigue and the union saying the additional hours have led to more absences.
The changes came with a pay increase, but not necessarily a raise.
Between May and August, lawyers for the city and the firefighters' union met seven times to try and negotiate a deal that would result in a pay increase for the 14-hour increase to the work week. Elorza's initial offer was 5%, but he later offered a 10% increase that would count toward worker pensions or a 33% increase for all hours actually worked that wouldn't have counted toward pensions. All of those offers were turned down. Instead, he gave the firefighters an 8% increase for a 33% increase to their work week. For the average firefighter, that works out to around $6 an hour for hours 42 to 56. (After 56 hours, the city still pays time-and-a-half.)
The city and the union are in court over money.
Neither side disputes that Mayor Elorza has the management right to move from four platoons to three, as the state Supreme Court ruled in North Kingstown earlier this year. But the two sides are in court because the union's contract calls for firefighters to be paid time-and-a-half for working more than 42 hours in a given week. (That agreement isn't slated to expire until June 30, 2017.) The problem on the administration side is that continuing to pay overtime for hours 42 to 56 would result in no savings for the city. The problem on the firefighter side is that earning far less overtime means losing out on a lot of money. Earlier this year, The Providence Journal reported that 31 firefighters earned at least $40,000 in overtime alone during the 2013-14 fiscal year.
The union won the first battle in court.
On Sept. 10, Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Lanphear ruled that the city and the union can go to grievance arbitration over their dispute. In his decision, Lanphear said the city failed "to focus on the key difference" between the Supreme Court decision about North Kingstown and the situation in Providence: the existence of a contract. Lanphear said "there is no reason, nor any logic, to deviate from the express provisions of the contract now." Elorza initially said he was "excited" about the judge's decision, but lawyers for the city then asked Lanphear to dismiss the complaint altogether. The judge called the request "an insult to the court." The city has appealed the arbitration decision to the state Supreme Court. Separately, the firefighters have filed another lawsuit accusing the city of violating the federal Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA).
State legislation played a major role in the timing of the city's changes.
What prompted Mayor Elorza to announce that Providence would move to a three-platoon system even though a contract was already in place? Money was obviously one factor, but just as important was a bill that was quietly making its way through the General Assembly. The bill would have added platoon structures or shift schedules to the list of matters that can be collectively bargained, which would have made it made it significantly more difficult for municipalities to restructure their fire departments. A group of mayors and town managers urged lawmakers to kill the legislation. As a response, another bill was introduced, this time designed to require cities and towns to pay firefighters time-and-a-half for working more than 42 hours in a week unless otherwise agreed to in a contract. Once again, municipal leaders rallied against the bill. In the end, the General Assembly took no action on either piece of legislation.
Copyright by WPRI - All rights reserved Supporters of the Providence firefighters' union rally in City Hall. (Photo by Dan McGowan/WPRI 12)
Copyright by WPRI - All rights reserved Supporters of the Providence firefighters' union rally in City Hall. (Photo by Dan McGowan/WPRI 12)
Because platoon changes are a management right, the City Council has been relegated to the sidelines throughout much of the dispute. Ultimately, a council vote is required to change the terms of the union's contract, but with negotiations at a standstill, it doesn't appear the council will be sent a contract in the near future. Still, some councilors have expressed frustration with the administration. Finance Committee Chairman John Igliozzi said Elorza "had an obligation" to tell the council's 15 members that he hired an outside lawyer to prepare for the platoon changes. Igliozzi also successfully convinced the administration and the Providence Teachers Union to alter language in their new contract so that educators aren't eligible for a pay increase equal to whatever the firefighters ultimately receive. The entire council met behind closed doors on Sept. 8 to receive a briefing from the administration on the status of the firefighters' lawsuit. Afterward, Councilman Sam Zurier said he wants the council to hire a lawyer to give a "second opinion" on the entire dispute. The council also passed a resolution urging Mayor Elorza to launch a new fire academy after learning that 44% of department employees are eligible to retire.
The battle has become deeply personal.
Even before Public Safety Commissioner Steve Pare launched an investigation into social media threats made against Mayor Elorza, the dispute had already become heated. More than 250 firefighters and their supporters rallied at City Hall on Sept. 8 to oppose the platoon changes. Before that, families of firefighters said the forced 56-hour work week was taking a toll on them. On the city side, the administration has regularly pointed out that one firefighter earned more than $100,000 in overtime during the 2013-14 fiscal year to make the case that savings are needed. The union also picketed a happy hour meetup hosted by the mayor, which led 34 of 36 elected officials in the city to skip the event. On Dec. 5, the city chose to not staff two engines and two ladder trucks because only 83 firefighters were on duty (the union contract calls for 94 on duty at all times). Pare claimed the shortage was the resulted of an illegal "coordinated" work action, but Council President Aponte said he didn't see any evidence of wrongdoing. In March, the city fired a fire captain for insubordination.
Continue the discussion on FacebookThis is the second entry in a series of posts previewing the NCAA Frozen Four, which will take place Thursday at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia. The winners will advance to Saturday’s National Championship game. We will preview each of the 4 teams in the days leading up to the tournament.
Monday: Boston College
Tuesday: Union
Wednesday: Minnesota
Thursday: North Dakota
Union is the 3rd overall seed in the NCAA Men’s Hockey tournament and the most unheralded of the semifinalists. The Dutchmen, from Schenectady, NY, are in their second ever Frozen Four and have just 1 NHL draft pick on their roster. The East region champs have all of 4 NCAA tournament appearances in their 23 year Division I history, granted they have come in each of the past 4 seasons. They made rather quick work of Vermont (5-2) and Providence (3-1) to punch their ticket to Philadelphia this year.
Quick Observations
The only NHL pick on their roster is defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere, a 2011 3rd round pick of the Philadelphia Flyers. Gostisbehere has been at the top of his game all year and many believe he will give Frozen Four foe Johnny Gaudreau a run for his money in Hobey Baker voting. It is believed that this may be the last one or two games of his NCAA career and he may turn pro following the tournament.
Union’s roster doesn’t boast big names or big scorers, but they get it done. They are led is scoring by senior Daniel Carr (46 pts.), and they have 9 additional players with 20 or more points. They also have seven 10-goal scorers.
This team has gotten to where they are by playing more disciplined hockey (averaging 2.5 fewer penalty minutes per game than their opponents) and making use of their special teams (21.6% PP, 83.0% PK)
Union didn’t play any games this season against their fellow Frozen Four attendees, but it should be noted that they haven’t lost a game since the end of January.Australia's minister for broadband, and censorship, Stephen Conroy has delayed the switch-on of its Chinese-style national firewall until after the election.
Conroy's moves have been criticised on technical, practical, economic and moral grounds to no avail. But it seems the danger of losing votes has focused his mind.
Trials of the initial system, which claimed only to block child sex abuse images, hit controversy when the secret blacklist of sites was leaked and found to contain a variety of other content - from vanilla porn to a site for a Tasmanian dentist.
Conroy said the filter would be delayed until a proper definition of Refused Classification could be found.
He said: "Some sections of the community have expressed concern about whether the range of material included in the RC category... correctly reflects current community standards," according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
The Aussies are already partial to a fair bit of censorship - American Psycho is banned in parts of the country and only available for over-18s elsewhere.
Adult video games are also currently refused classification and cannot be sold anywhere in Australia.
Conroy also promised to introduce a route to appeal if your site is unfairly included on the list which will be reviewed annually.
Conroy's own website, which has been a victim of hackers before, is unavailable at the time of writing. ®Brian Cushing popped by the Texans’ locker room while it was open to the media Friday without crutches or a brace supporting the knee on which he had anterior cruciate ligament replacement surgery Oct. 25.
“Probably say I’m ahead of schedule, but at the same time don’t want to push anything,” Cushing said. “There really is no rush. The most important thing is to be 100 percent healthy for when I do come back. I’m here every day working. Really happy with the progress I’ve made so far, and everything is just right on schedule.”
Cushing suffered the injury in the Texans’ victory over the New York Jets on Oct. 8. The linebacker has tried to stay around the team as much as possible while completing his rehab.
“It’s tough,” Cushing said. “After every win you obviously are happy, but a part of you feels like you weren’t part of it. … 10-1 is extremely impressive. Definitely tough watching every game and knowing I can’t contribute.”
Joseph won’t play Sunday
For a second straight week, the Texans will be without cornerback Johnathan Joseph, who is nursing a hamstring injury.
Alan Ball, who started in Joseph’s place against Detroit, is questionable for Sunday’s Tennessee game with a foot injury.
That likely means nickel corner Brice McCain will start with Brandon Harris being activated to play nickel.
“I’ve been working hard preparing myself for an opportunity,” Harris said. “(Coach Gary Kubiak) understood that. We sat down. We talked about it. I’m getting more chances.”
The Texans also will be without inside linebacker Bradie James (hamstring), guard Antoine Caldwell (hamstring), right tackle Derek Newton (knee) and outside linebacker Brooks Reed, who is likely to be out another two weeks with a groin injury.
For the Titans, linebacker Colin McCarthy has been ruled out for the game with a concussion.
League fines Watt $15,750
The NFL fined Texans defensive end J.J. Watt $15,750 for roughing the passer, hitting a player in the head or neck area.
The fine was assessed for a hit on Detroit quarterback Matthew Stafford that happened in the fourth quarter Thanksgiving Day. The Texans were not assessed a penalty for the hit.We’re usually very happy to see the government release documents shed light on unconstitutional surveillance. We’re less happy when the release is done Christmas week, in an attempt to ensure that they will get as little attention as possible.
That’s what happened this Christmas. On December 23, the National Security Agency (NSA) released over a decade’s worth of oversight reports from the NSA to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board—documents that should have been released years ago pursuant to a FOIA lawsuit brought by EFF. And on December 24, the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General released “A Review of the FBI |
the findings of that investigation due to privacy laws.
But just recently Chu herself managed to get a summary of the findings after repeatedly pressing the university. The two-page letter from Stanford's general counsel summarized the 2000 investigation.
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It said the investigation found Fliegelman had called Chu repeatedly and left her messages with sexual content, showed her pornography and initiated oral sex.
"You stated that the sexual contact was preceded by your stating that you were uncomfortable and wanted to leave," the letter reads. The summary says Fliegelman disputed that, but the letter continues, "Although there were no other witnesses to this incident, the investigation found that you made contemporaneous reports to others that were consistent with your assertion that the contact was nonconsensual."
Based on the findings, the provost at the time, John Etchemendy, concluded that Fliegelman "engaged in a pattern of unwelcome verbal conduct of a sexual nature, and engaged in an incident of physical sexual contact under circumstances that were extremely inappropriate and in which your assent could be questioned."
Fliegelman was suspended for two years, barred from the department during that time and sent to mandatory counseling. Then he went back to teaching at Stanford.
He was later honored multiple times -- at a one-day conference at Stanford known as "Jayfest" put on by former grad students, when the university acquired his rare book collection, and when he died.
'This to me encapsulates the problem. The provost of Stanford University participated in a ceremony that praised an individual who had literally been banned from campus.' Michele Dauber, Stanford Law School
The university also named an award in his honor, a practice the university followed for other faculty but which it has since discontinued.
In 2016, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies also named a mentorship award after Fliegelman. The society renamed it after hearing from Chu.
Fliegelman was honored even though his sexual misconduct case was well-known on campus.
When he died in 2007, following standard practice at Stanford, a colleague read a memorial resolution honoring him in the Faculty Senate.
The resolution described Fliegelman as a dedicated teacher and mentor. "On three occasions he won awards for teaching, including the Dean's Award for Outstanding Teaching and the Associated Students of Stanford University Teaching Award," it said. "These honors do not begin to tell the story of his remarkable devotion to classroom instruction and to advising and reading dissertations."
Everyone there -- including Provost Etchemendy, who disciplined Fliegelman -- stood in tribute.
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“This to me encapsulates the problem," says Michele Dauber, a professor at Stanford Law School and a vocal advocate for victims of sexual assault on campus. "The provost of Stanford University participated in a ceremony that praised an individual who had literally been banned from campus.”
But for Dauber it’s not a surprise. “This is what has been my experience at Stanford: light consequences followed by a sense that this kind of conduct just isn’t bad enough to remove someone from this community. And that is the sense that really must change if we’re going to make any progress."
She says sexual misconduct occurs on many college campuses, but she argues an acute lack of transparency at private universities like Stanford contributes to a lack of accountability.
Private schools aren't subject to public records laws, though they're heavily subsidized by taxpayers. A 2015 report found Stanford receives $63,100 in tax subsidies per student, while UC Berkeley -- which is subject to public records laws -- receives $10,500 per student.
“They are literally awash in government money and yet they are not subject to the same kinds of transparency that we impose on public schools," Dauber says. "It is contrary to the public interest to spend so much public money on a black box, particularly where sexual harassment and assault by faculty are concerned.”
Dauber has publicly called for the university to disavow the memorial resolution, and says she's putting together a formal request to the Faculty Senate in conjunction with other faculty.
Regarding Chu's case, Stanford University says the Title IX office is "reviewing the allegations to see if there is an action for the university to take."
Over the years, Stanford has tried to make it easier for students to report sexual misconduct. The school has created confidential resources to provide support to students and strengthened policies governing relationships between faculty and students.
'Emily Doe's' Letter to Brock Turner Inspired Chu to Speak Out
Chu is now an associate professor in the English Department at Queens College CUNY. She started writing about her experience at Stanford on Facebook last summer, after she read Emily Doe’s letter to Brock Turner, the Stanford student convicted for sexually assaulting Doe while she was unconscious.
She recently published an essay in Entropy magazine that has brought her considerable attention.
Stanford did offer Chu an apology. In that Nov. 27 letter summarizing the investigation, the general counsel, Debra Zumwalt, wrote:
On behalf of Stanford University, let me express how sorry I am that you have suffered as a result of a faculty member's misconduct. You did the right thing by bringing this issue forward back in 2000, and we are grateful to you for doing so.
It's the first apology Chu recalls getting from the university, but instead of bringing her closure, the letter raises more questions for her. She remembers being raped all too clearly, she says, and doesn't understand why the school found Fliegelman responsible only for harassment.
"At this point what I really want is an explanation," Chu says. "I want to move on, but first I need to understand what happened to me."
Chu requested a copy of the investigative report on her case from Stanford, but hasn't received it yet.
UC Berkeley Grad Student Shares Familiar Story of Abuse
A couple of days after Chu’s essay came out, another woman made public her own decades-old allegations against a professor.
Kimberly Latta was in her first semester of grad school at UC Berkeley in the mid-'80s when she took a class from a visiting professor: Franco Moretti.
In a Nov. 5 letter posted on Facebook, Latta writes that Moretti “sexually stalked," "pressured" and "raped” her.
“I remember wanting him to stop and telling him I don’t like this, I'm not comfortable with this," she says in an interview. To which she remembers him responding, “‘You American women, when you say no you mean yes.’” Moretti is Italian.
She says the harassment continued for several months. During his office hours in the English Department, she remembers Moretti pushing her up against the wall and grabbing her breasts.
“I remember feeling kind of revolted and paralyzed and embarrassed and ashamed and deeply uncomfortable,” she says, “and yet totally and completely passive and unable to do anything. For the longest time I remember feeling so ashamed of myself for having allowed that to happen, as though it were somehow my fault.”
Eventually, Latta says, she became sick with anxiety.
She stopped going to Moretti’s class because she’d get sick to her stomach when she did. She went to Berkeley’s Title IX office to make a complaint.
"I remember walking in and thinking, ‘Oh shit.’" The officer at the time was Frances Ferguson, another professor in the English department. Latta remembers crying in Ferguson’s office and telling her she was being harassed. She doesn’t remember if she told Ferguson she’d been raped. “I was deeply ashamed of that," Latta says.
Latta says Ferguson actively discouraged her from reporting. "Her demeanor and coldness led me to believe that if I were to go through with a formal process, there would be nobody at the university who would be on my side, who would believe me.”
She assumed it was because Ferguson and Moretti knew each other, and “they were on the same team and I wasn’t. I was an expendable graduate student.” Both professors deny they were friends at the time.
In a statement, Ferguson said she hadn’t understood the misconduct to be so significant. She recalled Latta describing sexual harassment, not assault.
"I respect that we remember some of these events differently," she said in the statement. "Had any student at Berkeley brought a formal complaint concerning such allegations, I would have pursued it."
But that wasn’t Latta’s impression. So instead of going through with the formal process, Latta says, she told Moretti she’d reported him to the university. She says he threatened to destroy her reputation and end her career.
Moretti is now a professor emeritus at Stanford. He did not respond to a request for comment, but he told the Stanford Daily he denies the rape allegation. He said Latta had been a consensual partner.
“We went out to dinner together one night and back to her apartment, where we had fully consensual sex and I spent the night,” Moretti told the campus paper. “I did not rape her, and am horrified by the accusation.”
He added that he and Latta kept meeting, and maintained their acquaintance until he left Berkeley. He also denied threatening Latta.
A friend of Latta’s, who was a fellow student in Moretti’s class, confirmed much of Latta’s account. She asked not to be named because she’s still in academia. She remembers Latta agreeing to go on a date with Moretti and having a bad experience, though she didn’t know the details. Afterward, she says, the professor wouldn’t stop pursuing Latta.
“Basically we would call it stalking,” she said. “She would leave his office and be very upset.”
The friend remembers Latta trying to make a complaint and later telling her that she’d been threatened with legal recrimination. The friend says Latta was a strong student, but ended up dropping out because of the episode.
Latta says that’s true. She didn’t finish her Ph.D. at Berkeley. “I had to leave academia for a long time because of what happened,” she says.
It wasn’t just the trauma of the alleged assault and harassment, or the way the university responded that affected her. She says the experience with Moretti undermined her sense of herself.
"At first I thought he was interested in me because he thought I had an interesting mind,” she says. “But then to find out it was only sex -- it really sapped me of my sense of myself as an intellectual. It took me a long time to gather myself together and feel like a competent scholar after that.”
Latta says she has wanted to tell this story for years, but it’s only because she feels buoyed by the recent wave of women's public testimonies that she’s doing it now.
“I don’t any longer feel like a single voice crying in the wilderness,” she says.
Stanford University says it is reviewing her allegations against Moretti.
In the days after Latta spoke out, another allegation involving Moretti has surfaced from Jane Penner, a woman who alleges he harassed her while she was attending a seminar at Dartmouth University.
Seeing women like Chu, Latta and Penner come forward as part of the #MeToo movement is heartening, says Stanford student Stephanie Pham, who founded the university’s Association of Students for Sexual Assault Prevention. But, she says, it's also upsetting.
"What I’ve found most disappointing and scary is that if you compare what happened to these survivors decades -- generations -- ago, to what’s happening now, you see that nothing has really changed,” Pham says.
In 2015, about 40 percent of undergrad women who were surveyed said they had experienced sexual violence in some form at Stanford.A new anti-Donald Trump proposal is trying to allow delegates to vote their conscience at the Republican convention. | AP Photo Trump foes make new push to unbind GOP convention delegates
Anti-Trump delegates to the Republican National Convention are circulating the language of a plan that would free all delegates to vote for the candidate of their choosing at the convention, a move aimed at loosening Donald Trump’s grip on the party’s presidential nomination.
A letter, sent to members of the convention rules committee by Colorado delegate Kendal Unruh, makes no mention of Trump but includes a new party rule that would permit any delegate to shrug off pledged support — usually, support dictated by the results of state primaries or caucuses — for any candidate by invoking a new “conscience” clause.
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“If any such delegate notifies the secretary of his or her intent to cast a vote of conscience, whether personal or religious, each such delegate shall be unbound and unconstrained by these rules on any given vote,” the proposal reads, “including the first ballot for the selection of the Republican nominee for President of the United States, without the risk of challenge, sanction, or retribution by the Republican National Committee.”
The plan describes legitimate personal reasons as including “public disclosure of one or more any grievous acts of personal conduct by a nominee candidate, including but not limited to, criminally actionable acts, acts of moral turpitude or extreme prejudice, and/or notorious public statements of support for positions that clearly oppose or contradict the policies embodied in the Republican Party's platform.”
Unruh, the rule’s author, has attended seven national conventions and was elected at a state convention to return as a delegate for Ted Cruz. She was also elected by her fellow Colorado delegates to serve on the convention rules committee. Unruh has become one of the leaders of the stop-Trump movement, though it’s unclear if she’ll find much support among fellow rules committee members. She’s running a group called Free the Delegates and is working to cobble together a majority of the convention’s 112-member rules committee to support her proposal.
In her letter, Unruh also embraces an argument proffered by North Dakota Republican Curly Haugland, who suggests that delegates are already free to vote their personal preference based on decades-old interpretations of Republican rules. Unruh argues that her proposal would simply codify explicitly the choice delegates already have.Can liberalism rescue Bosnia and Herzegovina from nationalism-driven politics? Senad Osmanovic says yes.
The discussion surrounding the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina has for years been at a stalemate, where old ideas and phrases get refashioned in Brussels, and returned to the country in new packaging. These packages promise economic development, prosperity, reforms, integration and justice, and ultimately an invitation to the European family. For more than two decades, the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been paved, the push of Dayton would be replaced by the pull from Brussels and develop the country into a modern European state. This has not happened even though the first post-conflict decade saw changes and progress, with the assistance of the High Representative, which were then followed by passivity and idleness from the main national and international actors.
The approach from the European Union has changed from time to time. An active role has been tried, and so has a passive one. Soft politics has changed to hard politics and vice versa. Still, no great development towards the Union has been made, even though the recent progress reports declare positive results and small steps towards Brussels. The German-British initiative from 2014 was an active push towards changing the economics and focus less on the politics. Even though the economics and politics are often intermingled in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Meanwhile, a fusion of blockades and inabilities to change the status quo has been the usual offer from Bosnia and Herzegovina’s side. While nothing constructive happens inside the country, the unemployment rate is amongst the highest in the world and the brain drain continues since the young and educated take flight to other destinations.
Just like in other countries which are both inside and outside the European Union – the pro-EU and anti-EU tides shift regularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina, often due to external factors, most recently the migration crisis and Brexit. A large influx of refugees to the European Union has created a large strain on its capacities. Also, with one country leaving the Union, its future can be up for discussion. That said, the relationship between the European Union and Bosnia and Herzegovina is a prosperous one. The European Union is the biggest trading partner to the country and critics who downplay the Union’s role on the continent can not turn a blind eye to the fact that the Union is still a major force. On the other hand, Bosnia and Herzegovina can not expect the European Union to solve all its pre-existing problems without any effort from the country itself.
Since the launch of the latest initiative in 2014, the political maneuvering of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been tiptoeing towards Brussels with the membership application formally filed at the beginning of 2016. Even though the same old political parties are still in charge of the future of the country, a new way of acting and thinking has made them more capable of seeing the same kind of issues and possibilities which the European Union does, and some progress had been made. However, the progress made is often overshadowed by large trenches of loans in exchange, mainly from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which keep the economy floating on a short-term basis but will have consequences in the long run. By the end of 2016, the Questionnaire of the European Commission was handed over to Bosnia and Herzegovina, containing 33 chapters and 3242 questions. Currently, 33 working groups have been established and ahead of them is a great challenge which will test the country and its capacities. The working groups are already trailing and slipping behind schedule. With several different levels of authority in need of addressing, political influence is never far away and eventually a complete breakdown of the process is possible if some part is unsatisfied.
Why is it that Bosnia and Herzegovina does not change its approach towards the European Union without first being offered something in return? The pro-EU foundation is largely based on the liberal ideas of two of the four largest political groups in the European Parliament, the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe and the European People’s Party. As part of a former communist system which preferred socialism, the beginning of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a sovereign state did not see an ideological change towards liberalism. Instead, a chokehold of nationalist ideas gripped the country which only looks for support among its own ethnic ranks. At the same time, the amount of corruption and nepotism is soaring.
To make the changes necessary to leave this nationalism-oriented set-up behind, an ideological makeover is required from within. After all, the alternatives to the European Union are thin and unconvincing and Bosnia and Herzegovina needs both short-term and long-term stability to develop. However, opportunities offered must be taken. Last week, dignitaries from the European Union and the region gathered in Sarajevo, but the hosts did not take advantage of the occasion and nothing constructive came out of the summit.
Liberalism is weak in Bosnia and Herzegovina; it is also something unfamiliar. The ideas and phrases that the European Union tries to establish in Bosnia and Herzegovina are forcing the Union into a position in which it has to convince the country that this is how it needs to act and think. In its basic form, a shift in ideology only has two dimensions: the organization of the country and the way to get there.
What the European Union has done lately is show Bosnia and Herzegovina how to organize the country and how this can be achieved within its own legal, albeit complex, judicial framework. However, when attempts to start a dialogue about the idea of adopting a new political philosophy in the country which can eventually undermine the current nationalism-driven set-up and change the outlook for the future – a passive and hollow response has often been the answer. How can we change and what is the alternative? A drastic change from established routines which the citizens have lived with for more than two decades into something unfamiliar can also be frightening. That said, fear of change and the unknown do not necessarily mean that a struggle will begin.
More importantly, not trying to change at all is a guaranteed loss. For every year that passes without progress, Bosnia and Herzegovina has less and less to lose.Pseudo-Cushing's syndrome Specialty Endocrinology
Pseudo-Cushing's syndrome is a medical condition in which patients display the signs, symptoms, and abnormal hormone levels seen in Cushing's syndrome. However, pseudo-Cushing's syndrome is not caused by a problem with the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis as Cushing's is; it is mainly an idiopathic condition, however a cushingoid appearance is sometimes linked to excessive alcohol consumption.[1] Elevated levels of total cortisol can also be due to estrogen found in oral contraceptive pills that contain a mixture of estrogen and progesterone. Estrogen can cause an increase of cortisol-binding globulin and thereby cause the total cortisol level to be elevated.[2]
Diagnosis [ edit ]
Differential diagnosis [ edit ]
Differentiation from Cushing's is difficult, but several tools exist to aid in the diagnosis [4]
Alternative causes of Cushing's should be excluded with imaging of lungs, adrenal glands, and pituitary gland; these often appear normal in Cushing's
In the alcoholic patient with pseudo-Cushing's, admission to hospital (and avoidance of alcohol) will result in normal midnight cortisol levels within five days, excluding Cushing's [5]
Another cause for Cushing's syndrome is adrenocortical carcinoma. This is a rare form of cancer with an incidence of 1-2 per million people annually. About 60% of these cancers produce hormones, with cortisol being the most frequent. Most patients present in an advanced disease state and the outcome is dismal.[6]
Prognosis [ edit ]
Blood results and symptoms normalise rapidly on cessation of drinking or remission of depression.[ citation needed ]
References [ edit ]In the span of 24 hours, six people were shot in Stockton, and police are trying to see if there is a connection between two separate shootings.
Homicide detectives have their hands full, as they try to piece together what happened over the weekend.
Police were called out Saturday night to Princess Lane where there were reports of shots fired.
When police got there, Stockton police officer Joe Silva says a woman and two children were shot.
"Our victims were a 3-year-old girl, an 11-year-old girl and a 30-year-old woman. The three of them were inside a car when they were shot," Silva said.
They suffered non-life threatening wounds.
Then hours later Sunday morning, on the same street, a documented gang member was fatally shot and two others injured.
Neighbors are now saying they're scared to even go out on their front lawns.
"Call Crime Stoppers, you can remain anonymous. Because we do want people to be able to have people feel safe. And the only way we can get back to that is for the community to help us," Silva said.
Investigators are not saying both shootings are connected but it is being considered.GORHAM — Students of various political stripes at the University of Southern Maine are preparing to welcome Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, who plans to visit USM’s Gorham campus Saturday during a two-day campaign trip to Maine.
Some students are excited about the congressman’s visit, including Mark Truss, 23, a sophomore criminology major from New Jersey. Truss is a Democrat who’s not bound by party lines.
Additional Photos Chris Camire: Organizer wants to get more students involved Sean Rothgaber: ‘Paul wouldn’t be my candidate of choice’ Will Getchell: ‘Paul is a shock that our political system needs’ Chris Perkins: Iraq war veteran likes Paul’s foreign policy Mark Truss: ‘Interested in learning about all the candidates’ Meghan Connelly: Wells student: ‘I don’t know much about him’ Related Headlines Ron Paul to speak at Colby Friday
“I’m interested in learning about all the candidates,” Truss said Tuesday. “I pretty much watch what happens and try to figure who’s best to run the country.”
Other students aren’t interested in Paul’s pending visit, including Sean Rothgaber, 21, a junior from Hollis who’s studying information technology. He’s an independent voter who leans left.
“Ron Paul wouldn’t be my candidate of choice anyway,” Rothgaber said. “I like his foreign policy best out of all the Republicans, but I’d go for Romney because he’s the least right. I think the world would like us a little bit better if we didn’t have our foot down everyone’s throat.”
Paul is scheduled to speak at 11 a.m. Saturday in the Hastings Formal Lounge, on the first floor of Hastings Hall. The event is free and open to the public. The rest of Paul’s schedule for Friday and Saturday is being developed, said Ryan Flowers, the candidate’s deputy state campaign chairman in Maine.
Paul finished fourth in Saturday’s primary in South Carolina, behind Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. The next primary will be held Jan. 31 in Florida.
Student Body President Chris Camire is helping to organize the event at USM with state Rep. Aaron Libby, R-Waterboro. Libby didn’t respond to calls for an interview Tuesday.
Camire, an independent voter, got involved when a recent USM graduate who’s a Paul supporter contacted him Monday, looking for help in planning a campaign event at USM. Camire’s cellphone has been busy ever since.
“A lot of people are excited to see Ron Paul,” Camire said Tuesday. “People are telling their friends and word is getting around. I heard from one student who’s coming down from Colby College.”
Camire said he’s glad but surprised that Paul’s campaign workers want to hold the event at USM’s rural Gorham campus, instead of its more urban Portland campus. About 10 percent of USM’s 9,300 students live in dorms on the Gorham campus; the rest live off campus or commute from towns around southern Maine.
“USM isn’t always blessed with such cool people coming to campus,” Camire said, noting that university administrators are working together to make plans for parking, public safety and Paul’s campaign security.
Camire, 20, a sophomore from Auburn who’s studying technology management, declined to discuss his political views about the election in general or Paul in particular.
“My No. 1 priority is to get more students interested and involved in the election,” Camire said. “I’m hoping (Paul) will open the event up to questions and answers because I’d like to ask him a few questions myself.”
One student who plans to attend Saturday’s event is Anthony Diaferio, 19, a freshman from Island Falls who’s studying criminal justice. He recently started working on Paul’s campaign.
“Right now, it seems a lot of people don’t know he’s coming,” Diaferio said. “A lot of people don’t like to get into politics. I like Ron Paul because he’s not a flip-flopper like the rest of the Republicans. If he doesn’t win (the Republican nomination), I won’t vote.”
Meghan Connelly, 18, a freshman education major from Wells, said she hasn’t paid much attention to the Republican campaigns.
But Connelly, a Republican and a Christian who opposes abortion, said she “might as well” attend Paul’s campaign event. It will be in her dorm.
“I don’t know much about him,” Connelly said. “I normally just wait until it’s time to vote, and then my mom and dad tell me who I should vote for.”
Paul is an anti-abortion candidate who also believes that gay marriage is an issue to be decided by the states.
Victor Tardiff, 22, a math major from Augusta, said he plans to attend Paul’s event but doesn’t plan to vote in the presidential election.
“It’s current events,” Tardiff said. “It’s going to be something interesting, and not much happens in Gorham.”
Some students said they’re glad that Paul is coming to USM but they won’t be able to attend because they will be working.
One is Chris Perkins, 26, a veteran who did two tours in Iraq with the Marines. A junior art major who lives in Portland, Perkins said he likes Paul’s approach to foreign policy and believes U.S. forces should leave Afghanistan.
“We spend so much money on wars that aren’t necessarily constitutional,” Perkins said. “As long as we’re (in Afghanistan), we’re just going to create more enemies.”
Another student who will be working Saturday morning is Will Getchell, a senior political science major who spent last summer working for a security contractor in Baghdad.
Getchell said he’s an independent voter with libertarian leanings who registered as a Republican so he can vote in Maine’s upcoming presidential caucuses. He said some students like Paul because he stands up to “the establishment,” opposes long and expensive wars without congressional approval and favors legalizing marijuana.
Paul’s views on abortion and gay marriage are “wedge issues” that distract voters from real concerns, he said.
“Ron Paul is a shock that our political system needs,” said Getchell, 23, of York. “He has been consistent in his views, especially foreign policy. He can’t be bought.”
Staff Writer Kelley Bouchard can be contacted at 791-6328 or at: [email protected]
SharePradip Sarmah, back in 2002, had a conversation with a cycle rickshaw driver that changed his life’s purpose for ever. Watch how Pradip reinvented the cycle rickshaw and how his rickshaw bank is making rickshaw drivers smile every single day. Pradip’s biggest impact? In his own words:
“Their children are now going to school – and most importantly, they are accepted by society”
Watch How He Reinvented The Rickshaw And Changed Hundreds Of Lives For The Better
About: Video by The Collaborative
In 2006, The Lemelson Foundation and Ashoka launched a partnership to advance invention for social good. Together, they identified and invested in over one hundred leading invention entrepreneurs from developing countries.
Pradip Sarmah is one of these outstanding individuals. His work to inspire inventive engineering and innovative business models is empowering service providers like rickshaw drivers to enhance their livelihoods.Science is always providing new information that allows us to interpret the behaviors of dogs, or to reinterpret behaviors which we thought we understood very well—such as the meaning of a dog's tail wagging.
Perhaps the most common misinterpretation of dogs is the myth that a dog wagging its tail is happy and friendly. While some wags are indeed associated with, others can mean, insecurity, a social challenge or even a warning that if you approach, you are apt to be bitten.
In some ways, tail wagging serves the same communication functions as a human smile, a polite greeting or a nod of recognition. Smiles are social signals and are thus reserved mostly for situations where somebody is around to see them. For dogs, the wag seems to have the same properties.
Since tail wagging is meant as a signal that a dog will only wag its tail when other living beings are around—a person, another dog, a cat, a horse, or perhaps a ball of lint blown by a breeze and seemingly alive. When the dog is alone, it will not give its typical tail wags, in the same way people do not talk to walls.
Like any other language, tail wags have a vocabulary and grammar that needs to be understood. Up to now scientists focused on two major sources of information, namely the tail's pattern of movement and its position. However new data adds a third important dimension to the language of the canine tail.
Movement is a very important aspect of the signal. Dogs' eyes are much more sensitive to movement than they are to details or colors, so a moving tail is very visible to other dogs. Evolution has made tails even more visible, such as tails with a light or dark tip, a lighter underside or a bushy shape.
The tail's position, specifically the height at which it is held, can be considered a sort of emotional meter. A middle height suggests the dog is relaxed. If the tail is held horizontally, the dog is attentive and alert. As the tail position moves farther up, it is a sign the dog is becoming more threatening, with a vertical tail being a clearly dominant signal: "I'm boss around here," or a warning, "Back off or suffer the consequences."
As the tail position drops lower, it is a sign that the dog is becoming more submissive, is worried, or feels poorly. The extreme expression is the tail tucked under the body, which is a sign of fear: "Please don't hurt me."
Just as there are different dialects to a human language, such as a southern drawl or a New England twang, there are also dialects in dog tail language. Different breeds carry their tails at different heights, from the natural nearly vertical position common to Beagles and many Terriers to the low-slung tails of Greyhounds and Whippets. All positions should be read relative to the average position where the individual dog normally holds its tail.
Movements give additional meaning to the signals. The speed of the wag indicates how excited the dog is. Meanwhile, the breadth of each tail sweep reveals whether the dog's emotional state is positive or negative, independent from the level of excitement.
As a result, there are many combinations, including the following common tail movements:
● A slight wag, with each swing of only small breadth, is usually seen during greetings as a tentative, "Hello there," or a hopeful "I'm here."
● A broad wag is friendly: "I am not challenging or threatening you." This can also mean: "I'm pleased." This is the closest to the popular concept of the happiness wag, especially if the tail seems to drag the hips with it.
● A slow wag with the tail at half-mast is less social than most other tail signals. Generally speaking, slow wags with the tail in neither a particularly dominant (high) nor a submissive (low) position are signs of insecurity.
● Tiny, high-speed movements that give the of the tail vibrating are signs the dog is about to do something, usually run or fight. If the tail is held high while vibrating, it is most likely an active threat.
We can now add another newly discovered, feature of dog tail language that may surprise attentive pet owners as much as it surprised scientists like me. It now appears that when dogs feel generally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rear ends, and when they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.
Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trieste in Italy, and two veterinarians, Angelo Quaranta and Marcello Siniscalchi, at the University of Bari published a paper describing this phenomenon in the journal Current Biology. The researchers recruited 30 family of mixed breed and placed them in a cage equipped with cameras that precisely tracked the angles of their tail wags. Then they were shown four stimuli in the front of the cage: their owner; an unfamiliar human; a cat; and an unfamiliar, dominant dog.
When the dogs saw their owners, their tails all wagged vigorously with a to the right side of their bodies, while an unfamiliar human caused their tails to wag moderately to the right. Looking at the cat, the dogs' tails again wagged more to the right but more slowly and with restrained movements. However, the sight of an aggressive, unfamiliar dog caused their tails to wag with a bias to the left side of their bodies.
It is important to understand that we are talking about the dog's left or right, viewed from the rear as if you are facing in the direction the dog is viewing. Meaning that if you are facing the dog and drew an imaginary line down the middle of his back that positive right-sided signal would appear as tail swings mostly curving to your left.
This is not as strange a finding as you might think at first. Research has shown that in many animals, including birds, frogs, monkeys and humans, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and serenity. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like, a sense of, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate. Contrast this to the which specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system.
Since the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body, activity in one half of the brain shows up as movements on the opposite side of the body. For instance, chicks prefer to use their left eye to search for food (approach behavior) and right eye to watch for predators overhead (avoidance). In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face reflect unhappiness (right brain). So now we can add to this: that positive feelings pull a dog's tail to the right and negative feelings pull it to the left.
Unfortunately, if your dog's tail is docked to a short stub it is going to greatly reduce your ability to spot this signal and deduce what your dog is feeling at the moment.
Stanley Coren is the author of many books including: Born to Bark, The Modern Dog, Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses? The Pawprints of History, How Dogs Think, How To Speak Dog, Why We Love the Dogs We Do, What Do Dogs Know? The Intelligence of Dogs, Why Does My Dog Act That Way? Understanding Dogs for Dummies, Sleep Thieves, The Left-hander Syndrome
Copyright SC Psychological Enterprises Ltd. May not be reprinted or reposted without permissionHelen Gloag (1750–1790), of Muthill, Perthshire, Scotland, became the Empress of Morocco.[1]
Helen was born on 29 January 1750 to blacksmith Andrew Gloag and his wife Ann Kay in the village of Wester Pett, just south of Muthill in Perthshire,[2][3] and was the eldest of four siblings. Her father remarried after her mother died, but Helen did not have a good relationship with her stepmother, and left home at the age of 19 to take a passage from Greenock to South Carolina.[4] The ship was captured by Barbary corsairs, pirates from Morocco, two weeks into the voyage.[2][3]
After capture, the men were killed and the women were taken to the slave market in Algiers.[3] Gloag was purchased by a wealthy Moroccan and handed over to Sultan Sidi Mohammid ibn Abdullah.[2] Due to her beauty, red hair, and green eyes, the Sultan added her to his harem. His infatuation toward her resulted in her becoming his fourth wife and eventually 'principal' or favourite wife,[5] and later being given the title of Empress.[2][3] Her intervention was said to be instrumental in the releases of seafarers and slaves captured by the Salé pirates.
Gloag was able to write home and to receive visits in Morocco from her brother Robert, who was responsible for her story finding its way back to Scotland.[2] She became credited for a reduction in activities of Moroccan-based pirates, though this might also have been because of |
first-ever Stanley Cup last season, the Kings had won only one playoff series in the previous 19 seasons and missed the playoffs altogether in 12 of those seasons.
Last season's magical ride from the eighth seed to Stanley Cup champions came so easily. The Kings beat the top three teams in the West en route to the Stanley Cup finals, became the first team to jump out to a 3-0 series lead in every series and won a league-record 10 straight road games. Looking back on last season before Saturday's game, Kings captain Dustin Brown realized how easy it was compared to defending the title.
"In retrospect, it was easy last year," Brown said. "When you're going through it, it's not, but when you look back on it, it is. We've had to grind games out here … Quite honestly, this is what I expected it to be when we won last year. I remember talking to guys who won a Cup, and they talk about how hard it is. Last year, we were playing at a level that few teams have ever played at, and, this year, we're finding it to be much more difficult."
Nothing came easy for the Kings this postseason. After going 10-1 on the road last postseason, they were just 1-8 on the road this postseason. They had to come back from a 2-0 series hole against the St. Louis Blues in the first round, beat the San Jose Sharks in seven games in the next round and simply could not get past the Presidents' Trophy winners in the conference finals.
As he looks back on the season and what the Kings have accomplished over the past two seasons, Kings coach Darryl Sutter didn't see any reason to hang his head after the game.
"We got beat in the conference finals by the best team in the conference at the end of the day," Sutter said. "We accomplished everything. Once you set the bar up there, then that's your bar. So obviously, we're disappointed to lose to Chicago, but we're certainly not disappointed in how we played. I mean, I think you look at our season, other than not getting home ice, we've done everything we've wanted."
The Kings will be in position to get home ice and once again compete for the Stanley Cup next season and for the next few, and they only have to look at the teams in this season's Stanley Cup finals to know that it's possible. The Blackhawks were eliminated in the first round two straight seasons after winning the Stanley Cup in 2010, and the Boston Bruins lost in the first round after winning the Stanley Cup in 2011, and now both are back in the finals again.
This season's Kings team was almost identical to last season's team that won the Stanley Cup, and most of the team will likely be brought back, with Dustin Penner, Brad Richardson and Rob Scuderi being the only unrestricted free agents.
If the past two seasons have taught us anything about the Kings, it's that they are a resilient group that will bounce back from this season's disappointment just as they did when they fell behind 2-0 early to Chicago and were counted out down 3-2 with less than 10 seconds left in Game 5.
"We don't have to talk much about that stuff," Sutter said. "That's really a question that we get asked a lot, about resolve, all those things. Our team is highly successful because of that. There's not much you can do about giving up bad goals. If you put your head between your legs, you're going to get you're a-- kicked. We don't do that. We respond in the right way all the time."
It's a response that has been a breath of fresh air in Los Angeles the past two seasons and will likely continue to be for the foreseeable future.Here's my first official oil painting commission. I was very happy to do a Hulk piece. He's so flexible that he makes for a great subject with any medium.
As with all of my paintings so far, it was a real learning experience. Too many to really name, but early on I thought it was going to be a complete disaster and was relieved to not hate the results. Still a lot of things I havent figured out yet and the painting suffers for it, but one piece at a time. I can see the progress I'm making and thats a big motivator.
I love the colors that oils give, but I haven't figured out a way to showcase that in these scans. More than any other medium I use, oils get hurt the most by my scans. I wish I could share these with everyone in person.
Oils on panel
Hulk © Marvel ComicsNew York Knicks fans, brace yourself. Take a deep breath and exhale slowly. Then make sure you're sitting down before reading any further.
In a long-form piece for The New York Observer, Rafi Kohan relayed the following quote, spoken by none other than Carmelo Anthony:
I want to be a free agent. I think everybody in the NBA dreams to be a free agent at least one time in their career. It’s like you have an evaluation period, you know. It’s like if I’m in the gym and I have all the coaches, all the owners, all the GMs come into the gym and just evaluate everything I do. So yes, I want that experience.
'Melo's impending foray into free agency has been the subject of much discussion throughout the offseason.
Will he decide to stay in New York for the foreseeable future? Will he opt out and hit the open market? Could he—gasp—join the Los Angeles Lakers, putting on a purple-and-gold jersey that would incite plenty of boos?
It's sure to be a hot-button issue throughout the 2013-14 campaign, even as the Knicks keep pace in the Eastern Conference and remain a legitimate part of the title chase. Especially now that the world knows where Anthony stands on the issue.
But what does this actually mean? Should we start spewing out doom and gloom for the Knicks?
Nope, definitely not.
Last I checked, it was possible to opt out of a contract and then re-sign for a longer deal with the very same team. Becoming a free agent doesn't mean that 'Melo is going to find a new home, and New York fans should be all too familiar with that process. Remember, J.R. Smith opted out of a deal and then re-signed with the Knicks during the 2013 offseason.
Anthony continued speaking after his proclamation:
I came to New York for a reason. I’ve been with you all my life, almost to a fault. I wanted to come here and take on the pressures of playing in New York. So one thing I would tell my fans: If you haven’t heard it from me, then it ain’t true.
See? Nothing to worry about yet. Anthony is still focused on the coming season, and that won't change unless the Knicks drop out of contention.
If B/R's Zach Buckley is correct, there's nothing to worry about. He predicts that the Knicks' ceiling could reach "all the way into June" if everything goes according to plan and that they won't fall below the No. 5 seed in the East.
Let's keep the focus on that title quest for now, even if 'Melo has stated he wants to become a free agent. Remember, there's a difference between hitting the open market and taking advantage of it.
For now, Anthony is still the top player on the Knicks, and he will be for quite some time.Indeed, a modern F1 car is a tough beast to manage, and the technical dramas that the team revealed after last weekend's Russian GP – which required both Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg to manage their cars – has highlighted things are never easy in F1.
Central to what Rosberg and Hamilton have had to do is their steering wheel, whose array of buttons, rotaries and switches that it's bestowed with perhaps has more in common with a fighter pilot's cockpit.
That analogy doesn't end there though, because all these control functions are weapons in his arsenal as he looks to get the best from his machine over the course of the race.
Here, we look in detail at the steering wheel of Rosberg, to understand better its layout and just complicated the control systems are.
Starting in the upper left we find a light blue horizontal thumb rotary that Rosberg uses to fine tune his differential settings.
The orange OT button is for overtake and is pressed when the driver wants full power without the need to make multiple adjustments elsewhere on the wheel. This can be used for either attack or defence but must be used wisely as it can have an affect on energy strategy later in the lap.
The red BB- button is used to control the level of brake balance, in this case reducing the front-rear bias.
The green 'N' button is for neutral
Moving down the left hand side of the wheel we find a light blue vertical rotary marked BMIG, which we believe is the rotary we have heard Rosberg and his engineers relate to as brake magic.
This gives Rosberg the ability to fine-tune the settings in relation to the amount of energy being harvested so as not to disturb the car's balance,
The +10 button is used to quickly navigate through the pages of information available to him on the PCU8D LCD screen.
The dark blue thumb wheel is used to fine tune the differential during high speed corners
The yellow 'MARK' button can be used to place a marker on the drivers' telemetry trace. This can be used for an assortment of reasons but is usually used when they spot a problem with the car, or when returning to the garage, so that they can then pick through the problem with the engineer.
The left hand multi function rotary is used to determine the 'STRAT' or strategy mode currently being deployed. This is a baseline setting that decides energy schemes such as the fuel flow and ERS deployment.
The centre multi function deals with a huge array of details, settings, and sensors. It will include things like the current tyre/compound choice, as this can have an impact on the sensors around the car, given the differing circumferences of the wet/dry tyres.
It can be used to reset sensors that may be showing warnings, or change the bite point settings for the clutch.
The right hand multi function is referred to as the HPP rotary, as it deals exclusively with engine modes and can be used to change a whole host of details, such as fuel mixture and ignition timing.
In the case of Rosberg, he is using the rotary for a secondary function at pitstops, with the yellow numbered positions relating to the wing angle change he would like.
The PC/R button is used to confirm a request from the pitwall without the need to verbally do so. This can be important for the driver as they already require a substantial amount of mental dexterity without having to talk to the pitwall about every decision.
The yellow 'limiter' button is used when in the pitlane so as to observe the speed limit
The red vertical thumb wheel is used to fine tune the differential on corner entry
The +1 button is used to scroll through the pages of information on the LCD screen, one-by-one.
The green vertical rotary marked 'EB' fine tunes the brake balance, more so than just with the +/- buttons at the top of the wheel.
The grey 'radio' button does exactly that, allowing the driver to communicate with the pitwall via radio
The BB+ button makes positive incremental changes to the brake balance
The DRS button activates the movement of the rear wing flap when one second behind another driver at the detection point during the race.
The green horizontal thumb rotary is used to fine tune the mid corner effects of the differential
Rosberg's steering wheel, detailed view Photo by: Giorgio Piola
You may have also noticed that on Rosberg's wheel there are several stickers which he uses like cue cards to remember system procedures, such as priming the car for a start or dealing with a pitstop.
So, the left hand sticker (inset) is a reminder about the procedure that must be undertaken before a pitstop. TYRES + FLAP relates to the central and right hand multi function rotaries, with his selections transmitted to the crew, whilst STRAT 6 must be selected to reduce the amount of energy, be it petrochemical or electrical, being used by the car in pitlane.
SETTINGS? is simply a reminder that any additional setting changes must be made last in this order. Think of it like, mirror, signal, manoeuvre: often we do these without mentally calculating their order but if interrupted we can make mistakes.
The sticker placed above the multi-function rotaries is a reminder of the STRAT modes, with 6 used to save fuel under slower conditions, such as the pitlane or behind a safety car, whilst 3 and 4 are for race and qualifying.
The right hand sticker is a reminder of the procedure at the start of the race and is predominately to do with conditioning the brakes and clutch to optimise the start.
Mercedes AMG F1 W07 steering wheel Photo by: XPB Images
Having concentrated on Rosberg's wheel, you could be mistaken for thinking that Hamilton's wheel is entirely different, and whilst they aren't markedly different in terms of their shape, the buttons positions, rotaries, paddles and even colours are all customised to suit each drivers needs.MEXICO CITY — A mass grave has been found near here, the authorities said Thursday, and they are investigating whether the victims are a group of young people kidnapped en masse from a bar in May, a crime that shocked and perplexed a capital city not accustomed to such brazen violence.
Image Credit The New York Times
The city’s chief prosecutor, Rodolfo Ríos Garza, said it would take at least two days to analyze evidence and identify the bodies, found Wednesday east of downtown, in the town of Tlalmanalco; at least seven have been excavated but officials said there could be more. The 12 young people were abducted from the Heaven bar in a popular nightclub district steps away from Paseo de la Reforma, a major thoroughfare. It was the kind of kidnapping that occurs more often in areas of the country in the throes of the drug war but less so in the capital.
Mexican news media have focused on the group’s connection to the city’s Tepito neighborhood, a rough slum synonymous with crime and contraband. News reports said some of the abducted had connections to drug dealers, though their families have said they were not criminals. Relatives have staged protests to complain about the investigation’s slow progress.
A spokesman for the city’s prosecutor’s office said five suspects were in custody. Ricardo Martínez Chávez, a lawyer for the families of some of those abducted, told CNN Mexico on Thursday that one suspect had led the authorities to the mass grave. Mexico’s attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, said that the authorities found the mass grave during an investigation into a tip about arms trafficking in the area. Mr. Ríos Garza did not disclose any information about the bodies found Wednesday. Another mass grave, which contained five bodies, was found in the same area in 2011.Concord Community Schools
Concord Community Schools, 405 S Main St., Concord. (MLive.com files)
(MLive)
CONCORD, MI - Before they even got started, classes were canceled in Concord Community Schools on Wednesday, Aug. 24.
The action comes on the heels of school administrators discovering the district's buses had been sabotaged overnight, according to Concord Community Schools Superintendent Dan Funston.
Vandals, Funston said, let the air out of several tires on 10 of the district's buses, making a significant portion of the bus fleet inoperable.
The discovery was made by school employees at about 5:45 a.m. Wednesday, Funston said. The tires were drained down to a point where there were off the rims, and there wasn't time to get them pumped up again before the start of the school day, he said.
"It's awfully disappointing to see this happen," Funston said. "A lot of kids were excited to come in for the first day of school after last night's open house."
A majority of students attending Concord schools rely on the bus to get them there, Funston said.
Deputies from the Jackson County Sheriff's Office currently are at the school investigating the incident and will work closely with the district to identify the individuals responsible, Undersheriff Christopher Kuhl said.
Anyone who may have observed vehicles or individuals near the bus area late Tuesday night or early Wednesday are urged to contact detectives at 517-768-7931 or 517-768-7934.
The first day of school for Concord students now is a full day of classes on Thursday Aug. 25. Teachers and staff are still reported for duty on Wednesday.People usually grow annual plants. These plants die each winter and they have to be replanted in spring. But, perennials keep come back every year. In this article we have listed the most delicious perennial plants to grow in your own garden:
However, even though all of these are perennials, not all of them grow perennially in all locations. This depends on the area where you live. Always check for the compatibility with the place where you live before you do the purchase.
1. Lemon
Lemon and other citrus trees grow well in tropical and subtropical areas. Sweet citruses require warmer climate, but sour citrus trees like lemon do not need high temperatures, meaning you can grow them even in cool coastal regions.
Plant your lemon tree in spring. Spring planting enables the tree to establish itself before winter comes and potentially affects tree’s growth. Keep the lemon tree in a place exposed to sun that drains well. Fertilize it every month from spring to summer during the first year using a citrus tree fertilizer that is enriched with nitrogen.
2. Onion and Garlic
Onions and garlic survive even in cold winters. Plant garlic and onion cloves in fall and enjoy watching how the green shoots poke out of the soil in spring. Leave a few of these each year. They will flower, seed themselves and separate their own bulbs. This will provide the next year’s crop.
3. Avocado
Avocado tree is native to humid and semi humid tropical areas. It grows best in places with moderately warm temperatures (60-85F) and moderate humidity.
Once it grows strong, the tree can tolerate temperatures to about 32-28F with minimal damages. If you decide to purchase a tree, you can expect your first fruit 3-4 years after you plant the tree. If you grow avocado tree from a seed, it may take from 5 to 13 years before your tree can give fruits.
Avocado trees give fruits for many years. The original Hass tree (1926) is still growing and producing fruits. Some wild trees in Mexico are older than 400 years and they still give fruits.
An avocado tree can give about 200 fruits once it is 5 years old. But, the tree will not give the same amount of fruits every year -- one year it may give a larger crop, and the next year you may get a lot smaller crop.
4. Radicchio
Radicchio, or red chicory, gives a beautiful color to your home garden. It also brightens your dish. It is commonly used in Italy. Radicchio grows well in cooler seasons -- spring and fall. Plant some radicchio in early spring, once the soil can be works.
If you decide for a fall crop, tuck the plant into the soil in midsummer in some colder zones and early fall in areas with milder winters. Red chicory grows best in areas exposed to full sun during cooled weather. In summer days, the plant benefits from the afternoon shade. Well established plants can handle frost.
5. Strawberries
The best strawberries come from the home garden, because ripe fruits have a rich and aromatic flavor unlike strawberries sold in supermarkets, because they are picked unripe.
Strawberries die in winter and start growing in spring. After giving the first fruits (the earliest strawberries grow in February in Florida, and the latest in June, in the North), some types produce many runners with baby plants at the tips. The runners usually root themselves nearby, and remain attached to the mother plant. You will get more fruits if you clip off some of the runners.
6. Artichoke
Globe Artichoke is a heirloom perennial veggie. It is grown for its tender and edible flower buds. Artichoke can spread up to 6 feet across. It can grow everywhere in the US, except for the southern states, including Florida and Texas, where summer days are too hot. Artichoke grows well in places where summers are cool and moist and winters are mild.
If the climate where you live is colder than Zone 8, you may want to start new plants every year. In areas with mild winders artichokes grow as perennials.
7. Fennel
Same as celery, this perennial plant gives aromatic seeds and thick bulbs. Use the seeds to season your dishes and eat the bulb as a vegetable. Fennel bulb is a common ingredient in Mediterranean dishes. You can add raw fennel bulbs to salads, or just grill and roast them.
Fennel survives winter conditions between growing zones 5 and 10. If you need the bulb, always plant the Florence fennel.
8. Asparagus
Asparagus shoots are the first signs of spring. They poke out of the soil alonside other perennial plants like tulips and crocus.
Asparagus is a perennial, meaning the same plant can grow in your garden every year. In the first year you should not harvest any asparagus at all, and each year you will have to leave many asparagus shoots behind, allowing them to flower and grow into next year’s harvest. The plants will grow for many years, sometimes even 30.
Asparagus grows great in all areas, except for the warmest parts, Zones 8 and higher. Warmer zones have milder winters, and in these areas the plants do not go fully dormant. The plants do not get enough strength and eventually decline.
9. Sweet Potatoes
These grow so easily, that if you accidentally drop a plant on the ground it will take off and grow. Of course, only if the ground is warm and moist. Plant your sweet potatoes 12-18 inches apart. Allow about 3 feet between the rows so the vines have enough space.
10. Rhubarb
You will see rhubarb stems in early spring. The tart and colorful stems are commonly added in pies and jams, sweetened with sugar or even teamed with sweat strawberries.
Plant’s leaves are rich in oxalic acid and you should not eat them. Harvest the stems, remove the leaves and add these to the compost pile.
This plant grows best in zones where the ground usually freezes in winter. Rhubarb requires extended chilling periods, and the temperatures should be below 40 degrees. It can grow as far south as Zone 7.
Source/Reference: www.healthy-holistic-living.com
(Obtained permission from the website owner)
Other included sources linked in Healthy Holistic Living’s article: Village Green Network via Organic AuthorityCommon garden plants are to be used to clean polluted land, with the extracted poisons being used to produce car parts and aid medical research.
Scientists will use plants such as alyssum, pteridaceae and a type of mustard called sinapi to soak up metals from land previously occupied by factories, mines and landfill sites.
Dangerous levels of metals such as arsenic and platinum, which can lurk in the ground and can cause harm to people and animals, will be extracted using a natural process known as phytoremediation.
Once the plants have drawn contaminated material out of the soil, researchers will harvest and then process the plants into materials that can be used more productively.
The conversion process will take place in a biorefinery, which will use specifically engineered bacteria to transform the toxic metal ions into more useful metallic nanoparticles.
These tiny particles will be used to make catalytic converters for motor vehicles. They will also be used to help develop cancer treatments.
Cleaning polluted land and rivers could also allow land to be reclaimed and reused, the researchers say.
The project involves scientists from the University of Edinburgh, the Universities of Warwick and Birmingham, Newcastle University and Cranfield University.
Dr Louise Horsfall of the University of Edinburgh's School of Biological Sciences, said: "Land is a finite resource. As the world's population grows along with the associated demand for food and shelter, we believe that it is worth decontaminating land to unlock vast areas for better food security and housing. I hope to use synthetic biology to enable bacteria to produce high value nanoparticles and thereby help make land decontamination financially viable."
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The study is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
For more information please contact Eleanor Cowie on Tel: 0131 650 6382/07979 446 209 or E: Eleanor.Cowie@ed.ac.ukThe Original Macintosh: 32 of 122 Calculator Construction Set Author: Andy Hertzfeld Date: February 1982 Characters: Chris Espinosa, Steve Jobs, Donn Denman Topics: Software Design Summary: Chris tries to make a Steve-approved calculator The Calculator Chris Espinosa was one of Apple's earliest and youngest employees, who started work for the company at the ripe age of 14. He left Apple in 1978 to go to college at UC Berkeley, but he continued to do freelance work during the school year, like writing the Apple II Reference Manual, the replacement for the legendary "Red Book".
In the summer of 1981, Steve Jobs convinced Chris to drop out of school to come work on the Mac team full time, arguing that he could go back to school anytime, but there'd only be one chance to help shape the Macintosh. Chris dropped out of school to become the manager of documentation for the Macintosh, starting in August 1981.
We needed technical documentation right away, since we planned to seed third party developer in only a few months. Since the most important part of the Macintosh software was the Quickdraw graphics package, Chris decided to start with documenting Quickdraw.
Chris wanted to write a demo program using Quickdraw, in order to better understand it. He got excited about the idea of what we called "desk ornaments", which at that point were not implemented yet. He decided to work on a Quickdraw program to draw the calculator.
After playing around for a while, he came up with a calculator that he thought looked pretty good. But the acid test was showing it to Steve Jobs, in his role as our esthetic compass, to see what he thought.
We all gathered around as Chris showed the calculator to Steve and then held his breath, waiting for Steve's reaction. "Well, it's a start", Steve said, "but basically, it stinks. The background color is too dark, some lines are the wrong thickness, and the buttons are too big." Chris told Steve he'll keep changing it, until Steve thought he got it right.
So, for a couple of days, Chris would incorporate Steve's suggestions from the previous day, but Steve would continue to find new faults each time he was shown it. Finally, Chris got a flash of inspiration.
The next afternoon, instead of a new iteration of the calculator, Chris unveiled his new approach, which he called "the Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set". Every decision regarding graphical attributes of the calculator were parameterized by pull-down menus. You could select line thicknesses, button sizes, background patterns, etc.
Steve took a look at the new program, and immediately started fiddling with the parameters. After trying out alternatives for ten minutes or so, he settled on something that he liked. When I implemented the calculator UI (Donn Denman did the math semantics) for real a few months later, I used Steve's design, and it remained the standard calculator on the Macintosh for many years, all the way up through OS 9. In the summer of 1981, Steve Jobs convinced Chris to drop out of school to come work on the Mac team full time, arguing that he could go back to school anytime, but there'd only be one chance to help shape the Macintosh. Chris dropped out of school to become the manager of documentation for the Macintosh, starting in August 1981.We needed technical documentation right away, since we planned to seed third party developer in only a few months. Since the most important part of the Macintosh software was the Quickdraw graphics package, Chris decided to start with documenting Quickdraw.Chris wanted to write a demo program using Quickdraw, in order to better understand it. He got excited about the idea of what we called "desk ornaments", which at that point were not implemented yet. He decided to work on a Quickdraw program to draw the calculator.After playing around for a while, he came up with a calculator that he thought looked pretty good. But the acid test was showing it to Steve Jobs, in his role as our esthetic compass, to see what he thought.We all gathered around as Chris showed the calculator to Steve and then held his breath, waiting for Steve's reaction. "Well, it's a start", Steve said, "but basically, it stinks. The background color is too dark, some lines are the wrong thickness, and the buttons are too big." Chris told Steve he'll keep changing it, until Steve thought he got it right.So, for a couple of days, Chris would incorporate Steve's suggestions from the previous day, but Steve would continue to find new faults each time he was shown it. Finally, Chris got a flash of inspiration.The next afternoon, instead of a new iteration of the calculator, Chris unveiled his new approach, which he called "the Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set". Every decision regarding graphical attributes of the calculator were parameterized by pull-down menus. You could select line thicknesses, button sizes, background patterns, etc.Steve took a look at the new program, and immediately started fiddling with the parameters. After trying out alternatives for ten minutes or so, he settled on something that he liked. When I implemented the calculator UI (Donn Denman did the math semantics) for real a few months later, I used Steve's design, and it remained the standard calculator on the Macintosh for many years, all the way up through OS 9.A brazen thief stole a shop worker’s wallet as her accomplice distracted him.
Two women walked in to KLS Entertainment in Vicar Street, Falkirk, on Tuesday and made off with Davie Bateman’s money and an irreplaceable photo.
The 22-year-old said: “It’s unbelievable how casual they were about the whole thing.
“I had taken my wallet out because a woman came in fundraising and I gave her a couple of quid. I left it on the desk for a minute while I was putting stock away and in that time it was stolen.”
Davie, a popular local musician, put the CCTV footage of the theft up on video-sharing website You Tube and in just one day it has attracted hundreds of hits. The women, who spoken with Eastern European accents, can clearly be seen walking in to the shop and, while one speaks to Davie, the other goes behind the till, picks up the wallet and stuffs it down her top.
He continued: “I really hope they get caught. I had just been paid and there was hundreds of pounds in it as well as bank cards. I know I’ve got no chance of getting my money back but there was a picture of my grandparents in it that I can’t ever replace, so even if I got that back it wouldn’t be so bad.”
Police are appealing for anyone with information to get in touch. Contact Central Scotland Police on (01786) 456000 or call Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 55 111.
To view the CCTV footage of the theft click here YouTube.On a sweltering day in the summer of 2002, some of Baltimore’s finest basketball players assembled for a game on the city's east side at Collington Square Park. It was something close to an All-Star contest. And millions of people would end up watching.
Fifteen years ago, The Wire debuted on HBO. The highly acclaimed series, which spanned five seasons from 2002 to 2008, depicts the decline of the American city, told through a fictionalized reality of Baltimore. The story is often defined by loss—of life, industry, opportunity and institutions.
In 1973, Baltimore lost something else: the NBA, when the Bullets moved to Washington. But basketball continues to thrive in Charm City. It’s a pillar of the town that molded Carmelo Anthony, Keith Booth, Michael Lloyd, Skip Wise, Sam Cassell, Muggsy Bogues and so many other great players. Without basketball, the story of Baltimore would feel incomplete.
The Wire’s ninth episode, “Game Day,” brings the police detail’s investigation of the notorious Barksdale organization to the basketball court, where rival drug dealers from the east and west side preside. This is the oral history of how The Wire’s hoops game unfolded, and how just a few minutes of on-screen gameplay managed to authentically portray Baltimore’s rich culture of basketball.
CHRISTOPHER CLANTON (Savino Bratten): Baltimore is known for heroin as well as basketball. You already have the storyline of drug dealers, the typical cliche with a twist hood story. With Baltimore, you had no other choice but to involve the basketball aspect.
DAVID SIMON (creator): We wanted to do something with the natural competition between east side and west side.
DAVID MELNICK (writer): This east side vs. west side thing was a really unique and new dynamic for the show, something the show hadn’t seen yet.
DAVID SIMON (creator): I just remember once we found it, we were like, yeah. This feels right. This feels like the way in which we’re going to do this.
DAVID MELNICK (writer): I think sports is, and basketball in particular, is a big part of the culture of Baltimore, going back to the early 80’s with the amazing Dunbar team that people still speak about incredibly fondly as perhaps one of the greatest high school teams of all time, with Muggsy Bogues. I think basketball is an important part of the culture that helps tell that story. And I think it became a refreshing way to help introduce this rivalry that would eventually grow and build without having to hit you over the head right away that this is going to be intense.
SHAMIT CHOKSEY (writer): Most of the time when sports are written for TV and film, it’s just a regurgitation of what we’ve seen before. I think there are plenty of great examples of sports too, in film and TV. But it happens when the filmmaker and the writer and the director kind of departs from what we know about that sport and shows a new side of it. I think the East–West basketball game was sort of […] a new structure to see basketball.
MILCHO MANCHEVSKI (director): I still play basketball, but I played for a team back in Yugoslavia back when I was in high school. I think I must have told Bob [Colesberry, one of The Wire’s co-creators] that I liked basketball so much, so that’s why he picked that episode. But yeah I was over the moon that I got to direct basketball.
DAVID SIMON (creator): It’s a populist triumph of sport, basketball in the city. A city game. It felt right. You can’t imagine us doing that with football—nothing would be right. Baseball would be absurd. But even football would feel a little bit too much like the football game at the end of M*A*S*H. This felt organic to the actual city in which we all lived. The city of Dunbar, ‘Melo and the old love of the Bullets in the Civic Center. It’s one of the original NBA cities, even if it doesn’t have an NBA team anymore.
Paul Schiraldi/HBO
DAVID MELNICK (writer): Herc and Carver are sitting on the roof and nobody’s around.
SHAMIT CHOKSEY (writer): They’re looking around and there’s nobody out on the streets. They’re up on a roof, they’re doing surveillance, and one of them says to the other one, “Maybe we won.”
DAVID MELNICK (writer): There’s this war on drugs and the war on the neighborhood, and there’s this notion that there’s two different sides battling each other. In a way, the whole team concept that came up through the basketball part of our show—it’s this “maybe we won.”
MILCHO MANCHEVSKI (director): I tried to see the whole game sort of from a voyeuristic point of view, from an outsider’s point of view, because the two agents who come in—they’re dropped in the middle of it, so they’re outsiders and a little confused. Until they realize what’s going on.
TRAY CHANEY (Malik “Poot” Carr): I remember that day real clear. It was a nice sunny day.
CHRISTOPHER CLANTON (Savino): It was hot. It was a beautiful day in Baltimore. And they were pretty much in the heart of East Baltimore. It was at Collington Square basketball court. So with the hired extras there was still atmosphere. People were coming from everywhere, all walks of life, to watch what was going on.
J.D. WILLIAMS (Bodie Broadus): That was pretty early on in the series, and we hadn’t had a lot of time to get to know the city or its legends like that. But I do remember that day on the court, for what it was, and it was high energy from good players.
HBO
MILCHO MANCHEVSKI (director): It was important to create the feeling of community, the environment. So I spent a lot of time trying to get believable extras, and came up with some of the people bringing lounge chairs to watch the game and they’re like walking away with the chairs, so just to give a little real life feel to it.
PAT MORAN (Baltimore casting director): Here’s who watched that show: People that read The New York Times, law enforcement, criminal element…basically these are our core audience. People that were in that life. People that had escaped that life. People that had the tragedy of addiction come barreling through their life, all kinds of things.
So it had to be authentic. If you even had one component wrong, it’s going to kill the scene.
ANTHONY HEMINGWAY (first assistant director): We had put out an emergency request on the radio that day to raffle off prizes for people to come participate in the scene. And so we had a lot of background who were there because they loved the show, and they wanted to be in the scene and then they were there for the prizes. And I knew they would not be there or stay around very long.
J.D. WILLIAMS |
's daughter fell in love with him. In 1907 he married Princess Singdo, the daughter of the local king, Lamy. He got a start in the copra trade and managed to create his own coconut plantation that he called Teripax. He became king after the death of his father in law. His nickname among the locals was "Strong Charley", and he was indeed famed for his physical strength. Swedish newspapers printed a series of stories about Pettersson and his adventures.[1]
Later life [ edit ]
Business went well and he increased his estate with two plantations, first Maragon on Simberi Island and later Londolovit on Lihir Group islands. Pettersson was respectful of local customs and showed concern for his employees, which was unusual at the time. He was therefore very popular with the locals. His marriage with Singdo produced a family of nine children, one of whom died in infancy. His wife died in 1921 of puerperal fever.
In 1922, Pettersson travelled to Sweden, partly to look for a new wife who could look after his children. There, he also visited his old friend Birger Mörner whom he had met in the South Pacific. He then met Anglo-Swedish Jessie Louisa Simpson; together they returned to Tabar Island, where they married in 1923. In Petterson's absence the plantation had declined, and he was now close to bankruptcy. Additionally, he and his wife both suffered from malaria. He painstakingly rebuilt his plantation, but bad investments and the failing market conditions made it difficult to recover.
Pettersson did however find a gold deposit on Simberi Island which he kept secret for years. Even today, the Tabar Group of islands has one of the world's largest gold deposits. His fortunes changed, however, and Pettersson decided to leave the island. His wife Jessie traveled ahead to Australia for medical treatment and then returned to Sweden. She died in Stockholm from malaria and cancer on 19 May 1935. Petterson's health also deteriorated.
Pettersson left Tabar in 1935 but never returned to Sweden. He died of a heart attack in Sydney on 12 May 1937.
In popular culture [ edit ]
Carl Pettersson is regarded as the inspiration for Ephraim Longstocking, Pippi's father in Astrid Lindgren's children's series, Pippi Longstocking. In 2012, film writer Jorn Rossing Jensen reported that Swedish producer Mirijam Johansson, of Sweden's Wanted Pictures, announced at Cannes that she had acquired the rights to Efraim Longstocking and the Cannibal Princess, a film based on a screenplay by Daniel Fridell and Ulf Stark and approved by Saltkråkan, the latter of which holds Lindgren's rights.[2]
Further reading [ edit ]
Langer, Joakim; Regius, Hélena (2002). Kung Kalle av Kurrekurreduttön – en resa i Efraim Långstrumps fotspår [King Charlie of Kurrekurredutt Island - a journey in Efraim Longstocking's footsteps] (in Swedish). Stockholm: Forum. ISBN 978-9137120256.
Langer, Joakim; Regius, Hélena; von Nike (tr. from Swedish), Karen Müller (2004). Pippi & der König : auf den Spuren von Efraim Langstrumpf [Pippi & The king: in the footsteps of Efraim Longstocking] (in German). München. ISBN 978-3471780978.More than half of registered voters claim they are "less enthusiastic about voting than in previous elections," according to a Gallup poll released Monday.
This statistic is the polar opposite of the 2010 midterm election poll, which showed that 53 percent of voters were more eager to hit the polls than in previous years. The change this year hit Democrats hardest of all, according to Gallup:
Among registered voters, 42% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents currently say they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting, while 50% are less enthusiastic, resulting in an eight-point enthusiasm deficit. But Democrats are even less enthusiastic, with a 23-point deficit (32% more enthusiastic vs. 55% less enthusiastic).
The more zealous party typically fares better in midterm elections, the poll stated. Democrats took control of the House in 2006 when the poll leaned 52/41 in their favor. Republicans took the House in 2010 when the poll results leaned in their favor 62/44.
Nate Silver, a statistician who almost perfectly predicted the 2008 and 2012 elections, has calculated that the GOP has a 60 percent chance of taking over the Senate this year.North and south of the Canada-U.S. border, we are having important debates about immigration, and also about radicalization.
I believe strongly that these are both worthwhile conversations -- but also that they are different conversations. Radicalization is the process of drawing someone into more extreme and violent views, now done most commonly through online communications. Although many groups responsible for radicalization self-identify as Muslim, radicalization does not only impact those who come from Muslim backgrounds.
Both attacks carried out in Canada in 2014 were by Canadian-born Canadian citizens, neither of whom were raised as Muslims. Some have assumed that policy changes with respect to immigration are the answer -- but this assumption ignores the realities on the ground.
This is not to suggest that we should not be concerned about the possibility of immigration by people with radical ideas. We should be, and we should have appropriate vetting procedures in place. But by and large Canada and the U.S. already have those procedures in place. Our principle problems in this case have resulted from the radicalization of people already here, not from the immigration of people with radical ideas.
The U.S. is pursuing policies aimed at sending a symbolic message, but in the process that may actually exacerbate the problem.
Certainly a country's immigration policy should be fundamentally informed by its security interests, but the undeniable reality is that radicalization is not a Muslim immigration problem any more than the spread of Soviet communism during the Cold War was a Russian immigration problem. We are in a real war with extreme and radical ideas, but it is an ideological war that must be fought on the grounds of radicalization.
Nobody proposed banning Russian immigration during the Cold War. At the time, it was understood that such a ban would most negatively impact defectors trying to get out, and also that international communism spread principally through ideological propagation, not through immigration. This was before the Internet.
The U.S. is pursuing policies aimed at sending a symbolic message, but in the process that may actually exacerbate the problem. They are denying access to those facing persecution (Muslims and non-Muslims alike), while providing fresh fuel to those propagandists in Daesh and elsewhere who want more Muslims to see themselves as invariably in conflict with the U.S. This U.S. policy is bad for political dissidents and religious minorities in the countries targeted, and it is bad for American security.
U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order to impose tighter vetting of travellers entering the United States, at the Pentagon in Washington, U.S., Jan. 27, 2017. The executive order signed by Trump imposes a four-month travel ban on refugees entering the United States and a 90-day hold on travellers from Syria, Iran and five other Muslim-majority countries. (Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)
When it comes to countering radicalization, Canadian policy has a different problem. While the U.S. is pursuing a response to radicalization which actually feeds the problem it is supposed to be addressing, the Canadian response of late has been to effectively deny the reality of the conflict that we are in.
Our government pulled Canadian jets out of the fight against Daesh and is seeking closer relations with Iran. Our government speaks of countering radicalization, without recognizing how Daesh and the Iranian regime must be confronted as the sources of radicalization. Using ineffective tactics will not help us prevail in the current conflict, but neither will pretending that it does not exist.
A better response to radicalization would be one that appreciates that immigration and radicalization are separate issues. It would be tougher than the Canadian response on the sources of radicalization, but also much more targeted than the blunt, thoroughly unsophisticated American response in terms of recognizing who actually needs to be confronted.
Abrogating our values does not strengthen us, it weakens us.
An effective response would seek to eradicate Daesh, to limit the influence of Iran, and to push the intensification of necessary reforms in Saudi Arabia, especially around their international education program. It would confront Daesh without simultaneously empowering extremists in Iran, or their allies in Damascus and Moscow.
A better response would also recognize that winning the cultural and ideological battle against radicalization requires us to build greater cultural confidence in our values of universal human dignity, freedom, human rights, and the rule of law. A contagious strength and confidence in who we are, matched with a willingness to use the full range of tools (including our military) at the service of those values, will ensure our ultimate success.
Abrogating our values does not strengthen us, it weakens us. It is our belief in timeless and universal human values and our willingness to defend them that have made both Canada and the United States great societies.
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Also on HuffPost:Dean Winslow has withdrawn as President Trump’s pick to head the military healthcare system, but he is not backing away from a comment about “insane” U.S. gun laws that derailed his nomination in the Senate.
The Senate Armed Services Committee put Winslow’s nomination on indefinite hold following a November confirmation hearing where the retired Air Force flight surgeon and Stanford University medical professor criticized public access to firearms in the wake of the Texas church shooting.
Winslow, who is a close friend of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, announced his withdrawal in an op-ed Wednesday in the Washington Post. He said he had “blurted out what was in my heart,” has no regrets and remains opposed to the availability of what he called assault weapons.
“With a standard 30-round magazine, assault rifles are perfect for mass murder,” Winslow wrote. “Assault weapons in the United States are not being used to kill ‘bad guys’ in self-defense or to provide for a ‘well-regulated militia’ but for entertainment, mass murder and domestic terrorism. Is this really the intent of the Second Amendment?” he asked.
Pro-gun groups and Second Amendment advocates have criticized the use of the term assault weapon as a misleading term for semi-automatic rifles.
One of the weapons used in the Sutherland Springs, Texas, church shooting in November was a Ruger AR-556, which is a version of the AR-15 rifle. The AR-15, which itself is a semi-automatic version of the military’s M-16, is one of the most popular guns in America.
“As commander of an Air Force hospital in Baghdad during the surge, I have seen what these weapons do to human beings. The injuries are devastating,” Winslow said.
Firing them can be “a blast” for civilians but should be confined to licensed gun ranges, he said.
Winslow, who befriended Mattis at Stanford before he became defense secretary, said he was compelled to speak his mind during the confirmation hearing, even though the gun comment immediately drew the ire of Armed Services chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. He also acknowledged that his advocacy of therapeutic abortions in written committee documents played a roll in scuttling his nomination.
“As a devout Christian, a parent, a doctor and an American, I was deeply troubled by yet another loss of innocent lives, this time in the sanctity of a house of worship,” Winslow said.
He blamed the power of the gun lobby for forcing the withdrawal.
“As a citizen, I am saddened that our government has become so dominated by pro-gun lobbyists that an appointment such as mine — which has no responsibility for gun control — can be sidelined by a single sentence of informed, personal opinion. And that really is insane,” he said.The lay public, when presented with confusing data and competing arguments about climate change, deploy the mental shortcut of believing the people they most trust. Trust in the communicator is therefore crucial.
Unfortunately the three main climate change communicators: politicians, journalists and environmental campaigners, are among the least trusted people in society – fighting it out for bottom place in the ranking with lawyers and car salesmen. No one would pay any attention to them at all if they were not drawing on the aquifer of public trust in scientists.
But climate scientists have always misunderstood the dynamic of public belief and trust. They assume that belief will be built on their data and that public trust is merited by their authority. With the exception of a few outstanding communicators, they often make no attempt to speak to deeper values or make an emotional connection with the public – indeed they see that as contrary to their professional independence.
Climate change deniers have always understood this. They use language that is designed to appeal to deeper values (such as freedom, independence, progress). The narrative they tell of being determined (and even persecuted) free-thinkers, standing against the tide of oppressive and self-interested conformity is designed to create an aura of integrity and trustworthiness.
The recent hacking of the servers of the University of East Anglia can only be understood within this landscape of competing appeals to public trust. The denial industry (and hordes of climate nerds) has trawled through these emails and found sentences which, when removed from context, support their storyline that climate science is being deliberately distorted and exaggerated for a mixed bag of self-interested and politicised ends.
But you could find anything in here. I looked and found lots of references to lunch and fun, 94 to hate, 31 to love. Generally, though, the emails are extremely focused, technical, and, dare I say it, really dull. As noted on realclimate.org, the emails contain "no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to 'get rid of the MWP', no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords."
But this is hardly the point. This is an orchestrated smear campaign and does not require balance or context. The speed with which the emails have been cut apart and fed into existing storylines is remarkable. At the very least the UEA email campaign is an application of dirty political tactics to climate change campaigning.
I suspect it goes further than that. The storyline is too clever, the timing on the brink of Copenhagen and the US climate bill too convenient. I wait with interest to find out how these emails were obtained.
The UEA response has been frankly pathetic. It was informed by Real Climate of the hack on 17 November but only reacted two days later when journalists caught on to the story. It refused to confirm whether the emails were accurate or not and, for a long time, refused to comment at all.
Now, in typical scientist fashion, it seeks to argue the data rationally. The UEA website states that "the selective publication of some stolen emails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way". Mischievous? Irresponsible? What naughty pixies.
Then the Climate Research Unit director, Prof Phil Jones, focuses on one of quotes: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." For the smear campaign it is only those key words "trick" and "hide" that count – the rest can be made into anything it wants. Jones ignores this and responds with a detailed technical explanation of the passage with reference to the original graphs. It's like responding to someone calling you a bastard by showing them your birth certificate.
One can only imagine that the UEA's communications team is totally out of its depth. A less charitable conclusion is that they are defending the interests of UEA and are not concerned about (or have not understood) the damage to climate science.
I believe that Jones should speak to every journalist who calls, go on the offensive and defend his science. He ought to clearly state that he is not prepared to have his hard-working and committed colleagues around the world defamed or slandered by the kinds of people who illegally hack into computers. This is a desperate, last-ditch tactic by fanatics who have lost the rational debate.
Sadly, due in part to the lacklustre response, I am sure that these wretched emails have now entered permanently into the mythology of climate denial. Scientists are going to have to be a lot more savvy and on the ball in future.
• George Marshall is the founder and director of projects at the Climate Outreach and Information Network. He posts regularly to the blog climatedenial.org.Searching The Internet Increases Brain Function!
Functional MRI brain scans show how searching the Internet dramatically engages brain neural networks (in red). The image on the left displays brain activity while reading a book; the image on the right displays activity while engaging in an Internet search. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Los Angeles)
UCLA scientists have found that for computer-savvy middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet triggers key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning. The findings demonstrate that Web search activity may help stimulate and possibly improve brain function.
The study, the first of its kind to assess the impact of Internet searching on brain performance, is currently in press at the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry and will appear in an upcoming issue.
Additional details on the study and further research on the impact of computer technologies on the aging brain are highlighted in Small's new book, "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind". Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA who holds UCLA's Parlow-Solomon Chair on Aging. says: "Internet searching engages complicated brain activity, which may help exercise and improve brain function".
"A simple, everyday task like searching the Web appears to enhance brain circuitry in older adults, demonstrating that our brains are sensitive and can continue to learn as we grow older," Small said.
We recomend you go to www.sciencedaily.com for more details on this and other cutting edge health issues.Bill Murray is coming to Netflix.
Well, the beloved comedian is already on Netflix (some of his movies, including the classic Groundhog Day, are already on there) but Murray is poised to appear in an exclusive Christmas special for the streaming video service.
A Very Murray Christmas is being co-written and directed by Sofia Coppola, who also famously directed Murray in Lost in Translation, which gleaned the actor an Oscar nomination (and somehow, in a crime against good taste, did not win).
Check out this teaser for the special, which surfaced today on YouTube.
Murray actually revealed more details about it in this farewell interview with David Letterman earlier this week. He mentioned that Jason Schwartzmann and Rashida Jones are among the actors that will also star.
In any case, A Very Murray Christmas is yet another sign of how Netflix is transforming itself into a destination for must-watch, buzzy original content. Its content boss, Ted Sarandos, has said the company’s long-term aim is to launch 20 scripted series a year.
Here, courtesy of RBC Capital Markets, is a list of the more prominent original shows it has commissioned:
Although making original shows is expensive, investors are utterly besotted with this strategy. Netflix is the best performing stock in the S&P500 this year, rising more than 80%, compared with a 3% rise for the broader market.Join the Indiana Green Party for the 2017 INGP Congress! The tentative agenda for our first Congress in years is below. Come and meet fellow Greens, help us shape our INGP platform, discuss future candidacies, and more. Official registration page coming soon!
RSVP on Facebook.
What: Indiana Green Party Congress
Where: Neidhammer, 2102 E. Washington St. Indianapolis, Indiana 46201
When: June 3, 2017 from 9:00 AM until 6:00 PM
Ticket Information
Tentative Agenda
9:00 a.m. Registration/breakfast
10:00 a.m. Introductions of local groups
10:30 a.m. Speakers
11:45 a.m. 1st call of nominations for organizing committee/officers
12:00 p.m. Lunch
1:00 p.m. Last call of nominations for organizing committee/officers
1:15 p.m. Election of organizing committee
2:00 p.m. Bylaws/platform changes
3:30 p.m. Discuss potential candidates for 2018 offices
4:30 p.m Ballot access discussion
6:00 p.m. Organizing committee meetingThere are dozens of ways in which Apple's apparent effort to build an Apple-branded car could go wrong, but there's one argument against the idea that I'm hearing a lot of that really doesn't make sense. From Henry Blodget to former GM CEO Daniel Akerson to the LA Times to Yahoo Finance people are saying this won't work because the car industry is a "low margin" business in contrast to the fat margins Apple is used to earning most of all on its workhorse iPhone.
The misperception here is that Apple earns high margins because Apple operates in high margin industries. The truth is precisely the opposite. Apple earns high margins because it is efficient at manufacturing and firmly committed to a business strategy of sacrificing market share to maintain pricing power. If Apple makes a car, it will be a high margin car because Apple only makes high margin products. If it succeeds it will succeed for the same reason iPhones and iPads and Macs succeed — people like them and are willing to buy them, even though you could get similar specs for less.
Phones and PCs are low-margin businesses
Consider the smartphone industry, where Apple earns the lion's share of the profit and revenue. Apple earns 93 percent of all profits secured by handset manufacturers, with Samsung earning over 100 percent of the remainder left behind. Which is to say that if you look at the non-Apple portions of the smartphone industry, it's an exceptionally low-margin industry. Samsung is running a modestly profitable handset business based on enormous volume. Lots of players are losing money. Chinese upstart Xiaomi has a promising business built on handsets as a loss-leader for after-market services. By volume, the dominant software player in the smartphone industry is Google, which makes a phone OS that it gives away for free.
In other words, if Apple weren't already earning tens of billions of dollars in smartphone profits, people might look at this landscape and say it would be pointless for Apple to get into the market. How are you going to compete with zero-margin handsets and a free operating system?
Well, it's hard! But Apple pulled it off.
Apple isn't as successful in the PC industry as in the smartphone industry, but it's pretty successful and per Horace Dediu's chart above, the story about margins is similar. As of 2012, the non-Apple parts of the PC industry were very low margin and Apple earned high margins anyway. And since that time, the Mac has only grown as a share of the PC market.
Margins as a strategy
These existing profit margins are so anomalous that people have frequently proclaimed them to be unsustainable. Others have simply regarded them as unwise, arguing that Apple's long-term business would benefit from cutting prices to gain market share. But Apple is both fundamentally committed to this high margin strategy and good at executing it.
Will they be as good at executing it in the car space? Who knows.
But the logic that says Apple can't have a high margin car business would also say Apple can't have a high margin smartphone business. The reality is that earning profits in competitive industries is really hard. If you are looking for a guaranteed return, you need to be in a monopolistic industry (owning telecommunications networks or copyrights to popular comic book characters) rather than making consumer products.
Making an Apple-branded car is a big risk with a high chance of failure, but it's not qualitatively different in that regard from making an MP3 player or a smartphone. If it were easy to do these things profitably, everyone would do it and the profits would be competed away. Apple's entire success over the past 15 years is built on having defied those odds before, so you can understand why the company's executives might think they can do so again.The amount of ink that has been spilled over the sanctity of the right to vote could likely fill Lake Superior. The citizen’s right to vote is a defining characteristic of democracies and, therefore, taken with the utmost seriousness in many areas, including throughout the United States. There are often voting problems, of course (here’s my story from 2012, for example — you’ll note that there’s nothing nefarious about it, just the result of a fractured process), but in general, on Election Day, everyone is able to go to their polling station and cast a vote for their preferred candidates. Some voters, who can’t make it to the polls, obtain absentee ballots a few weeks beforehand and toss them into the mail. If you have access to the Postal Service, you effectively have access to the ballot box.
And that’s just about everyone on Earth. But what about those voters who aren’t on Earth?
As of this writing, there are six people aboard the International Space Station orbiting the planet. Of those six, two are Americans. These two people can’t simply put a ballot in the mail and cast their vote — mail trucks don’t have the ability to hit escape velocity — and the trip to their voting precincts is both expensive and cumbersome, to say the least. But we’d hardly want our astronauts to be disenfranchised. To solve this, Texas, in 1997, passed a law allowing astronauts who were aboard the ISS (or otherwise in orbit or beyond) on Election Day to cast their votes from space. That year, astronaut David Wolf became the first American to vote from space, doing so from the Russian station Mir.
The votes are, effectively, emailed in, making Texas the first jurisdiction to allow for such methods of voting (albeit only for a very limited group). Officials from the astronauts’ home counties — in 2010, that was Galveston and Harris Counties (both in Texas) — travel to Mission Control at Johnson Space Center in Houston and prepare ballots which are sent into space via a secure communications link. The astronauts’ cast their ballots via that same link, directly to the county officials. As NPR noted, the astronauts’ ballots cannot be secret ones due to the method of transmission, unfortunately, but otherwise, their votes are just like any one else’s.
So far, only one astronaut has voted for President in space. That occurred in 2004, when commander Leroy Chiao voted for — well, we don’t know, that’s gone unreported, thankfully — while above the Earth on board the ISS. Coincidentally, Chiao voted in an election in which George W. Bush was a candidate, and Bush is a large part of why Chiao was able to vote in the first place — he was the governor of Texas who signed the space voting bill into law.
Bonus Fact : Voting doesn’t always happen flawlessly, as many voters have experienced. But what happens when the government just forgets to schedule an election entirely? That’s actually happened a few times, and recently at that. On November 5, 2013, the town of Wallsburg, Utah, was supposed to hold elections but, well, didn’t. And it wasn’t the first time town officials forgot to hold an election, either. They made the same error two years earlier. The town government’s officials were appointed (by whom is unclear) in 2011 and re-appointed in 2013 due to the mistakes.
From the Archives: Swing Vote: When one man’s vote decided the fate of the Presidency.
Related: “Behind the Ballot Box: A Citizen’s Guide to Voting Systems ” by Douglas Amy. Two reviews, 4.5 stars.(CNN) How was Corey Jones supposed to know that the man who drove up to him on dark Florida highway in an unmarked white van with tinted windows; who walked out in a t-shirt, jeans and a baseball cap; who never showed a badge; and who ultimately shot him dead was a police officer?
Jones' family posed many questions in a meeting with State Attorney Dave Aronberg on Thursday, four days after the deadly shooting. But making sense of how the plainclothes Palm Beach Gardens officer interacted with the late 31-year-old drummer, and what Jones could have done about it, topped the list.
"He doesn't know if he's about to be mugged, he's about to be robbed, he's about to be killed," family lawyer Benjamin Crump said of Jones after the meeting with the Florida prosecutor. "Imagine yourselves on the side of the road at 3 in the morning, abandoned, the sense of concern you would have (while) waiting for a tow truck and an unmarked van rolls up."
Authorities haven't said a great deal about the Sunday incident, but lawyers for Jones did relate new details Thursday that they said they'd been told.
Among them was that Jones did have a gun that night. He had it legally, including a concealed carry permit, but didn't fire it once, according to Crump. Jones' gun was not next to him when he died about 80 to 100 feet from his car, having at some point tried to run away, according to the Jones family's lawyers.
The plainclothes officer fired six shots, three of which hit Jones -- including one that struck his aorta -- the attorneys said. Not that he necessarily knew who, really, had opened fire.
"We believe Corey went to his grave not knowing if this was a real cop or not," said Crump.
Source: Jones, officer misidentified each other
Jones had just played a gig and was heading home early Sunday when his car broke down. He called his big brother C.J., who offered to come get him only to have Corey tell him he wanted to stay with the car "because I have to perform at church with the choir the next morning," according to Crump.
Another call went out to friend and bandmate Mathew Huntsberger, who went to see Jones on the side of the road.
He left after Jones called a tow truck, telling CNN, "We didn't think anything was going to happen."
Around 3 a.m., Palm Beach Gardens police Officer Nouman Raja pulled up to check out what he thought was an abandoned car. Raja was on duty but was wearing civilian clothing and driving an unmarked car, police Chief Stephen Stepp told reporters earlier this week.
"As the officer exited his vehicle, he was suddenly confronted by an armed subject," Stepp said. "As a result of the confrontation, the officer discharged his firearm, resulting in the death of Mr. Corey Jones."
Yet Jones' family has a hard time believing this is exactly what happened, noting that Raja is the only one alive who can tell his side of the story. Jones' father, Clinton Jones Sr., says he taught his children "to be respectable and to respect the law."
And his brother C.J., or Clinton Jones Jr., said the kind, happy Corey Jones he knew wouldn't knowingly challenge a police officer with a gun.
"We know that he would not ever, ever, ever, ever, ever pull a gun on a police (officer). Never," Clinton Jones Jr. said. "This is not like him, and we need answers."
A source close to the investigation told CNN on condition of anonymity Wednesday that investigators think the shooting stemmed from Jones and Raja misidentifying each other. Raja felt he had to check the car because burglars had parked near the ramp where Jones' vehicle was, the source said.
The anonymous source added that investigators believe Raja may not have made it sufficiently clear he was an officer and that Jones may not have heard what the officer said.
Sister: Corey Jones a'responsible' gun owner
Authorities said they recovered a handgun at the scene and paperwork showed Jones bought it three days before the shooting. His family doesn't deny he owned a gun, but insisted he did so legally.
Melissa Jones said her brother advised her, as a licensed braider living about 400 miles away in Tallahassee, to get a gun for protection just like he did.
"'Make sure that you have your permits,'" she recalled Corey saying. "He made sure of that, because my brother was responsible."
She and other family members described him as a warm, loving and kind man. His lifelong love of drumming was matched by his selfless nature, whether it was mentoring with the non-profit group My Brother's Keeper, teaching children music for free or raising the spirits of his loved ones with his smile, warmth and positivity.
"He... could bring the selfless part out of the hardest person, he could bring that out of you," Melissa Jones said.
"Times I didn't want to laugh, I didn't want to smile, my brother would... know what to say to me... He knew what do... He knew, he knew. He could feel from afar."
Brother: 'This is not a black thing'
Jones' death has sparked an outcry, including a South Florida rally on Thursday attended by hundreds and a social media blitz using hashtags #Justice4Corey and #CoreyJones.
As to Raja, who has worked for the police department since April, he is on paid administrative leave as investigators look into the shooting.
"(The family) wants the truth to come out, they want answers, they want justice," Crump said. "And if (Officer Raja) did improper things, if he used excessive force, you want him to be held accountable to the full measure of the law."
This incident could also serve as a catalyst for change when it comes to plainclothes police officers, Crump said, pointing to cases in South Florida of people who've impersonated law enforcement.
"What is the policy so that people in South Florida would understand that, if you were ever approached by a non-uniformed cop, how do we really know that's a cop?" the lawyer said. "Isn't the burden on the cop to make sure the citizen knows that he's the real cop?"
The Jones family wants more than that, too, like an explanation of why it took them about 38 hours to learn that Corey had been killed. But what they don't want, brother C.J. said, is for this fatal shooting to be turned into a racial issue.
Yes, Corey Jones was African-American, as were Michael Brown and Eric Garner, who died in confrontations with police officers that stirred up tensions and a nationwide debate over interactions between blacks and police. But race is not necessarily relevant here.
"This is not a black thing," C.J. said, noting his own wife is white. "... No disrespect about Black Lives Matter, (but) all lives matter. And my brother had plenty of friends -- white friends, Asian friends, it didn't matter."
What does matter is getting some resolution, some justice for Corey.
"I need some answers," a tearful Clinton Jones Sr. told reporters Thursday. "I need to know why. Why is my son gone today? Why?"Today we’re announcing four new 500GB Xbox One S bundles: the Xbox One S Minecraft Complete Adventure Bundle, Xbox One S Rocket League Blast-Off Bundle, Xbox One S Starter Bundle and the Xbox One S Ultimate Halo Bundle.
Xbox One S Minecraft Complete Adventure Bundle
Own the Xbox One S Minecraft Complete Adventure Bundle (500GB) for $279 USD / £229 GBP / €279 EUR and be part of a worldwide phenomenon. This bundle is available at local retailers in select markets including Microsoft Store and includes:
• Xbox One S with 500GB hard drive
• Xbox Wireless Controller
• Full-game download code of Minecraft – Now you can build, dig, and craft together with friends across Xbox One, mobile, VR, and Windows 10 with the Better Together update.
• Full add-on download code of the Minecraft Explorer’s pack – The Explorer’s pack features the Chinese Mythology Mashup, Natural Texture Pack, Biome Settlers Skin Pack, Battle and Beasts Skin Pack, and Campfire Tales Skin Pack. The Explorer’s Pack will also be available as a standalone retail offering which includes the base game and DLC (valued at $29.99) starting Nov. 7.
• Full-game download code of Minecraft: Story Mode Season 1 – The Complete Adventure (Episodes 1-8) – Experience this episodic point-and-click adventure game.
• Xbox Live Gold – Enjoy 3 months of Xbox Live Gold to join the online Minecraft community and build, dig and craft together with friends.
• Xbox Game Pass – Get instant access to over 100 great games with 1 month of Xbox Game Pass.
Xbox One S Rocket League Blast-Off Bundle
Still wondering what soccer would be like with rocket-equipped cars? Wonder no more and get in on the action with one of the most popular multiplayer games around. The winner of numerous awards, get ready to score amazing aerial goals with the Xbox One S Rocket League Blast-Off Bundle (500GB) for £229 GBP / €279 EUR. This bundle is available at local retailers in select markets including Microsoft Store and includes:
• Xbox One S with 500GB hard drive
• Xbox Wireless Controller
• Full-game download code of Rocket League – Choose from a variety of high-flying vehicles equipped with huge rocket boosters to score amazing aerial goals and pull off incredible, game-changing saves, take on the single-player challenge in Season Mode or join in 8-player online competition and 4-player split-screen action.
• Xbox Live Gold – Enjoy a 3-month subscription of Xbox Live gold to play your favorite games online with friends and get free games each month plus deep Xbox Store discounts on games, add-ons and more.
• Xbox Game Pass – Get instant access out of the box to over 100 great games with 1 month of Xbox Game Pass.
Xbox One S Starter Bundle
Own the Xbox One S Starter Bundle (500GB) for $279 USD / £229 GBP / €279 EUR and dive into the very best of Xbox One. This bundle is available at local retailers in select markets including Microsoft Store and includes:
Xbox One S with 500GB hard drive
Xbox Wireless Controller
Xbox Live Gold – Play with and against friends and family on the most advanced multiplayer network with 3 months of Xbox Live Gold, plus receive exclusive membership perks like free games each month and deep discounts in the Microsoft Store.
Xbox Game Pass – Get instant access to over 100 great games carefully curated for high quality and fun gameplay with 3 months of Xbox Game Pass. Games are added every month so there’s always something new to play including fan favorites such as Halo 5: Guardians, DiRT Rally, and LEGO Batman.
Xbox One S Ultimate Halo Bundle
Own the Xbox one S Ultimate Halo bundle |
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Read or Share this story: http://dmreg.co/1Sgt8gtThese 32 “Key” Zip Codes for 2016 Are Super Wealthy and Super White
| Adam Smith
Just 32 zip codes are “likely to be key” for establishment Republican presidential candidates, according to The Wall Street Journal. These neighborhoods aren’t key because they are vote-rich or represent a cross-section of America, but because they are filled with really rich people who are generous political givers.
These are the places where a candidate like Jeb Bush (and whoever ends up on the Democratic side) will spend a lot of time in order to raise up to $100 million to snag the Republican nomination for president.
What do these neighborhoods look like? Not the rest of America.
Using census data, we took the list of 32 zip codes in the story and looked at median household income and racial diversity in those areas.
The result? Presidential candidates will be spending a lot of time schmoozing with really rich white people. The median family income of these 32 communities is about $111,000, almost double that of the country as a whole. That’s also the combined annual salary of about seven minimum wage workers. None of the zip codes are less than 60.6% non-Hispanic white.
So, why does this matter?
As Demos’ David Callahan and J. Mijin Cha wrote in Stacked Deck in 2013, the people in these zip codes–the donor class–simply have different priorities than the rest of America. And when candidates are spending all their time dialing for dollars and attending fundraisers with this elite set of Americans, it’s impossible for them to be unaffected by it.
When it comes to race instead of income, the story’s the same. As Demos’ Adam Lioz wrote in a 2015 follow-up to Stacked Deck focused on race and money in politics, “Elections funded primarily by wealthy, white donors mean that candidates as a whole are less likely to prioritize the needs of people of color; and that candidates of color are less likely to run for elected office, raise less money when they do, and are less likely to win.”
The 2016 presidential election will be the most expensive in history, and if this week’s announcement by the Koch brothers is any sign, it’ll be more influenced by millionaires and billionaires than ever before. And all of this money from a small fraction of the American people, and the influence it buys, will have a big impact on the policies politicians enact.
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Public Campaign Research Analyst David Duhalde contributed to this report.
Adam Smith Adam Smith is Every Voice's communications director.Being music addicts, we need access to our tunes in the bedroom, living room, boardroom and dorm room - - - even outdoors, if possible. With that in mind, we took a look at five wireless speaker systems and weren't disappointed.
On the surface, they all have the same features: Bluetooth connectivity, awesome sound and, in all but one case, portability. But there are several features that also make them "unique."
The most expensive of this quintet is the Minx Air 100 from Cambridge Audio ($449).
The Minx Air we played with offered WiFi and Apple AirPlay connectivity in addition to Bluetooth, plus:
Internet radio, with access to thousands of stations
Support for aptX, which delivers CD-quality sound via Bluetooth
Its Balanced Mode Radiator (BMR) speaker drivers vibrate horizontally delivering a wider range of sound than conventional drivers that pulsate "in and out."
Five presets, which eliminate the need to access a smartphone app to change channels for Internet radio
Access to 20,000 Internet radio stations using the free Air app
A bass port integrated into the speaker's handle, which acts as a subwoofer to enhance bass
At first we thought the enhancement of the "thumping lows" using the bass port would be overwhelming and, truthfully, a bit annoying. To our surprise the enhancement proved to be a welcome addition to the sound experience, proving to be subtle rather than annoying.
The folks at iLuv let us play with two new speaker systems, the SyrenPro ($129.99) and the MobiRock ($199.99).
The SyrenPro is fine as a standalone portable speaker, but really shines when it is linked to another SyrenPro, which is controlled by the first - - - or base - - - unit.
Basically the speaker is designed to deliver true stereo, or simulated surround sound, throughout the room. It can also be taken outdoors and give you up to four hours of sound using a built-in battery.
Other features include:
It's waterproof and UV resistant
Its design allows it to deliver 360-degree sound
There are voice prompts to aid you with pairing the speaker to your mobile device and a second speaker
There's an aux-in port to accommodate devices that don't offer Bluetooth compatibility
jAura sound enhancement technology balances the full range of sound, from treble to bass
As with all of the others in this group of speakers, the SyrenPro delivered better sound quality than we expected from a portable speaker.
The MobiRock speaker adds NFC compatibility to Bluetooth making it easier to pair your mobile device to the speaker system. NFC is also known as near field communications, which, when enabled on your smartphone or tablet, can link your device to speakers, etc. without needing to enter a code or go through the pairing process. Simply put, and NFC-enabled allows another device to "see" it when it is within range.
The MobiRock can also charge your phone wirelessly, using Qi technology, which is showing up in many of the new smartphones and tablets. You can also purchase Qi adapters.
Basically, the MobiRock offers all of the features found in the SyrenPro (except for the ability to link to a second speaker), but there are a couple of other features that set it apart:
Top mounted, back lit touch controls for power, volume, track changes and Bluetooth and NFC pairing
An USB charging port for devices that can't be charged wirelessly
The Albergo Clock Radio with Bluetooth from Tivoli Audio ($249.99) is a bit more than your standard AM/FM radio.
By combining the standard features of an AM/FM clock radio with Bluetooth, the folks at Tivoli have expanded its capabilities, allowing you to stream your favorite tunes to the device.
The radio is also customizable. The one we played with was a pre-production unit, so it didn't come with any of the variety of designs now offered by Tivoli. In addition the Albergo offers the following features:
A remote control that allows you to change stations, adjust volume, access the radio's station presets and other functions.
A telescoping antenna to receive FM signals
The ability to set the clock automatically by tuning into an FM station that offers Radio Data System (RDS) technology. This is the same technology some radio stations use to transmit the names of songs to radios, etc.
You can set the alarm using either the remote or the alarm button on the radio
A built-in equalizer and other options can be accessed by pressing the Menu/Select button on the radio or remote
Last, but the most fun to use, are Pulse by Sengled light bulbs featuring JBL sound ($169.99). Essentially, this is a pair of LED bulbs with built-in JBL speakers. You just screw them into an overhead light socket, pair them with your device and you get great sound.
Truthfully we were amazed by the sound quality these bulbs delivered, rivaling any of the other speakers featured here.
Like the SyrenPro, you wirelessly connect to a "master" bulb that controls what is played through its so-called "slave" bulbs. This includes track selection, volume and all of the other controls you'd expect from a portable speaker system.
The big difference here is the Pulse master can control up to eight additional bulbs, enabling you to play your music in multiple locations.
Other features include:
You can control the speakers and lights using a downloadable Android or iOS app.
These are LED bulbs, which mean they consume less energy than conventional light bulbs
The bulbs "dim" to a lower wattage when the speakers are activated, but you'll hardly notice a difference
You can assign one of six different audio settings via the built-in equalizer function, and launch media players such as Pandora, Spotify and others using the smartphone app
The bulbs are rated at a life expectancy of 25,000 hoursJust days after president Trump left the region, a geopolitical earthquake is taking place in the Middle East tonight as the rift between Qatar and other members of the (likely extinct) Gulf Cooperation Council explodes with Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt cutting all diplomatic ties with Qatar accusing it of "speading chaos," by funding terrorism and supporting Iran.
The dispute between Qatar and the Gulf's Arab countries started over a purported hack of Qatar's state-run news agency. It has spiraled since, and appears to be climaxing now... just days after President Trump left the region.
As Al Arabiya reports, Bahrain has announced it is cutting diplomatic ties with Qatar, according to a statement carried on Bahrain News Agency.
The statement on Monday morning said Bahrain decided to sever ties with its neighbor “on the insistence of the State of Qatar to continue destabilizing the security and stability of the Kingdom of Bahrain and to intervene in its affairs”. The statement also said Qatar’s incitement of the media and supporting of terrorist activities and financing groups linked to Iran were reasons behind the decision. “(Qatar has) spread chaos in Bahrain in flagrant violation of all agreements and covenants and principles of international law Without regard to values, law or morals or consideration of the principles of good neighborliness or commitment to the constants of Gulf relations and the denial of all previous commitments,” the statement read. Qatari citizens have 14 days to leave Bahraini territories while Qatari diplomats were given 48 hours to leave the country after being expelled. Meanwhile, Bahrain has also banned all of its citizens from visiting or residing in Qatar after the severance of ties.
Additionally, Bahrain has has closed both air and sea borders with Qatar.
Saudi Arabia then confirmed the same - cutting ties and shutting down all sea, airspace, and land crossings with Qatar as well as dissolving Qatar's role in the Saudi-led coalition fighting against Yemen. Emirates, Etihad, Saudia, Gulf Air, and Egypt Air are no longer allowed to fly to Qatar and Saudi Arabia is providinhg facilities, services to Qatari pilgrims
Egypt then followed, confirming it was cutting diplomatic ties with
Then UAE confirmed it would cut ties, shut down all sky, water, and land crossings, and expel all Qataris within 48 hours.
The Maldives also just cut diplomatic ties with Qatar.
All of this happens within 24 hours of Iran calling out 'The West' for ignoring the real sponsors of terrorism around the world and UK's Labor party leader outright name-shaming Sauid Arabia's funding of terrorism.
Qatari officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As a reminder, documents obtained by Middle East Eye show strategic alliance includes pledge by Ankara to protect Gulf state from external threats...
In December 2015, Turkey announced, to the surprise of many, that it planned to establish a military base in Qatar. Behind the scenes, the agreement was about forming a major strategic alliance. After a 100-year hiatus, Turkey is militarily back in the Gulf and ramping up its presence overseas. In January, Ankara announced that it would also establish a military base in Somalia. Specific details about the Qatar agreement, which Turkey described as an alliance in the face of "common enemies", remain scant, but Middle East Eye has acquired copies of the agreements, as well as further details, which include a secret pledge by Ankara to protect Qatar from external threats.
Did Qatar just get scapegoated in the 'war on terror'? One thing seems clear, support for a Syrian gas pipeline will be dwindling and with it the need for a Syrian war.
Notably, this raises further doubts about OPEC's stability. As Bloomberg notes, while Middle East ructions have historically added risk premia to oil prices, discord here could theoretically put downward pressure on prices as OPEC members struggle to maintain unity and compliance on production cuts.ARM is announcing that CEO Warren East is stepping down after nineteen years at the company, making way for new CEO Simon Segars — the company's current president. The succession will happen on July 1st of this year, 12 years after East took charge. Even though ARM doesn’t produce devices (or even chips) of its own, the processor architecture it designs provides the foundation for the vast majority of mobile SoCs on the market, from the likes of Qualcomm, Apple, Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Samsung, and many others.
The 45-year-old Segars is a bona fide hardware guy
Unlike East, whose background was in operations, the 45-year-old Segars is a bona fide hardware guy who served as VP of Engineering on some of ARM’s early processor designs. To hear him discuss what he thinks of Intel’s competing mobile architecture, multiple cores, and the future of mobile computing, take a look at our interview from 2012, below.Should you stop taking fish oil? A new study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that men with the highest concentrations of omega-3 fatty acids in their blood had a 71 percent greater risk for developing a deadly type of prostate cancer.
While a stat like that may sound worrisome, a closer look at the research shows there's no reason to toss your fish oil supplement, or take mackerel off the menu.
“The most important thing to know is that this is not a definitive finding,” says Men's Health's urology advisor, Larry Lipshultz, M.D., of Baylor College of Medicine. “This type of study shows a correlation, but it does not prove causation.” In other words, it wasn't a controlled clinical trial in which some men swallowed fish oil and others didn’t.
Instead, researchers looked at levels of certain omega-3 fatty acids in participants’ blood and watched who developed prostate cancer and who didn’t over time—but the method the researchers used wasn't great, says Chris Mohr, Ph.D., R.D., The Belly Off! Club nutritionist.
The guys in the study had their blood drawn once a year. “It’s a small snapshot of what was in their blood at those times instead of a clear picture of their long-term chronic intake of omega-3 fatty acids,” Mohr says. “If you just had a salmon dinner the night before, your levels would be way higher than what’s actually average for you.”
Also complicating matters: The fact that researchers didn’t set out to determine an association between omega-3s and prostate cancer in the first place. The findings were extrapolated from a study that looked at whether selenium and vitamin E protect against prostate cancer. (They don’t). The researchers just also happened to gather information on omega-3 blood levels, which wasn't very useful.
The bottom line? Studies showing the protective effects of omega-3 fatty acids for heart, brain, eye health and more are much stronger and numerous than this one, Mohr says. More controlled clinical trials are needed to give the prostate-cancer link any legs—or, er, fins. So continue putting fish on your plate at least twice a week, or supplementing your diet with fish oil. (Click here for the 10 Best Fish for Men.)
If you liked this story, you'll love these:French World Cup winner Thierry Henry will join the BBC team covering the 2014 tournament in Brazil next summer during the break in the MLS season.
Henry will be part of the presentation team in Rio, joining Gary Lineker, Rio Ferdinand, Alan Shearer, Phil Neville and Alan Hansen.
He will warm up for the role with an appearance on Saturday's Match of the Day alongside Lineker and Shearer.
Henry played at four World Cups with France, winning on home soil in 1998.
Media playback is not supported on this device Take a tour of the Manaus stadium
Lineker is delighted to have Henry as part of the BBC team, saying: "Thierry is one of the best strikers to have graced the game and really resonates with the British audience after such a successful time at Arsenal.
"He is full of charisma and brings with him tremendous insight from his career in France, Italy, Spain, England and the USA."
The New York Red Bulls striker, who scored 51 goals in 123 appearances for France, said: "I am delighted to be joining Gary Lineker and the rest of the BBC team for the tournament in Brazil.
"I've enjoyed playing in World Cups, but to experience it as a fan and studio analyst will be a new, exciting challenge. I've been fortunate enough to play with and against many of the players taking part, so will look forward to watching their performances this summer."
Philip Bernie, BBC head of TV Sport, said: "We are thrilled to have Thierry as part of our team, and he joins our exciting line-up, which has a wealth of international experience.
"He has witnessed first hand all the emotions this great competition has to offer, as one of the outstanding players of his generation, and we are sure he will now enjoy offering his greatly informed opinions to our audiences."Independent farmers at Ottawa's markets say July's heat wave and drought has had an impact on the quantity and variety of locally grown fruits and vegetables.
For some vendors, the only locally grown crop that has survived the July heat wave is lettuce.
Tina Keeping, who sells produce grown at an 18-hectare farm in Navan, Ont., says the locally grown lettuce may also be a little bitter this year.
"Absolutely it doesn't taste the way it normally should — there's always a change in food in the flavour if it's not got the nutrients or the moisture that it needs," said Keeping.
Like many independent operators, Monique Lemieux's farm doesn't have an irrigation system.
She said they've had to improvise.
"So far we created a little water tank, so we try to survive the tomato plants and cucumbers and beans and things like that," said Lemieux.
Other farmers at the ByWard Market said some crops that like heat and sun are coming in early, while others that need more water are slow to grow.
"Our cabbage, broccoli, our corn, things like that, have been coming out really early because of the heat," said Martine Belanger-Trottier. "In that way it's good, but in the other way they're really thirsty."
The ByWard Market produce is fresh, and so far prices are in line with a normal year, in part because these crops got their start in June when there was some rain.
But from his stall in the market, Serge Cleroux's warns the price of foods not yet picked, and still growing in the field, could go up.
"The second field, third field in August there, it won't be too good," said Cleroux.Democratic National Committee (DNC) Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile has apologized for leaked emails that targeted Sen. Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE's (I-Vt.) presidential campaign.
“On behalf of the party, I wanted to apologize for the salacious and sensitive, very mean-spirited emails that were referenced to in the WikiLeaks,” she told Fox News on Monday from the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
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Brazile, who will take over as interim chairwoman when Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigns from the post after this week's gathering, said Democrats must not let the content of the messages divide them ahead of the general election.
“Now look, we all know the party’s emails were hacked,” she said. "We all know that they are being selectively leaked. We also know that they have been tampered with.
“I do believe, as a party, we have to make sure that the material information that gets out is not harmful to the party and the party’s opportunity this fall to win the election.”
Wasserman Schultz abandoned plans to open the party's convention just hours before it was set to begin. Earlier Monday, the Florida congresswoman was repeatedly interrupted and booed as she sought to speak to her home-state convention delegation. Wasserman Schultz was expected to have some sort of role at the convention but told the Sun Sentinel Monday afternoon that she would no longer appear to open the convention.
The drama kicking off the convention comes after the release of internal emails from top DNC officials that showed aides rooting for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE over Sanders in the primary — leading to those on both sides of the aisle saying the system was fixed.
Brazile rejected GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE’s claim that the Democratic presidential primary was “rigged” against Sanders.
“Well, as you know, Mr. Trump makes statements at times that are not accurate,” she said. “The truth is that the Democratic Party, we have a very open process."
WikiLeaks last Friday published a trove of 20,000 emails spanning the DNC’s communications from January to late May.
Some of the messages showed top DNC officials seemingly undermining Sanders’s presidential campaign.
Sanders’s camp has repeatedly accused Wasserman Schultz of tipping the scales in favor of Clinton.
Wasserman Schultz on Sunday said she would resign later this week, after the Democratic convention ends.Today’s guest post comes from my friend Mason Slater. Mason is a husband to Melinda, a seminary student, a youth pastor, a blogger and a freelance writer in the Mecca of Christendom, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He blogs at New Ways Forward. (Add him to your Google Reader; he's one of my favorites!)
***
So this past week Rachel has been blogging about how faith changes our relationships, which has been brilliant because I can very much relate. I’ve gone though many of those same changes (and in many ways still am), and that process has transformed my relationships in significant ways.
I want to focus here on the relationship that has been the most difficult for me to work out—my relationship with my church.
What do we do when we begin to come to different conclusions about faith and practice than are taught by our faith community?
We have plenty of options, but I’m going to look at them under two categories: We can leave, or we can stay.
If you find yourself in this dilemma, I can’t tell you exactly what to do because I don’t know your story. But I can tell you mine.
In college I began to push back against the mostly Baptist faith with which I had been raised. I studied for myself and was exposed to more of the world. In retrospect, there was probably more grace given to me than I realized at the time, but it didn’t feel that way. (That said, calling someone a heretic for rejecting Left Behind eschatology is hard to do graciously). The more I asked tough questions the more my questions were either dismissed as a phase or I was told I needed to just believe the Bible.
But I did believe the Bible. I just didn’t see how it was saying the sorts of things I’d been taught.
So I left.
But not all at once. Over time I stepped back bit by bit from the many ways I was involved in the church, until one day I walked out the doors knowing I wouldn’t return.
I tried other church communities which did not look at all like the one I had left, and I tried no church community at all. Each path had its own ups and downs, but over time I was faced with a decision I did not expect: Did I want to go back—not to the same church, but to one similar to it?
I had to make this decision because I was offered a position on staff as a youth pastor on staff at exactly the sort of church I’d left. I thought it would be an easy decision, but it wasn’t.
After much thought and prayer, my wife and I decided that this was exactly where we needed to be. The institution and tradition still don’t fit us exactly, but that really isn’t the point. We love the people and have a role to play there now.
That role? To be the voice I wish I had heard at that point in my journey. Not in the sense of acting a part, pretending to be on the same team while secretly indoctrinating people into images of myself. No, I simply pray that I might be able to help the people I work with see that this Gospel story is deeper, farther reaching, and more beautiful than any of us had imagined.
It can be a difficult path to walk. More than a couple times in the past six months I thought I was going to be Chad Holtz-ed (see how I did that?) over some of what I’ve said or written, but so far it’s all working itself out for what I hope is the best for all involved.
Yes, I still have the same disagreements theologically and socially, but I’m learning to put them in their proper place. I’ve made peace, more or less, with my story. There are areas in which I push back, but I’m glad to play the role I’ve been given—to try to share a bigger picture of God and his saving work from within this tradition.
When I walked out those doors years ago I never thought I’d be back, but I am, in a way. And I’m happy to be, because if there’s no voice to tell these kids there is more to the story, when they walk away it might be for good.
So when you are faced with that choice, to walk away or stay for God-knows-what reason, just remember you’re not alone. You’re not alone because many of us have faced that choice and in our brokenness tried to choose a path with some level of grace. And, you’re not alone because there is likely someone else like you or me a few pews down.
Leaving might be the right choice, but if you stay there is a role to play in that path as well. It’s at least worth thinking about.
Grace and peace.
***
Your turn.
Have you ever faced a big decision about possibly leaving a church? How did you make that decision?"We sincerely regret that politics were inserted into the Scouting program," BSA's chief wrote in an apology to the Scouting community.
Steve Helber / AP
President Donald Trump delivered an overtly political speech Monday to a national gathering of thousands of Boy Scouts in West Virginia, prompting the chief of the Boy Scouts of America to apologize to the Scouts for the president's "political rhetoric."
Trump's speech also invited criticism from current and former troop leaders.
Trump kicked off his speech to throngs of 12- to 18-year-olds at the National Scout Jamboree by asking rhetorically, "Who the hell wants to speak about politics when I'm in front of the Boy Scouts, right?" He then spent most of the speech talking about politics. Over the course of his 35-minute address, Trump joked about firing Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, if Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare fail; criticized the "fake media" several times; celebrated the margin of his electoral victory over Hillary Clinton; and boasted about the economy and stock market.
On Thursday, Michael Surbaugh, the Chief Scout Executive for the Boy Scouts of America, apologized to the Scouting community for "the political rhetoric that was inserted into the jamboree."
In a blog post addressed to the Scouting Family, Surbaugh wrote that the events of the jamboree were "overshadowed by the remarks offered by the President of the United States."
"I want to extend my sincere apologies to those in our Scouting family who were offended by the political rhetoric that was inserted into the jamboree. That was never our intent," Surbaugh wrote, adding that the invitation to the president to visit the National Jamboree was a long-standing tradition, and was "in no way an endorsement of any person, party or policies."
"For years, people have called upon us to take a position on political issues, and we have steadfastly remained non-partisan and refused to comment on political matters," Surbaugh wrote. "We sincerely regret that politics were inserted into the Scouting program."
During his speech, the president also bragged about the size of the crowd, inaccurately claiming that a "record-setting" 45,000 people were in attendance, but said that the news media would report "it's about 200."
“What do you think the chances are that this incredible, massive crowd, record-setting, is going to be shown on television tonight? One percent or zero,” he told the gathering. "The fake media will say President Trump spoke before a small crowd of Boy Scouts today. That's some — that is some crowd. Fake media, fake news." The Boy Scouts of America told BuzzFeed News in a statement it could not confirm Trump's claim.
Steve Helber / AP
"We cannot estimate the size at tonight's event," the organization said, "but we can tell you the Boy Scouts of America welcomed 40,000 Scouts, Venturers, volunteers and other participants to the Summit Bechtel Reserve in West Virginia for the National Scout Jamboree, Scouting's largest event in celebration of adventure, service and conservation."
In his speech, Trump brought up Washington, DC, which he called "the swamp," saying his disparaging nickname for the nation's capital should be changed to "the cesspool or perhaps the word sewer, but it's not good." The president noted members of his cabinet who were former Boy Scouts, including Price, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Vice President Mike Pence. "Many of my top advisers in the White House were scouts. Ten members of my cabinet were scouts," Trump said. "Can you believe that?" He later turned to the Republican effort to repeal former president Barack Obama's health care law, the Affordable Care Act, saying Price had "better" get the votes to "kill this horrible thing known as Obamacare that's really hurting us." "By the way, you're going to get the votes?" Trump said to Price. "He better get 'em. He better get 'em. Oh, he better." "Otherwise," Trump continued, "I'll say, Tom, you're fired. I'll get somebody."
"He better get Sen. [Shelley Moore] Capito to vote for it," Trump said referring to the junior senator from West Virginia who has been on the fence about supporting the Republican health care bill. "He has to get the other senators to vote for it."
Steve Helber / AP
Trump then attacked Obama for not attending the gathering in years past. “By the way, just a question, did President Obama ever come to a jamboree?" he said. (Obama instead recorded a video message for the gathering.) While extolling the virtues of hard work, Trump told a lengthy story about William Levitt, a real estate developer credited with inventing the suburb but who is also seen as a controversial figure for refusing to sell homes to black people. It's not the first time Trump has talked about Levitt — he referenced him while he was on the campaign trail and in his 2004 book Trump: How to Get Rich. "I saw him at a cocktail party and it was very sad because the hottest people in New York were at this party,” Trump told the gathering. “And I see sitting in the corner, was a little old man who was all by himself. Nobody was talking to him. I immediately recognized that the man was the once-great William Levitt of Levittown." The president's anecdote focused on how Levitt lost "momentum" after he retired and then tried to get back into the real estate business by buying his company, but "in the end he failed and he failed badly." Trump compared it to his run for the presidency, once again disparaging the "dishonest" media for saying he couldn't win the election. "Do you remember that famous night on television, November 8, where they said, these dishonest people, where they said there is no path to victory for Donald Trump?" the president asked. "But do you remember that incredible night with the maps and the Republicans are red and the Democrats are blue and that map was so red it was unbelievable and they didn't know what to say," Trump continued. "And you know, we have a tremendous disadvantage in the Electoral College. Popular vote is much easier. We have — because New York, California, Illinois, you have to practically run the East Coast and we did. We won Florida, we won South Carolina, North Carolina, Pennsylvania." Trump then moved on to a recent jobs report and the stock market. "We're going to be bringing back very soon trillions of dollars from companies that can't get their money back into this country and that money is going to be used to help rebuild America," Trump said.
Steve Helber / AP
He also brought up the so-called war on Christmas, telling the scouts, "In the Scout Oath, you pledge on your honor to do your best and to do your duty to God and your country. And by the way, under the Trump administration, you’ll be saying 'Merry Christmas' again when you go shopping. Believe me. Merry Christmas. " Trump said the Boy Scouts will "never ever let us down" and then pivoted to the US military, praising the "billions and billions and billions" his administration was pouring into defense. "Billions of dollars," Trump said. "New planes. New ships. Great equipment for our people." Trump concluded the speech by saying he was proud of Boy Scouts and that he had known many in his life who were "winners."
"Remember your duty, honor your history, take care of the people God put into your life, and love and cherish your great country," Trump said. "You are very special people." "If you do what we say, I promise that you will live scouting's adventure every single day of your life and you will win, win, win, and you will help people in doing so," Trump concluded. In response to questions about the speech, the Boy Scouts of America said it is a "non-partisan" organization and that it has invited every sitting president to speak. “The Boy Scouts of America is wholly non-partisan and does not promote any one position, product, service, political candidate or philosophy," it said in a statement. "The invitation for the sitting U.S. President to visit the National Jamboree is a long-standing tradition and is in no way an endorsement of any political party or specific policies." “The sitting U.S. President serves as the BSA’s honorary president. It is our long-standing custom to invite the U.S. President to the National Jamboree," it said. But current and former Boy Scout troop leaders criticized Trump's politicization of the event.
This is nauseating. I'm an Eagle Scout and a former scoutmaster. The BSA was never partisan. https://t.co/T6W2jGx8eEImage copyright Getty Images Image caption The main political parties will be competing to get their message across to voters
It is the biggest voting event in the world: more than 800 million Indians are going to the polls over six weeks to elect a new government.
The first phase of polling starts on 7 April. The ninth and last will be held on 12 May.
Votes will be counted on 16 May.
How does it work?
Image copyright AP Image caption The Election Commission has urged people to vote in huge numbers
India's lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, has 543 elected seats. Any party or coalition needs a minimum of 272 MPs to form a majority government.
Some 814 million voters - 100 million more than the last elections in 2009 - are eligible to vote at 930,000 polling stations, up from 830,000 in 2009.
Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) will be used at all polling stations. The entire process will be overseen by the Election Commission of India.
How the machines work:
1) Candidates' names are written in the majority languages and scripts of the constituency. To help illiterate voters, each candidate is also identified by a symbol: the lotus for the BJP, for example, or a hand for Congress. Non-affiliated candidates can choose a symbol from an approved list.
2) Voters press the blue button next to their preferred candidate to cast their ballot. For the first time, there is a button for None of the Above, as well as a serial number in Braille to help visually impaired voters.
3) The control unit stores the votes and runs on a battery so that it can keep working in case of a power cut. During counting, the serial number of each candidate appears, along with the total number of votes cast.
Once poll officials press the Close button under the flap, the machine stops recording any more votes. It is used at the end of polling or if anybody tries to forcibly enter a polling station with the intention of casting fraudulent votes.
4) To prevent anyone tampering with the unit holding the voting information, the unit is sealed with old-fashioned wax, supplemented by a secure strip from the election commission and a serial number.
Election Commission of India
Who are the main players?
Image copyright AP Image caption From left to right, Rahul Gandhi, Arvind Kejriwal and Narendra Modi are the key candidates for PM
This election is primarily a contest between Narendra Modi, prime ministerial candidate for the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and Rahul Gandhi, vice-president of the governing Congress Party.
However, the leader of the anti-corruption Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Arvind Kejriwal, is attracting a lot of attention.
Several opinion polls have given Mr Modi a sizeable lead over his rivals. However, opinion polls in India have a history of getting election results wrong.
But Mr Gandhi and Mr Kejriwal say their opponent is not the right choice for prime minister, because of his controversial past.
As chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, Mr Modi is credited with fostering economic prosperity.
But he is accused of having done little to stop anti-Muslim riots in 2002, in which more than 1,000 people died - an allegation he has always denied.
Many analysts believe the personality-driven campaigns in 2014 have taken India's general elections closer to the presidential-style system in the US.
Profile: Narendra Modi
Profile: Rahul Gandhi
Profile: |
A photograph showing Santa cradling the image of a baby boy who passed away is touching hearts across the country.
Hayden Daniel was nearly six months old when he died from a rare heart defect in December last year - before he ever got the chance to meet Santa.
Last week, his father, Kyle Daniel, went to a mall in Georgia and handed a framed image of his son to Santa, who was being portrayed by actor Caleb Ryan Sigmon.
Read: Mall Santa Gets on the Ground to Play With 6-Year-Old Boy With Autism
Sigmon wrote on Facebook: "A man walked in today holding something in his arms. 'I have a request,' he said, turning around this picture frame. He took a moment. 'My son passed away, last year.' He choked up and couldn't finish his sentence. The entire photo set was silent. I said, 'Absolutely.'"
Stories From The Big Chair:A man walked in today holding something in his arms. "I have a request," he said, turning... Posted by Caleb Ryan Sigmon on Wednesday, 9 December 2015
He described placing the frame on his knee and reading an armband on the boy's arm, which read "Hayden."
"I didn't ask any questions, but I am guessing that this is his first photo with Santa," he continued. "The camera snap was the only sound I could hear through the entire mall."
Daniel explained that he wanted to buy the photos for a gift for his wife, but Sigmon said they could not allow him to pay.
"As he walked out, we all had tears in our eyes," Sigmon wrote. "I'm sharing this to remind us all that Christmastime is unbelievably hard for some families. Pray for the brokenhearted. Smile at people. Just be kind. Love one another."
The family also shared the post on a Facebook page made for Hayden. Kyle wrote that he was "forever grateful" to Santa for the photo.
Read: Santa Claus Poses for Adorable Pictures With Snoozing Baby
Kyle wrote of Sigmon: "We are forever grateful to him for doing this for us. Thank you Caleb for making a hard situation easy for me."
He added: "All we want is for you all to do something nice like Caleb did for us. Just be there for a random stranger this holiday. You don't have to do anything big, sometimes all it takes is a smile and a hello."
According to the family's Facebook page, Hayden suffered from Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, a congenital heart defect that means the left side of the heart is undeveloped, putting more pressure on the right side. He passed away on December 19 last year.
Watch Below: Baby Boy Born With Half a Skull Takes Heart-Melting Photo With SantaThis weekly poll is a way to gauge engagement among sci fi fans relating to the genre TV shows currently airing for the Fall season. The poll only includes shows from the Fall 2014 season that have had their debuts or that will be premiering during the current week (and the BBC America entries that debuted late August are included as well). Please vote each week on which shows you are watching and also feel free to add comments about these shows below. We will be compiling this information throughout the season and sending the statistics to the television network so that they can see which shows have generated the most engagement from the sci fi audience.
Poll Closed. Find the current week’s poll at this link
Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.Over a century ago, the world's greatest beachcomber prowled the ocean-washed cliffs of Lyme Regis. Top hat firmly in place, Mary Anning collected and identified fossils from England's eroding cliffs during the dawn of our understanding of dinosaurs. Today is her birthday.
Mary Anning at work. Image credit: Henry De la Beche
Mary Anning was born in Dorset, England. Her father collected and sold fossils as a side-business to his carpentry, taking Mary and her brother Joseph along to scour the cliffs for finds. When he died, she stepped up to run the fossil business as the primary form of income for the family.
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My favourite painting of Anning depicts her layered in rough clothes, hammer in hand, with a top hat and sturdy boots. Her attire is similar to geologists worn today, although her choice of fieldhat is a bit formal by modern standards. The best theory is that repeatedly coating the felted wool with shellac made for a very stylish helmet. Or, with the inevitable mud and dust earned by any field hat, not so much stylish necessary given the unstable cliffs pelting rocks while revealing new fossils to her.
The more fossils Anning found, the better her understanding was of how the bones fit together. Although she never undertook formal training, her ability to extract, prepare, and assemble fossils, and her knowledge of identification and anatomy brought scientists knocking on her door asking for help. Her role in discovering and consulting on fossils was not formally recognized, and she was denied membership in the Geological Society of London.
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Today's Google Doodle is in honour of Mary Anning's 215th birthday. Image credit: Google.
Mary sold her fossils to wealthy collectors, universities, and public museums. In retrospect, this was the first of many conflicts between private collectors and academic research, as her need to eat and support her family made the fossil's commercial value equally as important as their scientific significance for the development of palaeontology.
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Mary Anning and her little dog Tray at the Golden Cap outcrop. Image credit: Natural History Museum, London
The fossils from the Lyme Regis cliff were Jurassic in origin, with Mary finding molluscs, fossil fish, plesiosaurs, and ichthysaurs. She and her brother found their first ichthysaur when she was 12. A few years later, hers was the first plesiosaur collected. The paper describing the new species thanks the man who purchased the fossil, but has no mention of the woman who discovered and assembled it. This lack of recognition was an ongoing problem for Anning throughout her life. She was acknowledged for her assistance in first recognizing the nature of coprolites, fossilized dung.
She was frequently accompanied by her little dog Tray. Finding fossils is most effective when winter storms erode the cliffs, revealing new bones. This also means that she was out dodging waves and falling rocks. She had a few near-misses with landslides, but Tray wasn't so lucky.
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Mary Anning is virtually unknown outside of palaeontology, but she's downright famous compared to other women in geology from her era.An article on The Guardian lays out the problem neatly. A single photograph titled "The Geologists" features a pair in female and male attire in front of an outcrop, but doesn't list their identities.
Geologists in Devon. Salt print: William Henry Fox Talbot. Photograph: The National Media Museum, Bradford
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The salt print from 1843 is the right time to be Mary Anning, but it could also be any of her contemporaries: Elizabeth Philpot, Etheldred Benett, Mary Fairfax Somerville, Elizabeth Carne, or Barbara the Marchioness of Hastings. Or it could be someone else entirely whose name didn't make it into history at all.
Mary Anning died of breast cancer in 1847. Her bones are not fossilized, although she probably wished they could be. Instead, she lives on in a tongue-twister, starting, "She sells seashells on the seashore..."
Observation Deck has a different-and-awesome take on Mary Anning. To read more about Mary Anning, I recommend this blog by Paleonerdish, a history hosted by UC Berkeley, a BBC video, or the Natural History Museum biography.The Indian Air Force has placed orders for 83 Tejas light combat aircraft with the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited in Bengaluru, Business Standard reported on Thursday.
“HAL has received Request for Proposal for 83 LCAs [light combat aircraft] from Indian Air Force,” the organisation said in a press note on Wednesday. The move is seen as a big step towards defence indigenisation.
Earlier on Wednesday, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said in a written reply in the Parliament that the Defence Acquisitions Council had cleared the acquisition of 83 Tejas Mark 1A light combat aircraft for the Indian Air Force. Their production is planned from 2019-20, she had said.
The cost of one aircraft is about Rs 400 crore. This implies that the 83-fighter deal would generate business worth around Rs 33,200 crore for HAL and other Indian and foreign suppliers, the report said.
HAL already has an order to manufacture 40 fighters – 20 in the initial operational configuration, followed by another 20 in the final operational configuration. However, it has so far only delivered five fighters to the Indian Air Force, the Defence Ministry told the Parliament.
“The production of the remaining 15 initial operational configuration aircraft are taken up at HAL,” the ministry said. “Production for 20 final operational configuration aircraft will be taken up after clearance by Aeronautical Development Agency.”
The ministry also told the Parliament that the Centre has planned to manufacture fighter aircraft through strategic partnership model to bolster the fighter squadron strength. In May, the Union Cabinet had approved the strategic partnership model to allow domestic private companies to form joint ventures with foreign defence equipment manufacturers.Edmonton police are investigating a fatal collision involving an ambulance and a pedestrian in the south end Friday morning.
The crash happened just north of Gateway Park on the QEII at around 4:40 a.m.
The pedestrian was reportedly dead when emergency crews arrived at the scene. Police said the victim was a 67-year-old man.
The victim of the fatal ped vs ambulance crash on QE2 is removed from scene. Tow truck also here to move ambulance. pic.twitter.com/AGIqERb7yu — Erin Chalmers (@ChalmersErin) June 17, 2016
Investigators believe he was trying to cross the highway when he was struck.
The ambulance had a patient on board. Police said the vehicle wasn’t speeding or responding to an emergency and investigators don’t believe emergency lights or sirens were being used.
Alcohol wasn’t a factor, according to police.
Drivers entering the city on the QEII were being rerouted onto 41 Avenue SW for several hours, which caused major delays until the road was reopened at around 8:30 a.m.
NB lanes on the QE2 heading into #yeg are now open to traffic after fatal crash this morning. @GlobalEdmonton pic.twitter.com/63vAursSQ3 — Erin Chalmers (@ChalmersErin) June 17, 2016
Anyone who was in the area at the time of the crash is being asked to contact Edmonton police.Taj Gibson averaged 30.3 minutes during the regular season in four games against the Cavaliers, while Nikola Mirotic played half that amount at 15.5.
The Cavaliers' tendency to play small and flood the floor with shooting and players who can guard multiple positions suggests that discrepancy could continue in the Eastern Conference semifinals.
"He's probably our best low-post defender," Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau said of Gibson. "He's our best guy at moving his feet. Offensively, it's hard to put a small on him. He can overpower you inside with his post game, second shots. He's got a good 17-foot shot, so it's not like you can disregard him. He's critical for our team."
Gibson only averaged 21.8 minutes against the Bucks but closed with an extremely active Game 6 that featured him playing 26 minutes and guarding everyone from guards to centers.
"I love the fact that Thibs has confidence in me to guard multiple positions," Gibson said. "In Milwaukee he basically let me switch (point guard) through (center), and it's fun having your coach and your teammates behind you. He leaves me out there on offense too, knowing I can duck in late and post up and have fun with it."
Captain Kirk: Kirk Hinrich's role also greatly expanded in the series-clinching victory over the Bucks. The veteran guard played 20 minutes after logging a combined nine minutes in the three previous games after missing the first two with a hyperextended left knee.
"Just playing my role," Hinrich said. "Just trying to stay ready and bring energy whenever I'm called upon."
Thibodeau downplayed a question about Hinrich's role moving forward.
"He was hurt at the end of the year and he got better. If he's healthy, he plays," Thibodeau said. "He brings toughness, defense and veteran experience, gets the ball moving. He and Mike (Dunleavy) keep the ball moving quick. You need that."
Butler did it: Jimmy Butler draws the unenviable assignment of trying to slow LeBron James, which could sap his energy on offense. Butler averaged 24.8 points against the Bucks to lead the Bulls.
"He's got to do his job," Thibodeau said. "He has always guarded a primary guy. Same thing on the offensive end. We don't want any one guy carrying the burden. With a guy like LeBron, we need our whole team locked into him and not at the expense of opening up everything else."
Photos of the Bulls forward.
Layups: The Bulls are at full strength for Game 1. Joakim Noah practiced fully after sitting some on Saturday with a minor illness.... Freshly shorn Pau Gasol, a two-time NBA champion, was asked if he had a message for his teammates. He answered light-heartedly: "Let's all get new haircuts. That's the key component."by Martin Robbins
Last week, Frank Swain and I wrote a piece for The Guardian in which we questioned the various parties on their science policies ahead of the elections. We heavily criticised the Green Party of England an Wales, in spite of their sparkling climate and environmental credentials, and in doing so kicked off a debate that ran for much of the week on blogs and in The Times. On one side, many people thanked us for exposing deeply troubling attitudes.
On the other, Greens angrily claimed we had misrepresented their views. So are the Green Party anti-science; and if so what should they be doing to correct this?
Frank and I set out to write our article by putting nine science-themed questions to the parties. We knew that our response from the Green Party was going to be interesting when we saw this quote:
“The Green Party, for example, is in favour of increased funding for research on methods of integrated conventional and holistic treatments for cancer. […] We would oppose attempts to regulate complementary medicine, except by licensing and review boards made up of representatives of their respective alternative health care fields.”
As Tim Minchin put it, alternative medicine by definition is medicine that has been proven not to work, or not been proven to work. Alternative medicine that works is called “medicine”. Under the Green Party, money that could be spent researching actual evidence-based treatments for cancer could instead be diverted to quack remedies like homeopathy. Genius. And to say that the $60bn dollar alternative medicine industry needs no external regulation is just moronic. Either their quack remedies have a clinical effect or they don’t; and if they do they should be treated like any other drug.
Their policies on GM and stem cell research were equally confused, and would devastate large areas of biological research in Britain. I’m neither a fanatical supporter nor opponent of GM food; but clearly any new development in GM technology has both risks and benefits. You would think, therefore, that a sensible policy would involving assessing those, and acting based on that information with appropriate regulation, along the lines of the precautionary principle. Apparently not:
“Genetically modified food presents significant and un-quantified risks to human health and the environment. These outweigh any benefits.”
If you don’t know the risks, then how the hell can you claim that they outweight any potential benefits? Surely more research would be the answer in this case? But under Green Party policy, the import of genetically modified organisms would be banned outright, making research all but impossible. It is an incredibly irrational approach, but we we see the same stunt pulled in their policy on stem cell research:
“The Green Party believes that experiments on human embryos could have unforeseen outcomes harmful both to individuals and to society. We would work for an immediate international ban on all cloning and genetic manipulation of embryos, whether for research, therapeutic or reproductive purposes.”
Again, how can you ban all research into something on the basis of unknown consequences? Particularly when research into embryonic stem cells is so vital for progress in treating numerous conditions and diseases? Again, I’m all in favour of using the precautionary principle, but to ban something with known benefits on the basis of unstated “consequences” is just plain ignorant. They would allow the continued use of adult stem cells, but in doing so they appear to have swallowed the myth that these can always act as a substitute for the use of embryonic cells.
In short, while The Greens mean well, we found that their science policies in many areas were a disaster, and so we went ahead and published out results with suitably critical commentary. The response we got back via e-mail from the party press office was frankly unimpressive, and included the following memorable quote:
“Well, what can you say? We have an election platform that is talking about creating 1 million jobs through local food, renewable energy, and energy efficiency … and our lead candidate in the North West is up against Nick Griffin, the BNP’s leader, for the final seat in that region. But the most important thing for you to do is critique our support for alternative medicine?”
No. I’m not having that. I’m not being told that we’re not allowed to criticise Green Party policy in case the BNP get in. It is a miserable gambit designed to evade criticism. As much as I despise and hate the BNP, the idea of giving the Greens a free pass goes against every basic principle of democracy and free speech.
The backlash continued on various blogs, with HolfordWatch taking flak for “misrepresenting” the party. Some of the most intense criticism came in response to an article that Mark Henderson of The Times wrote about our work to leave comments like:
“…the Green Party is not anti-science, as this misleading and extremely biased article is trying to suggest.” “Please don’t be misled by misrepresentations of our policies.” “Instead of reading second-hand accounts of what our political opponents say that we say, how about looking about what we actually do say?”
None of these people hurling accusations of bias and misrepresentation at us appeared to appreciate the fact that we had posted their own statements unedited on our blogs, standing next to our commentary for everyone to see. As much as they ranted, few dared to point out specific instances where these terrible misrepresentations had occurred, and when they did they were simply referred back to their own statements.
I am deeply frustrated that, rather than attempting to defend their policies or engage with criticism from scientists, party supporters resorted to mud-slinging.
The fundamental problem is that in the Green Party, anyone can propose a policy, call a vote, and get it accepted in the manifesto. It’s one of those ideas that’s cute in theory, but the fact is that since most members of most parties aren’t likely to have much of a clue about things like modern genetics or cancer research, their policies are based on a popularity contest rather than considered appraisal of the evidence. The truth isn’t democratic, and the whole structure of the party works against the idea of evidence-based policy.
So to be fair to our critics, I don’t think they were being dishonest; they probably did feel that we misrepresented them because it’s unlikely that many party members support the whole manifesto. You probably couldn’t find a Green Party member that their manifesto fully and accurately represented.
I don’t want to give the impression that I dislike the Greens. I’m a fan of a number of their members, and they’ve done vital work pushing climate change up the national agenda. I have huge respect for figures like Patrick Harvie from the Scottish party. My hope is that by ramming home this message I can encourage them to properly consider their policies.
The first and most important thing for the party to do is to acknowledge that their policies are far out of step with the scientific community. They genuinely don’t seem to realise this, and I suspect this comes from a lack of engagement with actual scientists.
The second thing they need to do then is to engage with the scientific community, and bring evidence back into the policy-making process.
The third, is to build a more coherent set of policies so that their members are all singing from the same hymn sheet, rather than noisily squawking across each other. If they do, then we can begin to take them more seriously. If they don’t they will continue to fall victim to the lunatic fringe.Sheriff Drew Alexander, of Ohio’s Summit County, put his foot down this week: He announced a new policy, under which violent, mentally ill arrestees must be treated at a hospital or mental health clinic before being referred to the county jail.
“We’re not going to be a dumping ground anymore for these people,” Sheriff Alexander said. He knows of no other county in the U.S. with a similar policy.
This recent move is the latest in Ohio’s decades-long battle to better help mentally ill offenders who cycle in and out of the state’s jails and prisons. “We are the gatekeepers of a lot of persons who are mentally ill, and that’s not something we relish,” Reginald Wilkinson, director the Ohio Department of Corrections, told FRONTLINE in 2004 for our film The New Asylums.
Nearly 22 percent of Summit County’s inmates are being treated with psychotropic drugs. The county’s mental health providers have expressed concern over the impact of the sheriff’s proposal, but Summit County jail officials say they expect only two or three people per week will be brought to hospitals or mental health centers for evaluation.
NPR recently estimated that at least 350,000 people with mental illnesses are in U.S. prisons and jails. Experts point to tougher sentencing laws implemented in the 1980s and 1990s, combined with deinstitutionalization — the process of closing down mental hospitals that began in the 1950s — as the primary factors driving the rise in the mentally ill prison population.
In Ohio, it’s possible that a person could receive better mental health care in prison than on the outside. “I’ve actually had a judge mention to me before that ‘We hate to do this, but we know the person will get treated if we send this person to prison,’” Reginald Wilkinson told us.
Sheriff Alexander’s new policy, aiming to treat the violent, mentally ill before they’re incarcerated, comes after a review of of his jail by the National Institute of Corrections. It’s not surprising, however; Alexander has been a vocal critic of locking up the mentally ill for years. His new move is likely in part a response to the death of mentally ill inmate Mark D. McCullaugh Jr., who was killed in 2006 during a struggle with deputies in the Summit County lockup. One deputy was found not guilty of murder in the case, and charges were dropped against the others involved.
But Sheriff Alexander is not the only one reviewing and responding to the complicated issue of incarcerating mentally ill offenders.
A recent Sheriff’s Department report out of Los Angeles County found that deputies tend to use more force against mentally ill inmates than the rest of the population. This is not surprising: In The New Asylums, we heard that trained force is sometimes deemed necessary to protect the rest of the prison population, and the inmate himself. “You do have to use force on them…” one corrections officer told FRONTLINE. “Once they reach that level, they’re out of control, then they need to be secured.”
But Peter Eliasberg, legal director of the ACLU of Southern California, says that the real problem in L.A. County is a lack of training when it comes to using force. “You have to be on guard that some of them behave differently and they often do things that if they didn’t have mental illness, it would be a real true sign of aggression,” he said. “But if you’re sensitive that this is an inmate with mental illness, you realize it’s not a deliberate attempt to incite.”
The ACLU recently sued the department for “failing to root out deputy brutality inside the county’s jails,” after the Los Angeles Times reported on allegations that a rookie deputy was forced to beat a mentally ill inmate.
And in Massachusetts, the Department of Correction and the Disability Law Center recently came to an agreement to better care for inmates with severe mental illnesses, five years after advocates filed a federal lawsuit following a spate of inmate suicides between 2005-07. The agreement, which awaits a judge’s approval, “calls for the Department of Correction to maintain two new units at high-level security prisons as alternatives to disciplinary segregation for prisoners with mental illness.”
Being in segregation or solitary confinement can be particularly problematic for people with a mental illness. “The mentally ill in isolation [usually] simply fall apart. They have no support; they have no sensory stimulus; their hallucinations get worse. And you can just watch them fall apart,” Fred Cohen, a prison mental health consultant, told us for The New Asylums. “They’re being punished for their illness.”
In 2009, five years after The New Asylums, FRONTLINE producers Karen O’Connor and Miri Navasky went back to Ohio, and found that many of the people they profiled had been released — and then re-arrested, in some cases more than once. These arrests often occurred when a person stopped taking his medication, a constant struggle for former inmates learning to live on their own. Watch The Released for an intimate look at this transition, and learn more about efforts to stop the cycle in and out of jail, such as mental health court or a residential treatment facility that address mental health issues.
Both films feature unforgettable men, struggling with their mental illnesses in and out of prison. There’s Bennie Anthony, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1974. He’s been in and out of jail for a variety of offenses for over 30 years. Jerry Tharp, who has been diagnosed with psychosis, borderline personality disorder and major mood depressive disorder, wants nothing more than to remain in prison for the rest of his life because of the stability it gives him. And he just might: After each of his releases, he went on to commit violent crimes.This article is over 2 years old
Cuddles offered alongside coffee ‘to show people the charm of hedgehogs, which give the impression of being hard to handle’, says cafe worker
For those Tokyo residents wanting more than just your average cat, rabbit, owl, hawk or even snake-themed cafe there is a new choice – a hedgehog-themed cafe.
Japanese tourists flock to see Hachi, the cat with lucky eyebrows Read more
Customers at “Harry” – a play on the animal’s name in Japanese – have been lining up to spend time at a bright room in the Roppongi entertainment district where 20 to 30 hedgehogs of different breeds scrabble and snooze in glass tanks.
A fee of 1,000 yen ($9) on weekdays and 1,300 yen ($12) on holidays brings an hour of playing with and cuddling – carefully – the prickly mammals, which have long been sold in Japan as pets.
Anna Cheung, an 11-year-old visitor from Britain, said: “All of these hedgehogs are friendly even though some of them might spike you.”
Cafe worker Mizuki Murata, who also works in a rabbit cafe in the same building, said the shop had been popular since its opening in February, with customers often having to queue.
“We wanted to show people the charm of hedgehogs, which give the impression of being hard to handle. We wanted to get rid of that image by letting people touch them,” Murata said.
“The cutest thing about hedgehogs is getting them to finally open up and show you their face.”As you may or may not know, Hofstra University, which I attend, was the host of the presidential debate yesterday. “Who cares,” you say, “where’s my list of 20 things?” Calm down. We’ll get there (No we won’t).
For the entirety of last year, and obviously these first few months of fall semester 2012, Hofstra has been debate-crazed. Debate-aroused, if you will. “Home of the debate” was added to the bottom of every university document. Our alma mater was changed to just the word “debate” over and over again, to the tune of “Amazing Grace.” Our school president got a full back tattoo of Obama and Romney making out inside of a dream catcher. We got into it. And you know what? It didn’t disappoint. It was pretty awesome. Something important was happening, and we were all there, and it was neato. So without further ado, let me present to you “Max’s top moments during the presidential debate.”
1. This phone call.
I work as an office assistant on campus, answering phones and scheduling student appointments. It’s backbreakingly hard work, but somebody has to do it. During my debate day hell-shift (three whole hours, midday), I received the following call, from a screaming woman.
Me: Hofstra School of Comm, this is Max speaking. Her: MAX. I’M FROM NEW JERSEY, CALLING LONG DISTANCE. DON’T GIVE THE PRESIDENT A TELEPROMPTER TONIGHT, HE’S A LIAR. HE LIES. Me: I have literally no control over that. Her: LISTEN. NO LISTEN. Me: I’m listening. I just don’t have any– Her: –I SPENT A LOT OF MONEY TO CALL HERE. DON’T YOU LET HIM HAVE A PROMPTER. Me: Right. Her: LISTEN. Me: Mhm. Her: HE’S A LIAR AND HE THINKS HE KNOWS THE WORLD. Me: Okay. Her: I CALLED THE LIBRARY. Me: Right. Her: THEY TRANSFERRED ME HERE. Me: I gathered that, yeah. Her: ARE YOU GOING TO GIVE HIM A PROMPTER? Me: Not anymore, no. Her: HE LIES. YOU KNOW THAT, RIGHT? Me: I didn’t know until just now. Her: HE JUST SAYS WHAT THEY GIVE HIM IN HIS EAR FROM THE TELEPROMPTER. Me: Right. Her: IS AXELROD THERE? Me: What, with me? Her: YEAH. Me: No. Her: TELL HIM HE LIES. Me: I’ll tell him as soon as he comes in. Her: THANK YOU, GOODBYE.
2. A strange old man growled at me during a taping of MSNBC.
In our desperation to be blurry blobs in the background of a basic cable news show, our student body got pretty cutthroat. So did our campus’ visitors. There was an elderly gentleman wearing short shorts and a yellow parka, holding a large Romney sign. He was in a prime spot, right behind Chris Matthews’ enormous head, and I wanted it. I needed it. So I went for it. I stood in front of him.
For about six seconds, it was bliss. I waved, I jumped up and down; I was famous. I, a small-town boy from Pennsylvania, was a me-shaped blob on national television. It was glorious. And then, I felt the hand on my shoulder.
“Are you friend or foe?”
I turned around. The sky darkened. A child was crying. The old man had a crazy look in his eyes. He growled.
“I said are you friend or foe?”
“I… I don’t know what that means.”
“Are you with the enemy?”
“W-Who’s the enemy?”
He didn’t answer me. He just stood, breathing in my face. His breath stank of Nilla wafers and Earl Grey tea, and he stood, placidly staring through my eyes, into my very soul. Everything happy inside of me died.
Thankfully, his handler (or just a man in a suit) held him back, probably the only thing stopping him from biting my jugular.
3. Chris Matthews formed an opinion about me and it is not a positive one.
Right before the live taping of Hardball, Chris Matthews was making small talk with a crowd of students. I may or may not have told him I was up for adoption, and may or may not have asked if he was interested. He then may or may not have glared at me and very slowly and emphatically shook his head no. So, it may or may not be another Christmas alone for ol’ Max.
4. I talked to Theodore Roosevelt about the MLB playoffs
Part of the debate festivities included reenactments of famous speeches. The actor playing Teddy Roosevelt was apparently a chain smoker, as I ran into him repeatedly throughout the week, and each time he was smoking his mysterious old-timey pipe. At first, our conversations were pretty limited to what you would expect. Him pretending it’s the 1900s, me being a douchebag and talking about my space phone and female voters, etc, etc. The conversation went something like this.
Teddy: Good day! Me: Teddy! Can I get a picture with you? Teddy: Why, you don’t have a camera! Me: Nope, just my magic box here. Teddy: A magic box, you say!? What does it do? Me: Magic. Teddy: Ah! Well, certainly, let’s take a picture with your magic box. [Getting into duckface position, holding up phone] Me: You sure don’t like Native Americans huh? Teddy: What? Me: Cheeeese!
It went on like that, me telling him about the moon landing, and making up various wars and an alien invasion, and him pretending to be amazed. Eventually he just got sick of it, and we talked about Derek Jeter. And that’s what’s really important, isn’t it?
…Probably not.
image – Max KnoblauchPolice in San Bernardino, Calif., held a news conference about the ongoing investigation into the mass shooting that occurred at a county holiday party on Wednesday. An investigation into the shooters' home uncovered 12 pipe bombs in the building. (Reuters)
SAN BERNARDINO, CALIF. — At least two gun-wielding assailants opened fire on a holiday party for county employees Wednesday, killing 14 people in the deadliest mass shooting in the United States since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre three years ago this month.
Hours after the shooting, law enforcement officials said two suspects — Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27 — had been killed in a police shootout several miles from the site of the original attack.
In between were four hours of terror that brought the city of San Bernardino to a standstill. Fearful residents sheltered in homes, emergency responders rushed to get bleeding victims to safety, and dozens of law enforcement officers were embroiled in a car chase that took them from a residential street in nearby Redlands to a shootout back in San Bernardino that left both suspects dead, an officer wounded and one more community permanently changed.
[Hours before shooting, doctors urged Congress to lift funding ban on gun violence research]
The motives behind the mass shooting — the 355th in the U.S. this year — are still unclear. At a late-night news conference, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said that Farook is a U.S. citizen who worked as a health inspector for the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, which was hosting Wednesday’s holiday party.
Police in San Bernardino, Calif., said heavily armed gunmen killed 14 people and injured 21 others during a holiday party for county employees. Here's what we know about the mass shooting. (The Washington Post)
Police did not know where Malik was born or where she lived. A third suspect who had been seen fleeing the shootout was also taken into custody, though it was not clear whether he had been associated with the attack.
Asked about the third suspect, Burguan replied, “Right now, as we continue to drill down our information, it looks like we have two shooters. We are comfortable that the two shooters that went into the building are the two shooters that are deceased.”
Farook was at the gathering Wednesday, Burguan said, but he left early “under circumstances described as angry or something of that nature.”
Shortly after, Farook apparently returned with Malik, who officials believe is either his wife or fiancee. Then he allegedly opened fire.
Burguan declined to comment on what may have precipitated the attack. But, he said, the couple seemed too well-prepared for the shooting to have been set off solely by something that happened earlier that day.
“Based upon what we have seen and how they were equipped, there had to be some degree of planning that went into this,” Burguan said. “I don’t think they grabbed the guns and tactical gear on a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
He and other law enforcement officials said that terrorism has not been ruled out.
“One of the big questions that will come up repeatedly is: ‘Is this terrorism?’ ” said David Bowdich, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, said at an earlier news conference. “It is a possibility. We are making some adjustments to our investigation. It is a possibility. But we don’t know that yet. And we are not willing to go down that road yet.”
A senior U.S. law enforcement official told The Washington Post that Farook had not been under FBI investigation.
1 of 61 Full Screen Autoplay Close The day of the shooting The manhunt Skip Ad × What the investigation and scene of the shooting in San Bernardino look like View Photos The attackers were killed in a confrontation with police after a shooting at the nonprofit Inland Regional Center that left 14 dead. Caption The attackers were killed in a confrontation with police after a shooting at the nonprofit Inland Regional Center that left 14 dead. Dec. 11, 2015 A diver searches for evidence in the San Bernardino, Calif., shooting massacre that may have been thrown into Seccombe Lake. Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people and injured 21 at the Inland Regional Center. David Mcnew/Getty Images Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
The mass shooting Wednesday erupted at the Inland Regional Center, a three-building complex that houses a conference center and a facility that serves people with developmental disabilities. Dressed in black masks and tactical gear and carrying multiple weapons, the assailants barged into an auditorium where an annual gathering of health department employees was underway.
The barrage of gunfire set off a tense, confusing and terrifying day in Southern California as the shooters — their number unclear, their identities unknown, their motives unimaginable — fled the center in a black SUV and eluded capture for hours.
Police followed a |
—and you'd better, if you really want libertarianism to have a fighting chance.
In a sense the author is right: the article is honest in assessing libertarianism as a marketing ploy rather than political idealism, and the only way to con customers into buying a product that’ll likely do them harm is the same way you sell them Florida real estate: by tricking them.
Kroy lays out three "simple facts" which "a libertarian (of all people) should know." They are:
1. Libertarianism is an idea. And ideas are products, to be sold on the market. This implies, basically, that to turn another person into a libertarian you have to sell him the idea. And selling involves salesmanship. 2. To sell a product, you must wrap it in an attractive package. If you try to communicate an idea in a form which contradicts the basic convictions of your client, you will fail. Thus, if you explain to a Catholic that libertarianism is based on the virtue of selfishness, or to a communist that libertarianism is for pure capitalism, you will fail. The words you use will turn them off, and they will never consider the idea. This, in turn, implies the following principle. 3. To sell libertarianism, you must sell it under a formula which corresponds to the basic convictions of the guy to whom you sell it. In effect, to try to change his basic convictions, to try to make a Catholic accept Rand's thought first and then libertarianism as a byproduct, is utter folly. You may either fail immediately or succeed after eight years of hard work. So you have produced one more libertarian in eight years...
In other words, if you’re one of the libertarian True Believers rather than one of the Galtian players, you’re probably not going to be much help to the movement—so bugger off. The Kochs’ REASON is directly appealing here to what it hopes is a smarter, "cynical" subset of its small, cash-rich libertarian movement—Randroids, snotty heirs, and various reactionary sociopaths who understand that the key to their success is conning the sheeple, and enjoying it. What follows is a catalogue of libertarian "tricks" tailored to various marks.
Libertarianism for decent folk. A decent, hard-working, never-thinking bloke will not buy "individual rights"—he does not understand what you are talking about. It is quite too late to send him to a Montessori kindergarten to develop his conceptual faculty. Instead, what you can do is to explain to him that libertarianism is just against one thing: CRIME. By crime you mean just what he means: theft, robbery, kidnapping, enslavement. He will of course agree, because he thinks this is obvious. Then you just explain (at great length, and with many examples) that taxation is armed robbery, that inflation through deficit spending and money printing is theft—as well as forgery of money—that [the] draft is basically kidnapping, etc. You know the line. The point is one of equity: If you are not allowed to do any of these, why should a group of people called the government be allowed to do them? Clearly, he will object that the government is a totally different thing. But he must resort to explaining that the government is, basically, against crime, and then he has a paradox on his hands—and a paradox which he can understand.
Here the author makes clear one of the fundamental differences between libertarians and their marks: A libertarian is "cynical" and deliberate; he "tricks" with intent. Their target audience, on the other hand, is assumed to be earnest and gullible—vulnerabilities to be exploited. Other vulnerabilities targeted for exploitation: hippie narcissism and delusions of grandeur:
Libertarianism for romantic souls. A romantic soul is not interested much in economics or in politics, but he has great admiration for greatness. (That is why many Randists are ex-romantic- souls). He is all for the good, wise, great, smart hero, for the genius, against mediocrity. For him, Iibertarianism would make sense simply as the context where greatness would not be persecuted, hampered, restrained, destroyed. So that is the only point on which you sell libertarianism to him.
Behold the libertarian rank-and-file: the Legions of WäffenSchrutes.
More relevant to our time are REASON magazine’s suggested "tricks" to con idealistic leftist marks, and to con hippie hedonists:
Libertarianism for justice and freedom fighters. You will find this individual in the left radical movement, fighting for what he was told is freedom and against what he was told is slavery. So assure him that you are just against one thing: enslavement. Assure him that you are just for one thing: social justice. Having this agreement, start to communicate to him the true meaning of slavery—and why taxation, controls, draft, are slavery. (Start with draft, because he is already against that.) Libertarianism for hippies. The hippie has the right to take marijuana, walk naked on the beach, and have his own sex without anybody interfering, hasn‘t he? Isn’t that just what libertarianism is all about? Libertarianism was created to free him from the oppression of a conformist, square society, imposed on him at the point of a gun.
The next thing you know, Bill Maher, South Park’s creators, Hefner and the like are all running around smugly describing themselves as "libertarians" and feeling like they’re really sticking it to The Man in saying so.
Finally, the piece ends with a strange libertarian appeal to relativism and something verging on Leo Strauss:
Every point of view is based on recognition of some real problem and grasp of some truth. It involves, usually, many falsifications of facts. The point, however, is that you can make an individual a libertarian on the basis, almost, of whatever point of view he possesses—if you communicate the idea to him in his own frame of reference, based on his own fundamental convictions, in his own terms and words... Your problem, as a libertarian, is to create a libertarian society. To do that, you need many, many new libertarians. Their other convictions, whatever they are, are none of your business. They concern you only insofar as you use them—as the basis for your sale of libertarianism.
All of that is stunning enough—and something to keep in mind if you find yourself getting all dewy-eyed as you take your place on the bottom of the "strange bedfellows" at the StopWatching.us rally, topped by such rancid libertarian outfits as FreedomWorks, the Kochs’ climate denial front Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Kochs’ new anti-Obamacare Astroturf front Generation Opportunity, Students For Liberty (funded by CIA/NSA contractor Peter Thiel), Ron Paul’s Young Americans For Liberty, the Libertarian Party....
Anyway, just in case "Marketing Libertarianism" hadn't got the rulebook out widely enough, REASON ran a second article later in 1977 headlined "How To Get Converts Left & Right: Political Cross-Dressing Is The Answer."
The article essentially repeats the same dark message as before, in language clear enough so that even the dimmest narcissist on the lower rungs of the libertarian movement could grasp their instructions.
That they even had to run two articles in the space of a few months on how to trick Americans into accepting libertarianism shows what a hard time REASON was having selling such a counterintuitive political scam to a generation enamored with its idealism. It also shows a certain impatience on the part of the Kochs and the libertarian movement.
The problem was simple: In 1976, the Kochs threw a lot of cash into bankrolling a Libertarian Party presidential campaign, and they got zilch in return, despite buying all sorts of good press about what mavericks the Libertarians were. The movement was all lobbyists, no Indians. Which is to say: no voters.
Another thing that REASON’s unvarnished nihilism reveals is that they had no audience outside of their own numbers; no one in their right mind read the crap published in REASON back then. Only the tiny numbers of fellow libertarians, most of whom were on one political flak's payroll or another. In that sense, the REASON of 1977 was more like a Koch Industries PR department newsletter for the company's flaks. No need to mince words.
Having no outside readers also helps explain why REASON got away with publishing so much Holocaust denial crap. As I wrote a few weeks ago, in 1976 REASON devoted an entire issue to promoting Holocaust deniers—one of the deniers was Ron Paul’s Congressional aide at the time, Gary North, who wrote in REASON that the Holocaust was "the Establishment's favorite horror story" and recommended a book called "The Myth of the Six Million." It wasn’t the first time or last time that REASON or the Kochs published Holocaust deniers. If you can get away with denying the Holocaust, you can certainly get away with telling your libertarian base to trick and con as many sincere suckers out there as possible to help Master Koch.
Back to REASON’s article, "How To Convert": It begins by contrasting a slick, savvy libertarian trickster like 1976 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Roger MacBride with a common rank-and-file libertarian imbecile:
As Libertarian Party candidate for president of the United States, Roger MacBride campaigned and spoke in many cities. He constantly sought brief and effective ways to present libertarian ideas. During a question-and-answer session in Phoenix, Arizona, a member of the audience rose and said, "I like a lot of what you’ve said, but I disagree with you on gun control. Surely you realize that Saturday Night Specials have to be banned." MacBride waited a few seconds before answering. He replied, "Laws that forbid inexpensive handguns deprive blacks and other low-income minorities of a means of self-defense. Poor blacks living in ghettos cannot afford $200 pistols. How can you defend a racist proposal like this?" The questioner was stunned. He stared at MacBride for a moment, then sat down. Confronted with the same question, most libertarians would have talked about the right to self-defense, the immorality of government coercion, the Second Amendment, or some other point equally unimportant to the questioner—who would have remained unpersuaded.
Note again the emphasis on tricking an earnest mark. Earnestness, sincerity—these are mere weaknesses to the libertarian. The libertarian is expected to be "cynical," manipulative and deliberate; the mark, the average American voter, is assumed to engage in political debate honestly and sincerely, unarmed with tricks and strategies. Here the libertarian is assumed to be someone who can’t be persuaded by fair and honest debate; the only thing that threatens a libertarian’s commitment to the Movement is a sense of failure, the sense that no one else is being persuaded, the sense of a lost cause.
The author of the article, Michael Emerling, is a bit less crude than Moshe Kroy. The best liars are those who believe their bullshit; Emerling, whose bio boasts that he lectures around the country on "The Art of Political Persuasion," is a bit slicker and more nuanced in his presentation:
In 1976, I discussed this problem with John T. Hamilton III, a libertarian strategist and activist living in Tucson, Arizona. He had developed an enormously effective technique for bringing the left and the right to a consistent libertarian position. It is called "political cross-dressing." "Cross-dressing," of course, refers to the adoption of the dress and behavior of members of the opposite sex. For the libertarian, political cross-dressing means using right-wing words, evidence, and arguments to support civil liberties, and left-wing terms and reasons to support the free market. Political cross-dressing is based upon a sound principle of salesmanship: it shows the prospect how the "product" will fulfill his wants and needs. This can be done because freedom has something for everyone.
Indeed.
The author holds up Milton Friedman as the libertarian con-artist par excellence for "cross dressing" minimum wage to conceal its benefits to corporations and the rich, and instead package it as its opposite: anti-elitist populism and pro-black activism. Keep in mind this is 1977, when Milton Friedman was busy experimenting with Pinochet’s concentration camp libertarianism. REASON writes:
Milton Friedman is a master of this [cross-dressing] technique. Consider one instance. In opposing minimum wage laws, he says: "You very seldom find poor people testifying in-favor of the minimum wage. The people who do are those who receive or pay wages much higher than the minimum. Frequently northern textile manufacturers. John F. Kennedy, when he was in Congress, said explicitly that he was testifying in favor of a rise in the minimum wage because he wanted protection for the New England textile industry against competition from the so-called cheap labor of the south. "The effect of a minimum wage law," [Friedman] continues, "is to produce unemployment among people with low skills. And who are the people with low skills? In the main, they tend to be teenagers and blacks, and women who have no special skills or have been out of the labor force and are coming back."
It’s kind of amazing to read that today and realize how utterly credulous liberal-minded hippies must’ve been that they could be persuaded by such facile tricks. But again, it worked.
From here, the author goes on to provide specific examples of how to con a mark, sort of like the earlier REASON article. For example: How to con leftists into agreeing to privatize the US Postal Service. (This one has particular relevance to StopWatching.us — one of the most shocking scandals to emerge from the Church Committee hearings in the mid-1970s were revelations that the CIA and FBI had been opening up people’s mail without warrants, and recording citizens’ metadata on the envelopes.)
First, REASON poses the trickster’s goal and his mark:
How could free-market mail delivery be sold to the left?
And then offers a series of possible libertarian sales pitches:
The postal monopoly delays, loses, damages, and destroys thousands of letters and packages each day. It is unresponsive to consumers. It over-charges the consumer on first-class mail to subsidize Big Business on second-, third-, and fourth-class mail. It lets the CIA and FBI open and examine private communications.
Next, REASON gets into slightly more sophisticated marketing strategies to help explain libertarianism’s appeal to a generation raised on consumerism. The strategy is called "left drawer/right drawer" and its appeal is that it impresses the consumer and gives him the sense that merely "wearing" his libertarian ideology makes him appear special and unique— not for the political substance of the ideas so much as the impression it creates on other consumerist imbeciles, thanks to its mix-‘n’-match fashion:
There are ways of making political cross-dressing even more effective. One is called "left drawer/right drawer." It consists of cross-dressing issues while alternating left- and right-wing conclusions....Observe the pattern: left-wing reasons for free-market mail delivery, right-wing reasons for gay rights, left-wing grounds for opposing gun control, right-wing arguments for legalizing all drugs, and so on. "Left drawer/right drawer" produces some interesting results. First, it prevents the average person from classifying libertarianism as "left" or "right."....Second, by appealing to the right and left at the same time, the libertarian confuses the left/right spectrum. Because the approach is refreshing and original, people are often motivated to rethink their positions. And because the arguments are new and unusual, they get exposure. The working press appreciates hearing something different. So does the public.
So there you have it, the libertarian "tricks" laid bare. It’d make for some funny reading if it weren’t so self-consciously smug and sociopathic—and if it wasn’t so painfully effective in bringing to life the libertarian dystopia we all inhabit today.
Which brings me back to the StopWatching.us rally. The problem in the "strange bedfellows" coalition gathering together is the vast difference in their approaches. The Left and liberals who are part of this coalition have not, to my mind, thought through the politics. For the Left, the question over whether or not to join the StopWatching.us coalition with all those right-wing and libertarian outfits comes down to a moral, quasi-religious question, a question of ideals or lack of ideals: Are you for or against Big Brother government spying?
For most on the Left or liberals, the choice about whether or not to join the coalition comes down to this moral/religious choice, and therefore the answer is to do what every secular Christian knows is right: side with what looks like good.
There’s no political program presented by the Left as an answer to NSA spying; there are no deals cut with interest groups in-advance, no fleshed-out politics of what would come after abolishing or not abolishing the NSA, and who would benefit from this new arrangement and who would lose out... more importantly, from the Left there’s no suspicion about what the libertarians have thought out, what sort of broad political program, or deals cut, or interest group backing might be shaping their right-wing allies’ interest in StopWatching.us.
There is just the earnest Left/liberal assumption that the right must share some of their liberal distaste for Big Brother for the same humanitarian reasons as the Left.
As you can see from some of the more honest libertarian writings, that makes the Left a perfect mark, should the libertarians and FreedomWorks and the Kochs have thought their politics through already. Not to mention what Google’s interest is, given the fact that Google is the chief funder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an outfit that’s been busted on numerous occasions over the years as an undisclosed lobby front for Google, Facebook and other Silicon Valley corporations, and given the fact that Google "stores more personal data from more sources than any entity in history."
To get a sense of what the libertarians leading this movement might be up to, just look at the last time the Left got in bed with them over the TSA. A few years ago, the media was in hysterics over the so-called TSA “Gestapo.” In hindsight it looks rather embarrassing; but at the time, the hysteria over the TSA "Gestapo" was relentless, generated by the same libertarian-right front groups out of DC that are leading the StopWatching.us rally—the same lobbyists, the same assholes who "tricked" a good portion of the Left into agreeing with them that TSA airport gate security posed the greatest threat to our civil liberties, our privacy, our Fourth Amendment rights—since the Revolution.
No one on the Left was about to make an ass of themselves defending the TSA—why would they? The Left’s aversion to authority is stronger than its political sensibility—they never saw the angles on that campaign because they were never interested in knowing if there were any.
We now know what the angles were: The GOP and the libertarian lobby world planned to privatize the TSA entirely, abolish the agency and privatize the workforce before it succeeded in gaining union rights as a public sector union... with the ultimate goal of replacing the TSA with private contractors deploying "Israeli-style" racial profiling in our airports.
Unbeknownst to the liberal dupes who joined the anti-TSA hysteria, in November 2010, the TSA’s 50,000 security officers were finally allowed to unionize after a 10-year struggle to win collective bargaining rights. President Bush denied them that right during his entire presidency; and in the first two years of Obama’s presidency, Sen. Jim DeMint led a one-man filibuster crusade to block the appointment of a TSA chief, thereby blocking any possibility of the 50,000 employees gaining collective bargaining rights. It was only in early 2011 that the Obama Administration, having overcome DeMint’s filibuster and appointed a TSA chief, finally granted the TSA workforce the right to unionize. When they certified their collective bargaining agreement, it turned out to be the GOP’s worst nightmare: The single largest unionization drive in decades.
The GOP never gave up on their plans to privatize and destroy the TSA, of course. One of the planks in the 2012 Republican Party platform promised to privatize the TSA if Romney won, dole out security to private contractors, mass-introduce Israeli-style racial profiling into airports, and abolish the union.
What's the GOP's reason for constantly linking TSA privatization with introducing Israeli airport security? If you're lazy, you might assume it's because they're evil. If you try thinking it through a libertarian's way of thinking, you'll follow the money and find a more simple explanation. NASCO (National Association of Security Companies), the DC lobby outfit representing private airport security contractors, happens to be led by the Israeli lobby’s closest equivalent to a princeling—Washington lobbyist Stephen Amitay, whose father and partner is Morris Amitay—ex-head of AIPAC, vice chairman of the Jewish Institute for National Security (JINSA), and co-founder with Michael Ledeen of the Committee for Democracy in Iran. The Amitays father-and-son have represented Northrup Grumman and Israeli Aerospace Industries among their many clients, and together ran the pro-Israel Washington PAC. I dunno, call me krazy, but something tells me that there’s a connection between the messaging about privatizing the TSA and replacing it with Israeli-style contractors, and the fact that the chief lobbyist for the private airport security contractors association is also an A-list Israel lobbyist.
My point is that the Right didn't go into the big anti-TSA campaign merely shaking their fists without larger political plans to exploit the potential political benefits. In this case the Left, having abandoned Labor years ago, never saw the labor angle when it joined in demonizing the TSA. The Left never thought of the TSA officers as anything but evil Gestapo cops too. Having effectively demonized TSA officers as "rapists" and "jackbooted" "Nazis" running "porn scan machines" (those were the actual real talking points used), the libertarian/GOP right-wing created a favorable political atmosphere to carry out a full-bore privatization. Even though the libertarians and right-wingers pushing the anti-TSA crusade talked openly about replacing the agency with privately-run Israeli racial profiling, nevertheless the Left stayed on board and refused to get in the way, either out of sheer fecklessness, or cowardice—the fear of being shamed for appearing to support Police State "TSA" airport gate security. Yes, they really were that gullible.
Even that YouTube hero sensation John "Don’t Touch My Junk" Tyner turned out to be a fraud. Liberals and libertarians alike hailed Tyner as an American hero standing up to the Obama Administration’s Big Brother imperial machine. No one on the left was allowed to raise questions about Tyner, God forbid. Later, long after the peak of the hysteria, we discovered that the anti-Big Brother libertarian hero John Tyner is a military-intelligence contractor who works for a San Diego company called ViaSat. Tyner's company makes components for everything from battlefield drones used in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere; NSA spy satellites; integrated battlefield communications equipment for the Pentagon; and communications gear for the Department of Homeland Security.
Even as liberals and leftists rallied with their libertarian bedfellows behind a sentimental, idealized Tyner, the real John Tyner was busy tapping out insane radical-right political solutions on his blog—calling for firing the TSA's pro-union workforce, privatizing the agency, and replacing it with private airport security contractors specializing in "Israeli-style" racial profiling. And the libertarians pushing that agenda almost made it happen—they went into the anti-TSA crusade with everything worked out in-advance: Who would benefit, who would be hurt, the larger politics, the interest groups, everything. The left skipped along in smug ignorance as their unwitting accomplices, and nearly let themselves be used as dupes to bust a union and introduce privatized racial profiling in our airports.
So yeah, deciding whether or not to join with the libertarian far-right in another "strange bedfellows" coalition—without having the politics completely worked out, or knowing what the angles are—requires much more serious thought. It’s not merely a facile moral choice, an exam in a school civics class or a Sunday School catechism. In the strange bedfellows coalition to kill the TSA, the Left had nothing worked out beyond their own moral egos—and that made them accomplices in a crime against tens of thousands of struggling non-unionized workers, and the untold numbers of passengers who stood to be victimized by for-profit racial profiling.
The Left willed themselves into self-protected ignorance—but if the TSA was privatized, and replaced with airports run by private racial profiling contractors, it would be at least as much the fault of the leftist dupes who fell for the anti-TSA idiocy.
So this Saturday, as leftists join hands in righteous ignorance with their libertarian strange bedfellows to protest government surveillance, the rest of us will have to wait and see what the more sophisticated and cynical libertarian-right has planned to take advantage of today's anti-NSA outrage—what opportunities does it create? Already some are floating the idea of completely privatizing the NSA more than it already has been. I think we can assume they’ve already got a program worked out, and that it’s not something any of us would like. Until that time, here’s an idea for a counter-protest movement: "StopKoching.us" — no strange bedfellows allowed.The federal government indicted several union members on Tuesday for burning down a Quaker meetinghouse in 2012. Why? Because it was employing non-union workers, of course.
Ten members of Philadelphia’s Ironworkers Local 401 were charged with “allegedly participating in a conspiracy to commit criminal acts of extortion, arson, destruction of property, and assault in order to force construction contractors to hire union ironworkers,” the FBI statement reads. “Eight of the 10 individuals named in the indictment are charged with conspiring to use Ironworkers Local 401 as an enterprise to commit criminal acts. … The indictment details incidents in which the defendants threatened or assaulted contractors or their employees and damaged construction equipment and job sites as part of a concerted effort to force contractors to hire and pay Local 401 workers, even when those workers performed no function. Among the criminal acts set forth in the indictment is the December 2012 arson of a Quaker Meetinghouse under construction in Philadelphia.”
In an effort to distance themselves from allegations of violence, the union used a network of individuals ‘friendly’ to Ironworkers Local 401 that helped identify construction projects and job sites that were not using Local 401 members.
“The indictment alleges that business agents would approach construction foremen at those work sites and imply or explicitly threaten violence, destruction of property or other criminal acts unless union members were hired. The defendants relied on a reputation for violence and sabotage, which had been built up in the community over many years, in order to force contractors to hire union members,” the statement continues.
And they truly were union thugs. One of the ‘goon squads’ the defendants used, which consisted of union members and associates, called themselves THUGs—an acronym for “The Helpful Union Guys”.
Using violence, intimidation, extortion, and other crimes to further union goals will not be tolerated, the FBI said, and they’re hoping this indictment will serve as a warning to other unions.
“The strong-arm tactics we have seen in this case are outrageous and brazen—and an unfortunate blow to the worthy intentions of unionism,” Special Agent in Charge Edward J. Hanko said. “The fight for workers’ rights may sometimes call for tough tactics, but violence, intimidation, arson, and sabotage are crimes which won’t be tolerated. This investigation has been wide-ranging, but it is far from over. Now that this indictment has been unsealed, we expect to hear from more victims and will aggressively pursue all other leads we receive.”
H/T: The Washington Free BeaconBrian Leddy for BuzzFeed News Nebahitachiini Nez (#75), football player at Navajo Pine High School in New Mexico on the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation.
On a cold October night in Navajo, New Mexico, William Nez and his wife, Trina, and daughter, Morgan, pull up to Navajo Pine High School in their Toyota 4Runner and find a spot in the small lot close to the school’s track and football field.
Morgan, 9, bounces out of the backseat and is promptly stuffed into a purple snowsuit and handed a blue foam finger. Her father, William, zips a black fleece jacket over his Navajo Pine Warriors T-shirt, and he and Trina each grab a handle of a watercooler and head into the stands. Navajo Pine High School is located on the Navajo Nation, a windy 40 minutes north of Route 66, and near the border of New Mexico and Arizona. Behind the field are enormous red rocks facing west that glow pink as the sun sets, just before the Warriors’ game. It is their last home football game of the season, and the last time 17-year-old Nabahitachiini Nez, William and Trina’s son, will suit up in his Warriors football uniform in front of friends and neighbors. With 33.5 quarterback sacks during his senior season, Nez leads the nation in sacks, according to high school football website MaxPreps.com. At 6-foot-6 and 298 pounds — “not 300,” Nez clarified — he towers over his teammates and rivals, the youngest of whom are still in the eighth grade. In early weeks of his senior season, Nez was averaging a whopping six sacks per game, but as word traveled about his threatening size, players began to double cover him, and his production slowed down. In early December, Nez was named the Navajo Times Defensive Player of the Year. During the game against the McCurdy Bobcats — who traveled four hours across New Mexico to play the Warriors — Nez plays on the offensive and defensive lines, and sometimes as a fullback. He is comically bigger than every other player on the field, and the Bobcats put two defenders on him on many plays, stifling his productivity as a pass rusher. The Warriors have only 24 players on their full roster, requiring Nez to play on nearly every snap. The Warriors allowed McCurdy to take a quick lead, but in the stands, the Nez family is loud. William brings a pink stadium horn, which gets quickly swiped by Morgan, but his and Trina’s voices are the loudest in the hundred-person crowd gathered at the only event in town. “Get your guy, Bona!” William screams onto the field. In conversation, the Nez family refers to Nabahitachiini as Bona, a nickname he earned as a child when his older brother, William Jr., could not pronounce the 14-letter name. In addition to a head coach, McCurdy has a half-dozen assistant coaches dressed in red and blue in tow. The Warriors have only their head coach, Michael Hawley, who joined the team last-minute at the beginning of the 2015 season. Because of financial strain, Navajo Pine has turned over a new head coach on an annual basis. For the season, Hawley is paid $4,900. Nez’s school, Navajo Pine, is part of the Gallup-McKinley County public school district. In 2013, only 12.9% of Navajo Pine students were reading at their grade level, with only 5.7% of male students meeting the benchmark. The scores for math proficiency were not much better. Navajo Pine graduated only 69.1% of its students in four years in 2013, with only 53.8% of males earning their diploma on time. Most high schools on the reservation in New Mexico receive similar assessments to Navajo Pine; schools in border towns and away from the reservation score higher on state benchmarks. The caveat to Nez’s football statistics — which are self-reported by Warriors coach Hawley — is that the quality of competition from opponents and teammates likely influence and inflate his numbers. As Nez wraps his last season with the Warriors, and his family meticulously prepares for his future and education, college recruiters have not contacted them, nor have their requests for recruiters to visit their son been fulfilled. It is Nez’s hope that he will find a spot to play the game he loves in college, but for him and his family, football is a distant priority from the family’s most obvious priority: getting him a college degree.
“You have to get an overall understanding of what our tribe is experiencing in order to validate the decisions we're pushing on our kids.”
For many child athletes who grow up in underserved parts of America — as many reservations certainly are — sports can often be framed as a way out of the community. The Nez family sees football not as an escape or necessity, but as a tool to help the pursuit of the best possible education for their son. Trina and William, self-described helicopter parents, are deeply involved in their children’s lives, including decisions about college: “You have to get an overall understanding of what our tribe is experiencing in order to validate the decisions we're pushing on our kids,” William explained. The Warriors lost by mercy rule to McCurdy, 58–8, with three minutes left in the third quarter. McCurdy had scored 30 points during a disastrous second quarter for the Warriors, but the crowd — excluding a few players’ parents — was mostly unbothered as goodbyes were exchanged. Nez finished the game with one sack, five solo tackles, and ten assists. As the crowd headed home, the team took a knee near the end zone, and the seniors spoke harshly to the younger players who had bickered on the field and skipped that week’s practices. In tears, Nez stood to address the team. Instead of reprimanding his teammates, as his fellow seniors had done, he pleaded with them to invest more, try harder. “Next year, when I am gone, I want to come back here and see you win.”
Brian Leddy for BuzzFeed News Brian Leddy for BuzzFeed News
The Navajo nation is a vast and varied reservation located in the Four Corners region of the Southwest. Most of the land’s 27,000 square miles are in Arizona and New Mexico, but it pokes into the southernmost region of Utah as well. Across the reservation, red rock formations loom large along rolling hills and mountains, and on a clear day, you can look dozens of miles into the expanse. The Chuska Mountains run through the reservation, with a forest made up of pine, spruce, and fir trees at the base of their climbs.
The original land of the Navajo people — or, in their language, the Diné people — was between what they call the Four Sacred Mountains, which form a large slanted rectangle just east of where the tribe mostly lives today. The Nez family now lives in William’s childhood home in Navajo, New Mexico. Most of the homes in Navajo are small and rectangular, clumped together in close pockets along small highways. Twenty minutes north of the tribal capital, Window Rock, Arizona, Navajo was once a bustling town with an economy and job market stimulated by a local logging company. Navajo environmental activists, however, discovered that the company’s work was endangering spotted owls, and the logging company was shut down in 1994. Today, Navajo is a town of 2,000 people, and the only businesses in town are a grocery store and a gas station. The nearest restaurant to the Nez family home is a Denny’s 20 minutes south of Navajo in St. Michael’s, Arizona. Nabahitachiini’s knees nearly scrape the underside of the table as he sits before ordering a T-bone steak. Over lunch, William and Trina speak openly about their children, themselves, and the struggles of their community, often weaving in historical context of Navajo culture. Trina says opposing teams have singled out Nez for as long as he’s played football. “I had to bring his birth certificate with me to his games when he was just a kid,” Trina recalls. “I was getting so many questions, I realized I needed the proof that he was the same age as everyone else on the team.” Enough doubt was cast on his age relative to his size that she learned to carry his birth certificate with her to each of his games with the youth Tony Dorsett Football League, where Nez, starting at age 8, learned to play tackle football. Nez says he is now used to being singled out, by supporters and rivals alike. Though he speaks proudly of wearing out the players assigned to cover him, Nez places sportsmanship well above competitiveness on his list of priorities.
“I'll explain to the opposing team how to grab me. But I don't want them to get disqualified, either."
“When a guy tries to tackle me, sometimes it will be illegal contact,” Nez explains. “So I'll explain to the opposing team how to grab me. Most of them are probably shorter than me, so what they're used to doing might get them disqualified. But I don't want them to get disqualified, either." Trina’s younger brother, Alonzo Yazzie, was a star high school football player for the Hopi High School Bruins. Large and strong like his nephew, he helped teach Nez about the sport and encouraged him to stick with it. He is the football player — NFL stars included — that Nez says he looked up to the most. Yazzie died in 2011 at age 31, after what his family says was a “sudden accident.” Tearing up, Nez recalls his uncle's wisdom: “Me and him, we were... we were like two peas in a pod. I lost a lot of support at that time. I thought of even quitting football sometimes because of that. But I thought of what he used to tell me: ‘If you feel like quitting, don't quit. Because I will always be out there, cheering you on.’” “It was especially hard when we lost him because some of my brothers saw in my son the same playing talent that Alonzo used to have,” Trina says. “I think that's the driving force of them wanting to drive three to four hours out and see him all the time and motivate him and say, ‘You know what, try harder. Zo — we called him Zo — played all of these positions. Make your uncle proud!’” When Nez was a small boy, Alonzo and his other uncles often woke him before 5 a.m. and told him to get up and go outside for a run. Navajo culture prescribes early-morning runs facing east to face the deities, Trina explains. Shout as you run to make your reverence know, so they may bless you for a long and good life. Yell for the deity to hear you and bless you, no matter the hour or feeling of lead in the legs. Navajo elders pass down the tradition as a lesson of strength and |
US-131 and off of Division; in a way that’s going to be beneficial to everybody,” Rogoff said.
The new bus line, the Silver Line, won’t be complete until the summer of 2014, according to The Rapid CEO Peter Varga. It will run almost ten miles between the residential suburbs south of Grand Rapids up to major employers and the ‘medical mile’ in the downtown area.
According to a written statement:
The 9.6-mile route will serve major employers, including St. Mary’s Medical campus, the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, and the Cook-DeVos School of Nursing, which together employ about 29,000 area residents.
The federal government will pay for the majority of the $40 million dollar project. The State of Michigan will cover about $8 million.
Rogoff says other mid-sized cities with bus rapid transit like Kansas City and Eugene, Oregon have seen ridership on the lines exceed expectations.
“What you’ve seen in those communities is the corridor itself that you put the bus rapid transit in it comes alive with new retail new residential all around the stations because they see the permanence of the system,” Varga said.
“What I’m very excited about though is the example this sets for the southeast side of the state,” Lieutenant Governor Brian Calley told the crowd, “A place where a regional transit system is needed really more than anywhere else in the United States; a solution that has eluded us for the better part of forty years – I’ve been told, I’m only 35 years old.”Road surfaces can make a big contribution to local air purity. This conclusion can be drawn from the first test results on a road surface of air-purifying concrete. This material reduces the concentration of nitrogen oxides (NO x ) by 25 to 45 per cent, said prof. Jos Brouwers in a recent inaugural lecture at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.
The tests were carried out in the municipality of Hengelo, where the busy Castorweg road was resurfaced last fall. As part of the project, around 1,000 square meters of the road's surface were covered with air-purifying concrete paving stones. For comparison purposes, another area of 1.000 square meters was surfaced with normal paving stones.
Researchers at TU/e carried out three air-purity measurements on the Castorweg last spring, at heights of between a half and one-and-a-half meters. Over the area paved with air-purifying concrete the NO x content was found to 25 to 45 per cent lower than that over the area paved with normal concrete. "The air-purifying properties of the new paving stones had already been shown in the laboratory, but these results now show that they also work outdoors," said prof. Brouwers. Further measurements are planned later this year.
Asphalt
Brouwers, who has been professor of building materials in the TU/e Department of Architecture, Building and Planning since September 2009, sees numerous potential applications, especially at locations where the maximum permitted NO x concentrations are now exceeded. The concrete stones used in the tests are made by, and co-developed with, paving stone manufacturer Struyk Verwo Infra, and are already available for use. For roads where an asphalt surface is preferred the air-purifying concrete can be mixed with open asphalt, according to Brouwers. It can also be used in self-cleaning and air-purifying building walls.
The use of air-purifying concrete does not have a major impact on the cost of a road, Brouwers has calculated. Although the stones themselves are 50 per cent more expensive than normal concrete stones, the total road-building costs are only ten per cent higher.
Self-cleaning
Vehicle exhaust gases contain nitrogen oxides (NO x ), which cause acid rain and smog. The air‑purifying concrete contains titanium dioxide, a photocatalytic material that removes the nitrogen oxides from the air and converts them with the aid of sunlight into harmless nitrate. The nitrate is then rinsed away by rain. These stones also have another advantage: they break down algae and dirt, so that they always stay clean.
Jos Brouwers, professor of building materials at TU Eindhoven, delivered his inaugural lecture on the afternoon of Friday 2 July.The last month has been a whirlwind of allegations and accusations of sexual assault from the heights of Hollywood to the halls of Congress, Big Media, and beyond. Men from all walks of life, political beliefs, and social classes are losing their marriages and livelihoods, not the mention their reputations, due of the assaults and unwanted attention they have perpetrated on women (and in some cases men) in their lives.
The irony is that in many of these situations the ones being exposed (pun intended) reside within the warm cocoon of the liberal cultural elite. Most of these people have spent a lifetime—and a great deal of effort and money—sneering at and debasing the culture of practiced faith, respect for women, the institutions of traditional marriage and family, all the while portraying men of that “debased lifestyle” they disparaged as unenlightened peasants and troglodytes.
Now it appears the men who mounted these assaults—both literally and figuratively—are nothing but patriarchal misogynistic perverts. But unfortunately we’re seeing commentators—including women such as Michelle Obama—who actively enabled the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Al Franken, Bill Clinton, and John Conyers, pinning the problem on “toxic masculinity” as if all men are responsible for (and capable of) abusing the people around them in this way.
While there is delicious irony in seeing those individuals who treated traditional culture like their personal scratching posts run out of town on rails, there remain in their places those who share these hateful views about the “rest of us” and who are seizing upon this time as an excuse to launch a modern day Salem witch hunt. Hate of all things male has been rallying cry of the left over the last 100 years on behalf of the equality movement. The movement for women’s equality under law was and remains a good and just endeavor. And it should also be acknowledged that there remains much to be done, due in no small part to the actions of the Weinsteins and Frankens of the world who clearly did not practice what they preached.
How did we get here?
In Search of Lost Virtues
When you consider that the “sex positive” culture of the 1960s and ’70s turned sex from a function of emotional love and committed relationships working towards the goal of procreation into a casual, transactional exchange at the whims of the participants, it’s not hard to understand how the likes of Clinton, Spacey, and Conyers “evolved.” The former put the emphasis on the other, the latter on the self. Five decades of Hollywood and the media assaulting the institutions of marriage and the family, culturally objectifying women in print and in film, and normalizing abhorrent behavior and lifestyles can do that.
Beyond mainstream Hollywood, we have another serious problem: easy access to pornography for young men online who are conditioned thereby to view women as objects. After years of conditioning, we are “shocked” to find their behavior in line with their conditioning? Are we not being irrational to think there will be rational behavior in the face of such conditioning?
Moreover, as we have embraced the worthy effort of opening up all doors to women—and by extension girls—the culture has also embraced what I think is an unintended consequence of taking the “boy” out of the boy in our educational and organized activities systems. Christina Hoff Sommers’s almost two-decade-old research looks downright prophetic on the effects our culture wars have had on the next generation of men. What’s even more disappointing is that this campaign, given the recent news cycle about bad male behavior, appears to have accomplished little.
So, how do we continue to empower women while ending the campaign against masculinity that has, in part, created this crisis in our culture?
We all make choices every day: to objectify or not, to harm or not, to respect or not. Whatever happened to self-control and dignity? While we’re at it, whatever happened to being faithful and being true to a promise? Whatever happened to being virtuous? The Latin root word of virtue is “vir,” meaning man. Definitionally, to be a “man,” means to partake in virtue. “Manly” does not mean showing off with Gaston-like bravado, boasting about one’s power over others, but instead possessing strength of will, honor, and compassion.
The “masculine gentleman,” focused on self-sacrifice, self-discipline, honor, and gentle strength was a character Hollywood used to embrace—with Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, and John Wayne filling the roles. But somewhere along the line, in an effort to “equalize” the sexes, these values became deficiencies. Service for others, using strength to sacrifice for families and communities—once paramount to being a true and good man—became demerits that undercut the standing and role of women.
But these are the very values that required discipline, holding back passions and base desires, and building out of self-control some dignity and respect. Isn’t self-control what in many ways sets us apart from the beasts?
Toss them out and it’s not a surprise that we become more like beasts than men.
Set a Noble Course
Without virtue, self-sacrifice, or self-discipline, the world in many ways devolves into nothing but a collection of objects. When objectification occurs—whether it is men or women doing the objectifying—a human being, an eternal soul of unfathomable value, is reduced to nothing but an object for selfish pleasure. But then again, if the teaching is that we are nothing but products of chance, with no particular value beyond, say, a tree or a light bulb, then perhaps all of this was inevitable. Is it possible that this really does come back to what we believe about who we are as human beings, the immortal soul, and what our purpose for existence really is?
I am trying to teach my sons to be noble, to be magnificent, to be epic, to be courageous. The word noble is an archaic one, but it’s one that should come back into fashion because it captures the essence of everything we seek in men; the ideas of self-sacrifice and discipline and courage and gentle strength. So we must seek to be noble in a world that wants us to be anything but—a world that wants us to conform to it. A quarter-century ago, the nonconformists were the likes of Weinstein and Clinton and their ilk.
How ironic that today, I am raising my boys to be the nonconformists, pushing back, making the right choices every single day. We had a friend of the family growing up who was an air traffic controller. He said if a plane started off wrong by just an inch it’d be off by miles in the end. Little choices make the man, and by degrees, people shift with daily decisions to find themselves years later miles off course.
The world is a better place with masculine gentlemen. It’s just we need more of them.PITTSBURGH, Pa. - Pascal Dupuis and Olli Maatta are set to reclaim their positions with the Pittsburgh Penguins after significant medical issues last season.
A blood clot found in Dupuis' lung ended the 36-year-old's season shortly after it was announced Maatta would undergo surgery to remove a cancerous tumour from his thyroid gland.
Maatta returned from the surgery on Nov. 18, after last playing against Buffalo on Nov. 1, but suffered an upper-body injury against Ottawa on Dec. 6 that ended his second NHL season.
"Dupuis, last year, I appreciated everything he did," Penguins coach Mike Johnston said. "He worked right to the end to try to be ready for us if we extended our playoff series long enough so that he'd have a chance to get back in. Olli Maatta has had two bad injuries since he's been here, but we couldn't have a more positive young guy."
Dupuis has been Pittsburgh's vocal leader for several seasons, but the forward's presence has been missed over the past two. His 2013-14 season ended after 39 games because of a torn ACL sustained against Ottawa on Dec. 23, 2013.
In his first game back from the injury, Dupuis had a goal and three assists in a season-opening 6-4 win against the Anaheim Ducks on Oct. 9, 2014. His former spot alongside Sidney Crosby on the Penguins' top line could be unavailable with newly acquired forward Phil Kessel expected to play first-line right wing, but Dupuis feels fortunate to join the team in any capacity.
"I haven't been on the ice for a while with a group of guys that are on the same team," Dupuis said. "So, it was exciting. It was fun to be out there Last year, form November on, I was skating by myself before everybody and just the fact that I'm here and can go on the ice at the same time as everybody and just the fact that you're sharing the same thing as everybody else, you're going on the ice and you're practicing, you're battling It's good to be a part of that same group and not be the outsider looking in."
The 21-year-old Maatta is expected to join Kris Letang, who is returning from a season-ending concussion, on Pittsburgh's top defensive pairing entering his third season. After impressing with nine goals and 29 points in 78 games as a rookie in 2013-14, Maatta experienced a frustrating freshman year.
The defenceman said he is prepared for the increased workload against opponents' top lines despite any potential rust he could experience.
"You just have to get your mind into it," Maatta said. "It's mental too. It's not all about how the shoulder actually is, it's about mentally, you have to get over the hump."Tougher punishments for firms guilty of exceeding emissions limits or building plants without environmental permits
SHANGHAI, July 28 (Reuters) - Chinese firms guilty of exceeding emissions limits or building plants without environmental permits will face tougher punishments including credit bans and land use restrictions, the country's environmental ministry said late on Wednesday.
China has been cracking down on polluting enterprises, raising fines and threatening criminal action against persistent offenders, but regulators have long struggled to impose rules on powerful industrial enterprises and local governments anxious to protect revenue and jobs.
The country has sought to beef up its traditionally underpowered environment ministry and spread the burden of enforcement to other agencies, including dedicated courts, police authorities and financial regulators.
The Ministry of Environmental Protection said in a notice published on its website that it has signed a cooperation agreement with 30 government departments, including the central bank, to broaden the range of punishments for offenders as well as improve information sharing. (http:///www.mep.gov.cn)
The 31 government departments will draw up a blacklist of offenders in order to create a "unified punishment mechanism", the ministry's official publication, China Environmental News, said.
Businesses or individuals that have seriously violated environmental rules would not be able to apply for new land, safety or business permits, and would not be able to get their products certified by customs.
Preferential tax policies could be cancelled, and firms would also face restrictions when issuing bonds or making use of other financing tools. Some could also be restricted or banned from entering the market.
Earlier this month, the China Securities Regulatory Commission said that it would only allow companies that have a clean bill of environmental health for three full years to issue shares on local stock exchanges.
"Environmental enforcement needs to be enhanced, but if they can be assisted by other stakeholders and other powerful departments, especially investors, banks and stock market regulators, it can provide a big help," said Ma Jun, director of the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs, which campaigns against pollution.
(Reporting by David Stanway; Editing by Michael Perry)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.on •
THE GUERRILLA ANGEL REPORT — An Irish transgender advocacy group is taking on a cell phone provider Meteor Mobile Communication for exploiting trans people in television commercials promoting their products.
Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI) say these commercials are dehumanizing and are being used for cheap laughs. The commercial has reportedly been widely shown on both satellite and terrestrial TV. TENI has filed a complaint with Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland and YouTube and have begun a public awareness campaign to get the commericials off the air.
TENI’s Broden Giambrone: “Ireland’s trans community should not be used for cheap laughs. In a recent health survey, 40% of trans people in Ireland had attempted suicide at least once.... Trans people are among the most marginalised people in Ireland. They are Irish residents and taxpayers, and are still not recognised by the State in their true gender. They are not accorded their basic human rights.”
TENI was a force in getting another trans exploitation commercial banned earlier this year in May. I wrote about that here: https://lexiecannes.wordpress.com/2012/05/17/uk-ad-watchdog-bans-spot-the-stallions-from-the-mares-tv-commercial/
More about the TENI campaign: http://www.teni.ie/news-post.aspx?contentid=647
[Trigger warning] View the commerical here: Trans used for ‘cheap laughs’ in Irish TV advert | Gay Star News.
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Categories: Policy, Administrative, Transgender, Transsexual, TransBernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE has passed Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE at the top of a national poll for the first time in the 2016 race.
A Fox News poll of the Democratic presidential race released Thursday shows Sanders with 47 percent support to Clinton’s 44 percent.
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That's a gain of 10 percentage points for Sanders a January version of the poll. Clinton's support declined 5 points.
Clinton posted leads as high as 30 points over the summer, but Sanders has been steadily closing the gap. While no other poll of the race going back to 2014 has ever showed Clinton trailing a rival, she led Sanders by just 2 points in the last two Quinnipiac University tracking polls.
It's unclear whether the numbers are outliers or indicative of a dramatic change in the race. Outside of the Quinnipiac poll, Clinton posted double-digit leads in all three national polls conducted in February, with the largest lead coming in at 21 percentage points.
“One thing that is clear from our poll — and others — is that Clinton has been losing support and Sanders has been gaining,” said Democratic pollster Chris Anderson, who assisted Fox News on the poll.
“And this process appears to have accelerated since the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.”
Fox released the poll two days before Saturday's caucuses in Nevada, a state where Clinton has also seen a major lead evaporate. A CNN/ORC poll from this week found the White House hopefuls essentially tied there.
The Democratic establishment had long viewed Clinton as the inevitable nominee, but anxiety is growing, with some fearful that the campaign is slipping away from her.
Sanders's lead in the Fox poll comes due to improved numbers among female voters — a net loss of 25 points for Clinton over the past month — and gains among white voters, with a decline of 13 points for Clinton. But the poll shows Clinton still holding her lead with black voters.
The poll also found that a vast majority of Democrats, 72 percent, believe Sanders is "realistic enough" to serve as president despite repeated attacks by the Clinton campaign that his policies on healthcare and subsidized public college tuition are a pipe dream.
There are also signs that Sanders is catching on with the broader electorate.
Thirty percent of all voters would consider themselves satisfied if Sanders wins the White House, more than said the same of Clinton or Republicans Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE or Jeb Bush. Sanders also has the lowest number of people out of those four candidates who would be "not at all" satisfied with his election.
Updated at 6:53 p.m.Firaxis is working on an all-new, all-different and all-strategy X-Com remake entitled XCom: Enemy Unknown.
It's fair to say that not everyone was thrilled by the news that X-Com was being "reimagined" by 2K Marin into an FPS. Given that the original X-Com is one of the most famous and beloved strategy titles in videogaming history, turning it into yet-another-story-based-shooter that appears to have no connection to the franchise beyond the name unsurprisingly rubbed some people the wrong way. But those people may now rejoice, or at the very least allow themselves a moment of cautious optimism: Firaxis, the studio that gave us Sid Meier's Civilization and one or two other games you may have heard of, is bringing the series back for real.
As revealed by the February cover of Game Informer, the now-unhyphenated XCom: Enemy Unknown will bring the strategy classic back to life, "introducing a wider console audience to what made the storied franchise great in the first place." Enemy Unknown will be a "full-on strategy game" giving players command of a global military force battling invading enemies, keeping governments happy and the population reassured.
"It's been a dream of ours to recreate X-Com with our unique creative vision. We're huge fans of the original game and it's a once in a lifetime opportunity to re-envision a game that is as beloved as X-Com," said Firaxis Games President Steve Martin. "We were careful to keep XCom: Enemy Unknown true to the elements that made X-Com such a revered game while delivering an entirely new story and gameplay experience for both die-hard X-Com fans and newcomers to the franchise."
Isn't this exciting? I'm still looking forward to the XCom shooter and will enjoy it for what it is, but there's no getting around the fact that it's not really X-Com. And if sequels, remakes and "reimaginings" are what we're to be stuck with, then an X-Com do-over is long overdue.
Details will be thin until the February issue hits but it will reportedly include "destructible tactical environments," turn-based combat framed in a real-time strategic environment and a whole lot more. XCom: Enemy Unknown is slated to come out this fall for the PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. I'm so excited!Love on the Rocks
The Do’s and Don’ts of Climbing with Your Significant Other
We’ve all been there. Enjoying a day at the crag, when suddenly the fun and mirth are shattered by the most uncomfortable interaction you’ve ever seen between two people who supposedly like being with each other.
“I can’t figure this out, you can let me down,”
“Did you try the undercling? That ALWAYS works for me.”
“I can’t do the undercling, it’s not working for me.”
“Are you sure? Just try a little harder, you can do this!”
“I said I’m done, let me down.”
“Come on, I know you can do it. Grab the undercling!”
“I WANT TO GO DOWN NOW!! I SAID TAKE DAMN IT!!!””
or how about this:
“OK, watch me here.”
“I’m with you, you got this!”
(climber makes sketchy moves, get’s in place to clip, pulls up rope, then drops, then goes to pull up again and gets short roped.)
“’Come on, feed it faster!”
“I’m trying, don’t pull so hard!”
“Agh, now I’m pumped. I’m off, falling!”
(climber lowers to ground and gives belayer stink eye.)
We’ve probably all seen interactions like this, though oddly enough, rarely between two people who aren’t romantically involved. I’ll never forget the first “couple wobbler” I saw. These two normally-nice-to-each-other folks would turn into something very different at the crag, where all these frustrations and insecurities would surface in a perfect storm of swearing and tears. Yikes, isn’t this supposed to be fun?
I’ve often pondered why it is we let ourselves get so upset when climbing with our significant other. Maybe it’s because we think they should know us so well, that when they don’t give us 100%, we feel betrayed. Or maybe because we allow ourselves to be more vulnerable, but then when things go haywire, we explode with emotion. Scientists may be investigating this one for a while, but what I do know is there are certainly some solid do’s and don’ts when it comes to having a climbing relationship that works.
Don’t: Assume they want to use your beta. We’ve covered this briefly, but nothing seems to make your SO more flustered than you shouting up beta to them that may or may not work. Just let them figure it out, if they want your help, they’ll ask for it.
Do: Be supportive and encouraging. Listen, don’t try to fix. Men have an especially hard time with this one, which is maybe why we are the ones who walking around the base spraying beta at everyone.
Don’t: Yell at them, belittle them, push them to do something they don’t want to do. This is climbing, it’s supposed to be fun.
Do: Remember this person is special to you, and that should be the number one thing. Climbing will come and go, but your relationship should always be the #1 priority.
Don’t: Always be the one to suggest where you go climbing.
Do: In many relationships there is typically one personality that is stronger when it comes to making plans. Vary things up. If you both like sport climbing, great. But maybe they want to trad climb this weekend, and then you can go bouldering the one after that. Make sure you both have an equal say in where you want to climb.
Don’t: Treat them like any old climbing partner. Don’t assume they are having a blast just because you are.
Do: Check in to see how the day is going. Remember, the goal is to keep the fun factor high and the drama low!
I’ve been blessed to have my wife as my main climbing partner for the last nine years, and these are some things that work for us. Got any other tips? Please share in the comments!A woman used Facebook live to broadcast what happened after her boyfriend was shot during a traffic stop.
She claims that he informed the officer that he was a legal gun owner and had a gun in the vehicle – the police shot him 3 or 4 times when he reached for his license.
Here’s the video, it’s a little graphic, and there’s curse words:
If it doesn’t load up for you, here’s the link.
UPDATE – the video was taken down, but here it is on Facebook:
It’s only been up for 2 hours but it had more than 1.3 million views.
Here’s more information from the New York Daily News:
Police shot a man during a traffic stop in suburban Minneapolis, prompting his girlfriend to make frenzied calls for help via a Facebook livestream. St. Anthony’s interim chief Jon Mangseth confirmed that the unidentified man had been shot by one of his officers during a traffic stop Wednesday evening. The man’s condition was not immediately known, though a video posted to Facebook by a woman named Lavish Reynolds showed him bleeding. Mangseth said the victim had been taken to a local hospital, and was in unknown condition.
If she’s right, that cop should be in a lot of trouble. That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do as a legal gun owner – to think he was shot over it is really troubling.Researchers have long proven emissions from cars, trucks, coal plants reduce air quality and affect our health. Yet another study documents the serious health impacts on all of us, specifically our heart and arteries.
Reuters take:
The evidence is stronger than ever that pollution from industry, traffic and power generation causes strokes and heart attacks, and people should avoid breathing in smog, the American Heart Association said on Monday.
Particulate matter appears to directly increase risk by triggering events in susceptible individuals within hours to days of an increased level of exposure, even among those who otherwise may have been healthy for years,” said Dr. Robert Brook of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who headed the group writing the report.
A review of six year’s worth of medical research also showed strong evidence that pollution can help clog arteries, and a “small yet consistent” association between short-term exposure to air pollution and premature death.
….
The group recommends that the elderly or anyone with heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or diabetes should pay attention to air pollution and air quality index warnings.
“People can limit their exposure as much as possible by decreasing their time outside when particle levels are high and reducing time spent in traffic — a common source of exposure in today’s world,” Brook said.Update (March 9, 2012): I have updated this document to include styling information for Internet Explorer 10.
<progress>
progress
The HTML: Simple
As a web application developer,especially when it can take a long time. They can be(like the one in Gmail does when it shows the user how long it is going to take for it to load and initialize),(like some shopping cart applications have to show the user how many pages it will take to check out an order). I used to create progress bars using <div> tags, CSS and a litle bit of math, but now I like to do it the HTML5 way using thetag. This article will discussin all operating systems and browsers and how to, even in browsers that don’t officially support the it. It will also discuss some interestingamd show some
The HTML for a Progress bar is dead simple:
<progress max="100" value="60"> <strong>Progress: 60% done.</strong> </progress>
Progress: 60% done.
Note that the HTML inside the <progress> tag is the fallback for browsers that do not support it. That, unfortunately, includes all versions of IE and Safari so far, as well older versions of Firefox (5.x and lower) and Opera (10.x and lower). Although the fallback is acceptable, we can go a step further and use Lea Verou’s excellent <progress> tag polyfill, which adds pretty much full-support for all of these browsers except for Safari 5 and lower (so you should always put in the fallback HTML just to be on the safe side). Let’s take a look at these screenshots to see what how <progress> looks across the browserverse:
Windows 7 Windows XP Mac OS X Ubuntu Linux Firefox Chrome IE7-9 (polyfill) N/A IE10 N/A Safari 5.1+ (polyfill) N/A Opera
Note that:
Firefox and Chrome will render the progress bar the same way that the host operating system would … except for Chrome for Linux, which uses it’s own custom style (thanks to Mounir Lamouri for correcting me on this exception).
The color of the Opera progress value is always green (more on this later).
The browsers that use the polyfill all render the progress bar with a nice bluish gradient effect
A progress bar can also have an “indeterminate” state, which happens when there is no value attribute.
<progress max="100"> <strong>Progress: 60% done.</strong> </progress>
Progress: 60% done.
This effect is used to show that the state of progress is currently unknown (e.g. how long it will take for a web server to initiate the download of a file if is generating it on the fly). How this looks varies from browser to browser as well.
Windows 7 Windows XP Mac OS X Ubuntu Linux Firefox Chrome IE7-9 (polyfill) N/A IE10 N/A Safari 5.1+ (polyfill) N/A Opera
Note that:
Opera is the only browser that doesn’t distinguish between a progress bar with an indeterminate state and one with a value of zero.
All of the other browsers (including the ones that use the polyfill) animate the indeterminate states. (I have opted to not show all the animations here to avoid readers getting seizures … I hear that would be a bad thing).
One changes the value of the progress bar by changing its DOM node’s.value property. Easy peasy.
But I Want To Style Them My Way!
If you are particular in how you want your <progress> tags to look, the good news is that you can pretty much style them any way you want. You must, however, be aware about the browser quirks that can trip you up … and it isn’t all IE’s fault this time! Follow this three-to-four-step process, and you’ll be styling progress bars in your sleep in no time:
Step 1: Turn off default styling
The first step is to turn off the default styling in all browsers:
progress, /* All HTML5 progress enabled browsers */ progress[role] /* polyfill */ { /* Turns off styling - not usually needed, but good to know. */ appearance: none; -moz-appearance: none; -webkit-appearance: none; /* gets rid of default border in Firefox and Opera. */ border: none; /* Needs to be in here for Safari polyfill so background images work as expected. */ background-size: auto; /* Dimensions */ width: 400px; height: 60px; } /* Polyfill */ progress[role]:after { background-image: none; /* removes default background from polyfill */ } /* Ensure fallback text doesn't appear in polyfill */ progress[role] strong { display: none; }
Progress: 60% done.
Simple stuff: remove the border and add a specific width and height. I added the second rule to remove the background image inserted by the polyfill’s stylesheet, but if you wanted, you can modify the polyfill’s stylesheet directly (or leave it out completely if you elect not to use the polyfill). The final rule is to ensure the polyfill doesn’t display the fallback content — it assumes that is always wrapped in a <strong> tag, so this may be something you should keep in mind when setting the default content (if you don’t like using a <strong> tag as a wrapper for your fallback content, use whatever tag you like).
Note that the appearance property (and its vendor-specific brethren) are there to turn off the default operating-system styling on the progress bar — it doesn’t seem like it is really necessary, but I put it here for reference in case it becomes mandatory in the future.
Step 2: The Progress Bar Background.
Now let’s change the background color of the progress bar to a light red.
progress, /* Firefox */ progress[role][aria-valuenow] { /* Polyfill */ background: #ffeeee!important; /*!important is needed by the polyfill */ } /* Chrome */ progress::-webkit-progress-bar { background: #ffeeee; }
Notice that with Firefox and the polyfilled browsers, all you need to do is change the background of just the progress tag itself, while in Chrome (and I assume future versions of Safari) it is necessary to use the -webkit-progress-bar pseudo-element. Note that even though the code inside these rules are the same, you cannot put all of these selectors in one rule: doing so breaks Firefox and Opera (so much for degrading gracefully).
Step 3: The Progress Bar Value
Now let’s change the color of progress bar value to black. The CSS is a wee bit longer than it really should be:
/* IE10 */ progress { color: black; } /* Firefox */ progress::-moz-progress-bar { background: black; } /* Chrome */ progress::-webkit-progress-value { background: black; } /* Polyfill */ progress[aria-valuenow]:before { background: black; }
Yes, three rules to rule them all! Yes, four rules are needed now if you include IE 10! Again, putting them all together in one selector breaks every browser on the planet (including the polyfilled ones), so we have to write three separate rules with the same CSS properties in them! <sarcasm>Yaaayyy!!!!</sarcasm>
Note that there is no way that I know of to style the progress bar value in Opera 11.52 and lower. It just stays the same green no matter what you do. :-( If anyone is reading this and knows otherwise, I would be indebted to you to let me know how. Note also that as of this writing, the preview release of Internet Explorer 10 does not allow styling of the progress bar value with an image, only a color using the color attribute, so some of these examples do not look as intended in that browser)
Step 4: The Indeterminate Value
This part is optional, and I would only put these rules in if I know I’ll need a style for the indeterminate value (not all applications need it):
/* Firefox */ progress:not([value])::-moz-progress-bar { background-image: url(../images/indeter.gif); } /* Chrome */ progress:not([value])::-webkit-progress-bar { background-image: url(../images/indeter.gif); } /* Polyfill - IE */ progress[role]{ background-image: url(../images/indeter.gif)!important; } /* Polyfill - Safari */ progress:not([value]) { background-image: url(../images/indeter.gif)!important; background-size: auto; /* Needs to be in here for Safari */ }
It even works in Opera! Note that the background-size must be set to auto in order to override the default style in the polyfill. :-)
See the above CSS in action in a “clean room” page
That’s Too Basic! I Want Fancy-Pants™ Progress Bars
So, now that you know the basics, let’s take a look at some more complicated and interesting progress bars:
Two Image Effect
This progress bar uses two versions of the same image (one grey-scale, one |
keep pot out the hands of minors and the illicit market.
If the Trump administration were to withdraw the memorandum, recreational marijuana businesses and customers could be subject to federal prosecution.
Federal legislation has barred the federal government from spending money to shut down or hamper state medical marijuana programs, and a U.S. Appeals Court in August ruled that federal agencies may not prosecute people for growing or distributing medical marijuana if they are following state laws.
Withdrawing the Cole memo would still have a chilling effect on Oregons recreational marijuana industry and the investment and jobs created by legalization, Margolis said.
Prosecuting recreational marijuana businesses also could impact the states revenue stream. The state has collected more than $40 million in recreational marijuana tax revenue since January, according to the Oregon Department of Revenue. That represents an industry making more than $160.8 million in sales between January and September.
But Margolis said she thinks its unlikely that the Trump administration would withdraw the memo because of increasing support for legalization.
Voters in Nevada, Maine, Massachusetts and California approved recreational marijuana Nov. 8. and several other states, including Florida, approved medical marijuana.
Marijuana legalization has broad and bipartisan support, said Mark Pettinger, spokesman for the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, which regulates recreational marijuana.
But because the Obama administration did not lift marijuanas classification as a Schedule 1 drug, there still is potential for enforcement, Margolis said.
If the Trump administration were to prosecute the marijuana industry, states could attempt to sue the federal government to allow them to operate state programs, Margolis said.
The liquor control commission plans to continue to follow the Cole memo until further notice, Pettinger said.
There is not much we can react to when we dont know what position the Trump administration will take, Pettinger said.
By Paris Achen
Portland Tribune Capital Bureau Reporter
503-385-4899
email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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Visit Us on FacebookA group of Victorian brewers have come up with a navel way of making beer, growing a yeast strain from their own belly button fluff and savouring the results.
While the idea of Belly Button Beer may be stomach-turning for some, 7 Cent Brewery co-founder Doug Bremner said the yeast strains were carefully studied and grown to ensure they were sterile.
"It's perfectly safe. Yeast is yeast – this beer is no different to any other beer out there," Mr Bremner told 9news.com.au.
The friends tested the first batch themselves.
"We weren't really sure if we were going to see it work and we were really stoked that it actually did work," he said.
Three engineer friends founded 7 Cent Brewery in Gisborne South, in Victoria. (7 Cent Brewery) ()
Confident in their processes and research, they weren't overly worried about being guinea pigs.
"The process of isolating our own yeast strain involved swabbing samples of each of the brewer’s belly buttons and getting our full science on by streaking out the samples on agar plates," he and fellow co-founders Brendan Baker and Matthew Boustead said in a statement.
"After allowing the plates to incubate, we found all sorts of interesting things growing, including what appeared to be colonies of yeast.
"Positive controls were used to help us identify yeast colonies and negative controls were used to ensure our techniques were sterile.
"We selected individual yeast colonies and grew them up until we had pitch-able quantities for trial batches."
The unusual idea was inspired by a Beard Beer made from yeast from a Rogue brewer's beard in Oregon, Mr Bremner said.
Orange zest and coriander seeds complement the belly button yeast. (7 Cent Brewery) ()
As for how Belly Button Beer tastes, the brewery has described it as being "in the style of a new world-ish Belgian-ish Witbier with fresh orange zest and toasted coriander seeds".
"The yeast exhibits qualities of Belgian beer with the key characteristics being spiciness, clove and light banana esters. The orange zest and coriander seeds were used to help complement the yeast and a calculated amount of Riwaka and Mosaic hops were added to increase the citrus qualities and give it a refreshing hop kick," they said.
"Four different grains were also used to add both body and complexity including: barley, wheat, oats and rye."
The brewers made an 800L batch of the beer. (7 Cent Brewery) ()
The "completely unique yeast strain" gave the beer a unique flavour, Mr Bremner said.
The 7 Cent Brewery team, which is based in Gisborne South, north-west of Melbourne, will showcase their Belly Button Beer at the 2016 Great Australasian Beer SpecTAPular (GABS), in Melbourne and Sydney next month.
This isn't the first time the three-year-old brewery – which started out when the engineer friends began brewing beer for parties – has tried something unusual, Mr Bremner said.
"We do like to try and experiment a bit – we've done a black clam gose, which is a German-style sour beer with salt [and] the idea of clams was to add a bit of saltiness," he said.
The brewery also made an oyster stout, and launched a 'hipster beer' at GABS 2015, which was made with quinoa, chia seeds and kale.
Belly Button Beer was inspired by Rogue's Beard Beer. (7 Cent Brewery) ()
Mr Bremner said GABS was a great opportunity to try something different.
"The idea is to do something pretty unique and to kind of push the boundaries," he said.
7 Cent Brewery sells beers mostly packaged in kegs at Melbourne pubs, and has also been sold in Sydney and Perth.
Belly Button Beer may be available for wider purchased after GABS, "if it gets a good enough response," Mr Bremner said.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019By Kirsten Fiedler
The European Court of Justice today ruled that the EU legislation on mass surveillance contravenes European law. The case was brought before the Court by EDRi member Digital Rights Ireland, together with the Austrian Working Group on Data Retention.
After eight years, this affront to the fundamental rights of European citizens has finally been declared illegal. Eight years of abuses of personal data and eight years of reassurances from EU Member States and the Commission that the measure was legal
said Joe McNamee, Executive Director of European Digital Rights.
In today’s press release, the Court stated that
by requiring the retention of those data and by allowing the competent national authorities to access those data, the directive interferes in a particularly serious manner with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data.
In its judgement, the Court states that the Directive “applies even to persons for whom there is no evidence capable of suggesting that their conduct might have a link, even an indirect or remote one, with serious crime.” In particular, the Court critised the untargeted nature of the surveillance measure. It highlighted the absence of any objective criterion by which to determine the limits of the access of the competent national authorities to the data.
In short,
Directive 2006/24 does not lay down clear and precise rules governing the extent of the interference with the fundamental rights enshrined in Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter.
Judgement
Press release (pdf)
Implementation Report (pdf)Media, police and politicians disparage communities protecting themselves as “vigilantism”
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Following calls by politicians, media and the police for Brits not to buy baseball bats and engage in what was disparagingly termed “vigilantism,” Amazon UK has followed suit by banning self-defense items from its online store, after sales of makeshift weapons soared through the roof as a result of riots plaguing the country.
In the immediate aftermath of widespread looting and rioting which was directed primarily against private homes and local family businesses, Brits left defenseless by a blanket gun ban that makes it virtually impossible to own a private firearm rushed to Amazon to purchase whatever could be used as a weapon to protect their families and property from attack.
The need for self-defense was exacerbated after police in London were ordered to stand down and let the rioting take place for the first three nights of chaos as a result of a Scotland Yard directive.
Sales of aluminum truncheons and baseball bats skyrocketed, with some items achieving sales 50,000 per cent above normal.
However, despite the fact that communities organizing themselves into groups to protect their streets, undermined by being labeled “vigilantes” by the media, did indeed serve to quell the worst of the rioting, politicians like Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow which was hit by riots on Monday night, lambasted members of the public for purchasing weapons to defend themselves.
“This crosses the line when it involves weapons,” said Creasy. “That just encourages the sense of fear – we want to reduce tension and fear in the area. People with baseball bats roaming the streets is not helpful: don’t go on Amazon buying them.”
Following suit, Amazon UK today banned the sale of perfectly legal items, including self-defense sprays and Kubotans, short lengths of plastic or steel.
“Amazon has removed several police-style telescopic truncheons from sale on its site as soaring sales of truncheons, baseball bats and other items that could be used as weapons sparked fears of vigilantism in the wake of widespread rioting,” reports the Guardian.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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Amazon users were divided about the decision, but many applauded the move despite the fact that police completely failed to protect countless businesses from being burned to the ground and did little to stop violence which led to people being killed.
“Even if they are being bought by respectable home and business owners, they should be banned from sale temporarily,” said V Woolf. “Vigilantism is not the answer. Get these items off the shelves, we are all scared and angry in London and need to know that measures are being taken to help us to feel safe in our cities again.”
But there’s a difference between ‘feeling safe’ and actually being safe in your own home. No amount of government legislation or police deterrence can provide true safety and security, that responsibility rests with the individual. This has been proven in triplicate over the past few nights. As soon as communities started banding together and patrolling their streets, the riots withered and last night there was virtually no trouble at all.
However, the media quickly disparaged people getting together with their neighbors to protect their communities as “vigilantism”. The Metropolitan Police, whose order to its officers to stand down on the first three nights of rioting directly led to the escalation of the chaos, also warned residents not to patrol their communities.
Just like gun control, banning baseball bats only disarms the public and creates victims. Criminals will always be able to acquire weapons of any description because they do not obey laws. Leaving Brits defenseless will only embolden the rioting hordes.
If the UK riots have proven nothing else, they’ve proven that the authorities cannot and will not protect you. It always comes down to the responsibility of the individual and the community to protect their own families, businesses and private property.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.Any day now – perhaps any moment – the Twins will decide whether to trade second baseman Brian Dozier.
The Dodgers remain the most logical match, but the teams still are haggling over the package that the Twins would receive beyond right-hander Jose De Leon, according to major-league sources.
As of Monday afternoon, the Twins did not believe that the Dodgers’ offer included enough additional value, or that De Leon alone could carry a trade for Dozier, sources say.
Article continues below...
The Twins, out of respect to Dozier, want to resolve the matter soon. Perhaps the soft deadline will accelerate the talks in the hours ahead. But the Twins, sources say, are concerned that De Leon, like many prospects, will not fulfill his hype.
De Leon, 24, led the minors with 12.8 strikeouts per nine innings at Single A and Double A in 2015, and he averaged nearly that many last season at Triple A despite missing time with an ankle injury and shoulder inflammation.
His performance borders on elite. His makeup is considered quite good. But De Leon did not pitch more than 114 1/3 innings in any of his first four professional seasons, so it’s not as if he can step into the Twins’ rotation and provide 175 innings right away.
The Twins, if they trade Dozier, want to be as certain as possible that they receive a fair return. Dozier, who is owed below-market salaries of $6 million and $9 million the next two seasons, holds considerable value.
For now, the staredown continues. But not for much longer.
ORIOLES PEOPLE ON HOLD
With spring training a little more than a month away, more than 70 Orioles employees remain without contracts for 2017, according to major-league sources.
The group of unsigned employees is a cross-section of people in baseball operations, sources say — major- and minor-league coaches; professional, amateur and international scouts; player-development officials; even front-office executives.
The decisions on the contracts, sources add, rest with owner Peter Angelos. In the end, virtually all of the employees figure to be renewed. But the uncertainty is grating on certain employees, prompting one to say, “I hope we can submit our mortgage payments to the Orioles.”
ROSS IN NO RUSH
Right-hander Tyson Ross is taking a methodical approach to his free-agent decision, weighing rehabilitation possibilities as well as contractual structures as he recovers from thoracic-outlet surgery, sources say.
The Cubs and Rangers are considered the front-runners for Ross, who likely will command a relatively low base salary after pitching just 5 1/3 innings in 2016.
The Cubs, if they fail to sign Ross, might consider a reunion with left-hander Travis Wood, sources say. Ross offers more upside, but Cubs officials continue to hold Wood in high regard.
The defending World Series champions still might add another bench player as well, someone they could option to the minors and use as depth.
DIVERSITY EFFORTS CONTINUE
Major League Baseball and USA Baseball, in their ongoing efforts to promote diversity, will announce on Tuesday the introduction of the “Dream Series” for high-school pitchers and catchers across the U.S.
The event, taking place this weekend in Tempe, Ariz., acknowledges that African-Americans are under-represented at both positions. It will be baseball’s third such amateur development camp, joining the Breakthrough Series and Elite Development Invitational. USA Softball and the major-league players’ union also are partners in the camps.
Approximately 700 baseball and softball players, ages 13 to 18, will attend the camps this year, cost-free. Former major-league pitchers Dave Stewart, Marvin Freeman, LaTroy Hawkins, Ken Hill and Darren Oliver will be the pitching coaches for the “Dream Series.” Bob Didier, Charles Johnson and Lenny Webster will be the catching coaches, Homer Bush and Marquis Grissom the hitting coaches. Former major-league manager Jerry Manuel will be the field coordinator.
The participants will include Hunter Greene, a shortstop and pitcher from Notre Dame (Ca.) H.S., who is MLB.com’s No. 1 draft prospect.
AROUND THE HORN
Information compiled from major-league sources:
*The Orioles, who want to address their outfield defense, remain interested in free agent Michael Bourn.
*The Phillies’ choices as they seek a left-handed hitter remain the same — Michael Saunders, Brandon Moss and a possible trade for the Mets’ Jay Bruce.
*After righty Jose Berrios, the Twins view lefties Steven Gonsalves and Adalberto Mejia as their top starting-pitching prospects. Two of their touted youngsters, left-hander Tyler Jay and righty Kohl Stewart, could end up as relievers.OAKLAND — Khalil Mack made his veterans proud.
His performance Sunday, aggravating the Buffalo Bills’ offense in the Raiders 26-24 victory, wasn’t just his best game as a pro but a moment of fulfillment for the elders of the defense.
That’s why Justin Tuck had a twinkle in his eye when asked about Mack. Antonio Smith flashed a beaming smile. Charles Woodson rolled his eyes in amazement.
They have been pouring wisdom and experience into the willing ears of Mack all season. Seeing it pay off is special.
“That’s my guy,” Tuck said. “I can remember being the youngster and guys like (Hall of Famer Michael) Strahan looking at me the same way. … Watching some of the things he’s able to do, it’s exciting. Because I know what kind of player he can turn into.”
Mack registered his best game since leaving the University of Buffalo. And it came against the pro squad that passed him up even though he was a local stud.
He had a sack, a tackle for a loss and three quarterback hits. And that doesn’t tell the whole story.
He spent much of the game in the face of Bills quarterback Kyle Orton. Three times on third down, Orton made an errant throw because of pressure from Mack. His quickness and brute strength was too much for Buffalo right tackle Seantrel Henderson, who spent most of the game failing at slowing down the Raiders rookie.
Mack looked every bit like the stud-in-the-making. He was so aggressive, so all over the place, he played himself into exhaustion and missed the final defensive series.
“Just cramping,” Mack explained.
Mack, a candidate for Defensive Rookie of the Year, no longer looks lost out there. That’s allowing his impressive physical ability to shine even more.
One the first defensive play of the game, Mack exploded through the line and devoured Bills running back Fred Jackson. He did it again on a three-yard stop of C.J. Spiller in the second quarter.
But most of his damage was done rushing the quarterback. He had a move working where he’d jab to the outside then explode inside, giving him unimpeded access to the quarterback a few times.
Smith said Mack used to face paralysis by analysis. Trying to decided between stopping the run or rushing the passer left him a step slow a lot — especially against teams good at mixing it up.
“I’ve been telling him,” Smith said, “‘You’ve got the natural ability — just rush and the game will come to you.’ When he rushes off instinct it destroys everything, the run and the pass. He doesn’t have to think about whether it is a run or a pass. Just go.”
What happened Sunday had been in the works, if you ask the vets. They’ve seen things in film room and in practice that made them certain it was a matter of time and patience with Mack.
They each said Mack has received every morsel of advice they give. They love his work ethic and his willingness to learn. That on top of his physical prowess has them convinced he’ll be a big-time player.
“Dude’s going to be special,” Woodson said. “The biggest jump any player makes is from his first year to his second year. You’ll see a big jump out of him.”
Mack and Sio Moore, the Raiders other young linebacker, have a special way they encourage each other, especially through hard times. They remind each other of their ultimate goal — getting a yellow Hall of Fame jacket.
Smith loves it. Sunday, Mack made it look like more than just a dream.
“You’ve got to be confident. You’ve got to be hungry,” Smith said. “That boy is a young animal. He does some things out there on the field that looks almost impossible.”Teddy Atlas doesn't believe that we're going to see the "vintage Mayweather" in the ring, but admits he probably doesn't need to be to beat Conor McGregor. While Chael Sonnen demonstrates what McGregor has to do to avoid Mayweather's left hook. (1:49)
LAS VEGAS -- The fight most believed was nothing more than an impossible fantasy is happening.
The undefeated all-time pound-for-pound great Floyd Mayweather, he of 12 world titles in five weight classes, will exit a two-year retirement for one fight to face UFC star Conor McGregor, who is crossing over to boxing from MMA for a fight that was initially just a germ in his mind when he brought up the possibility in a 2015 television interview.
Two years later, huge amounts of social media fervor, genuine demand from combat sports fans intrigued by this pairing of huge personalities, a boatload of money and a wild four-city media tour... and here we are.
Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor TV lineup for the Mayweather Promotions card on Saturday (Showtime PPV, 9 p.m. ET) from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas: •Junior middleweights: Floyd Mayweather (49-0, 26 KOs) vs. Conor McGregor (0-0), 12 rounds •Junior lightweights: Gervonta Davis (18-0, 17 KOs) vs. Francisco Fonseca (19-0-1, 13 KOs), 12 rounds, for Davis' world title •Light heavyweights: Nathan Cleverly (30-3, 16 KOs) vs. Badou Jack (20-1-3, 12 KOs), 12 rounds, for Cleverly's world title •Cruiserweights: Andrew Tabiti (14-0, 12 KOs) vs. Steve Cunningham (29-8-1, 13 KOs), 10 rounds Preliminary bouts on Fox (7 p.m. ET): •Welterweights: Thomas Dulorme (24-2, 18 KOs) vs. Yordenis Ugas (19-3, 9 KOs), 10 rounds •Junior welterweights: Juan Heraldez (12-0, 8 KOs) vs. Jose Miguel Borrego, 10 rounds Fight facts Referee: Robert Byrd
Judges: Burt Clements, Dave Moretti, Guido Cavalleri
Start time: While the PPV begins at 9 p.m. ET, the main event won't begin before 11 p.m. ET and could start as late as around midnight ET.
"This was something that the fans wanted to see," Mayweather said. "I spoke to my team and said that the Mayweather-McGregor fight can be the biggest fight in history. That's what we're here to turn into reality."
But be honest, the fight makes no logical sense. Mayweather is a legendary boxer and supreme defender who will be facing an opponent who is outstanding in the Octagon but a novice in the ring and making his pro boxing debut.
Most experts view it as an abject mismatch, so that it was sanctioned by the Nevada State Athletic Commission was something of an upset. But it was, and now they'll engage in a 12-round junior middleweight spectacle that has the world's attention on Saturday night.
"Mayweather versus McGregor has captured the imagination of sports fans across the world. It's a historic event demanded by the fans and put on for the fans," Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe said. "The fighters will put their talents on display in a fight that people did not think was possible. After it's done, people will talk about this fight for years to come."
This is your ESPN.com Ringside Seat for the fight:
Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather square off during a news conference at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile/Getty Images
Floyd Mayweather (49-0, 26 KOs) vs. Conor McGregor (0-0)
What's at stake?
Nothing and everything.
In the scheme of championship boxing, there are no authentic titles at stake, no pound-for-pound implications. Just a fight, but a big one that is one of the most hyped ever.
No matter how small the risk is for Mayweather -- many believe it will be one of his easiest fights -- there is still some element of risk when another man is throwing punches at your head.
Mayweather is 40. Mayweather hasn't fought in two years. And Mayweather, of Las Vegas, is gambling his perfect record and a brilliant Hall of Fame legacy that could be ruined with one punch from a guy who looks like he barely knows how to throw a proper boxing punch.
If McGregor, 29, of Ireland, wins, many will consider it the biggest upset in sports history. At least when Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson it was a boxer knocking out a boxer. When the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team upset the Russians they were still hockey players facing other hockey players. When the Jets beat the Colts in Super Bowl III, the Jets were football players beating other football players.
McGregor is not a boxer, and there is no way he could make himself into an elite one in a matter of months. Mayweather, who comes from a boxing family, has boxed for virtually his entire life.
That experts give McGregor almost no chance to win, or to even compete, has merely motivated the "Notorious" one.
"It's certainly motivating," McGregor said.
"The disrespect and the disregard to my skill set is disappointing. I look at people so many times and their mind is closed. They've got a closed mind to how things can be done. It's a set way and there's no other way. Where if that was the case we'd never have reached across the waters and searched for other lands and we'd never have went into space." Conor McGregor
UFC president Dana White, McGregor's promoter, has been emphatic that his star has what it takes to get the job done.
"Don't judge a fight until the fight is over," White said. "You never know what's going to happen, especially with a guy like Conor who hits like a truck. When he hurts someone, he puts them away. Floyd is almost 41 years old. Conor is a young southpaw who hits hard. We'll see how it plays out. It's crazy to think that Conor won't connect with him."
Mayweather has played up McGregor's chances by pounding home the fact that even though McGregor is 21-3 with 18 knockouts in MMA, he has never lost standing up, only by submission.
"McGregor is a tough competitor. He's undefeated standing up. He's never lost when striking. I know that I'm in for a tough fight," Mayweather said. "But there is one thing I do know, this fight is not going the distance. No matter what anyone says, it's not going the distance."
For his part, McGregor is undaunted by his lack of boxing experience. He says his southpaw stance, which occasionally has given Mayweather minor problems, and his determination, aggression and punching power, especially in his left hand, will result in an early knockout.
"If people are overlooking my size, power and youth, they shouldn't be. I'm very confident in those attributes. I believe I'll knock him out early," McGregor said. "If you look at the way I fight, I am a fast starter. I come out and bang people right away. With eight-ounce gloves, I don't see him lasting more than one or two rounds. I am my own man and I feel I am superior to Floyd. When it comes to Saturday night, he will not be prepared for me.
"He's a beaten man. He will not be able to take the ferociousness that I come with. I'm very confident. I have more skills in many areas, and as a true martial artist, I can adapt to any situation."
The World Boxing Council will award the "Money Belt" to the winner of Saturday's fight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor. World Boxing Council
Cha-ching!
Many expect the fight to break all of the revenue records set by the 2015 megafight between Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, including total revenue (about $600 million), most pay-per-view sales (4.6 million) and all-time gate ($72.2 million). The fight is also expected to set the Las Vegas fight wager record. Bookmakers handled about $50 million in action on Mayweather-Pacquiao and expect Saturday's fight to exceed $60 million.
"The numbers are tracking huge," White said. "We are going to do the numbers that everybody has been talking we are going to do. The over/under line in Vegas is 4.9 million (pay-per-view buys). Everything is tracking right now to say that we are going to kill this thing. So it is looking really good."
The fight will be available in more than 200 countries and territories, and because of the massive amount of revenue that will roll in, the fighters will each make nine-figure paydays. Mayweather, who has made more money than any other fighter in history, will add substantially to his earnings and is likely to surpass the roughly $250 million he earned against Pacquiao. McGregor's likely haul of more than $100 million will dwarf anything he has made for a fight in the Octagon.
"This is huge, the numbers that we've been hearing about, they've been crazy," Mayweather said.
Said Showtime Sports boss Stephen Espinoza: "This will be the most widely distributed event in pay-per-view history. This event will be distributed in over 200 countries [and territories] and might grow to 225 by the time we're done. We are well on our way to being a record-setting event in many categories."
McGregor is also thrilled with the business of the fight.
"I saw it pointing to record-breaking numbers all across the board, from the gate to the sponsorships to the pay-per-view. Absolutely every angle," McGregor said. "So I am very, very happy with how it has gone."
UFC star Conor McGregor will step into the boxing ring for his first professional bout and face Floyd Mayweather on Saturday in Las Vegas. Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Boxing vs. MMA
Of course, the fight is a boxing match not an MMA bout. But that hasn't stopped legions from looking at it as one sport against the other. It's silly, because they are different sports, but that's just the way it is.
McGregor really has nothing lose in that respect. If he loses, he was supposed to. Remember, he's not a boxer. A Mayweather loss is on him, but it would probably reflect badly on boxing because of Mayweather's stature.
"I truly believe I'm taking the bigger risk. But it's a big reward for both. I have the 49-0 record. When a fighter has lost before, if he loses again, they say, 'Oh, it's nothing. He's lost before.' But when a fighter has been dominating for 20-some years -- never lost -- everything is on the line; my legacy, my boxing record, everything is on the line." Floyd Mayweather
As long as it's a decent fight, White said, the outcome won't reflect badly on either sport.
"I don't think it hurts either sport," he said. "I think this is one of those cool situations where two guys are willing to take the risk to fight each other, and I think that this thing has captured the imagination of people. That is how this fight was built. This fight was really built through the fans and the media."
Mayweather, who has said he would consider himself a failure in the fight if he didn't score a knockout, guaranteed he will get it and that boxing has nothing to worry about.
"Nothing is a threat," he said. "Boxing is legendary, and boxing is here to stay."
He added, "When he gets hit, he's going to find out that this is totally different [than MMA]. The brittle hands? Let him keep saying all that. When I come across his head, he's going to find out what it really is. Believe me. This fight is not going the distance, I'm telling you."
McGregor is the outsider but hopes to prove his worth as a boxer.
"I get it. I'm coming in; I'm supposed to be from another sport and so again, I understand where it's at," he said. "But I'm just looking forward to [Saturday], going in and proving what I'm saying and then educating the world on what martial arts are and giving the fans and everybody a good solid fight and earning my respect in this game also."
ESPN Stats and Information
50-0?
When Mayweather retired in 2015 after waltzing past Andre Berto, he reached 49-0, the hallowed mark of the great heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano. Although it's not an actual record in boxing -- several fighters have begun their careers with more consecutive victories -- it is a revered accomplishment.
It seemed inevitable that Mayweather would return for a crack at 50-0, and here it is.
Mayweather, however, said that sweet round number is not a big part of his motivation for returning and he does not burn to surpass Marciano.
"I don't focus on other fighters, but I'm appreciative for every fighter that paved the way for me to be where I'm at," he said. "I always talk about how I appreciate the legendary fighters. My focus is to go out there and give the fans an exciting fight even though I know this is No. 50 and we're constantly talking about Rocky Marciano.
"I just always like to let the fans and the people know Rocky Marciano is a legend. Rocky Marciano did it his way, and I would just like to try to do it the Mayweather way. It wouldn't matter if I was 46-0, it didn't matter if I was 10-0 or 1-0. I just feel like I am blessed to be where I am at and I am appreciative."
Keep it clean
One question asked often during the lead-up to the fight is what would happen if McGregor decided to use his MMA repertoire on Mayweather -- maybe throw an elbow or kick or slam him to the mat.
Anything, of course, can happen, and that is probably one of the allures of the match for some. However, McGregor is not known as a dirty MMA fighter and everyone involved expects him to act professionally in the ring. Besides, if he doesn't, there will be big problems.
"There is a significant penalty. The details will remain confidential, but there is a significant penalty in the event of what could be described as an extreme foul, an out of the ordinary foul of what your normal boxing foul would be," Espinoza said.
White was adamant that it would not happen, saying not only would McGregor face heavy contractual penalties but also a lawsuit.
"That will not happen. First of all, obviously, that is absolutely in the contract, No. 1. And, No. 2, this is a boxing match under the Nevada State Athletic Commission under the rules of boxing," White said. "When you go to court it's always about damages, and the damages on Mayweather if something like that happened would be massive. That can't happen.... Forget about the contract. [Mayweather] would just sue him and he would have a lawsuit against him that would destroy Conor and Mayweather would win."
Rafael's prediction: Mayweather by seventh-round knockout.WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Perceptions of U.S. leadership worldwide improved significantly from 2008 to 2009. The U.S.-Global Leadership Project, a partnership between the Meridian International Center and Gallup, finds that a median of 51% of the world approves of the job performance of the current leadership of the U.S., up from a median of 34% in 2008.
Gallup has asked residents worldwide to rate the leadership of the U.S. since 2005, which enables a comparison of how perceptions of U.S. leadership have changed from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. The global median approval of U.S. leadership remained relatively steady from 2005 to 2008. In 2009, a bare median majority approves of the job performance of U.S. leadership (51%) -- a first since Gallup began asking the question worldwide in 2005.
Significant improvements in sentiment toward U.S. leadership are evident in all four major global regions, with the largest year-over-year increase in approval measured in Europe. Median approval of U.S. leadership increased by 28 percentage points between 2008 and 2009 in this region. A median of 47% approves and a median of 20% disapproves -- the first time disapproval has dropped below 50% in Europe since Gallup first asked the question.
Historically, approval of U.S. leadership has been highest in Africa. However, there is great variability in the region on this issue with approval highest in sub-Saharan Africa and tending to be lower in North African countries. This trend continues in 2009, with a median approval of 83%, which is well above the median approval in other regions. Approval of U.S. leadership ranges from ratings that are higher than 90% in Ivory Coast (94%), Kenya (93%), and Uganda (91%) to lows of 38% in Morocco and 37% in Egypt and Tunisia.
A regional median of 53% in the Americas approves of the job performance of U.S. leadership and a median of 18% disapproves. Approval of U.S. leadership varies from a low of 40% in Bolivia and 42% in Argentina, Ecuador, and Nicaragua to a high of 68% in El Salvador.
Perceptions of U.S. leadership are more divided in Asia than in any other region. In 2009, a median of more than one-third (38%) say they approve, while 29% disapproved. Pakistanis express the lowest approval of U.S. leadership, at 9%, followed by 14% approval in Iraq, 15% in Syria, and 17% in Vietnam. Approval was highest in Singapore (68%), Japan (66%), Cambodia (64%), Turkmenistan (61%), and Israel (61%).
Among the Group of Twenty (G-20) members, approval of U.S. leadership changed significantly in 16 of 17 countries where Gallup collected data before and after the Obama administration took office early last year. In 15 of these countries, approval ratings increased substantially, with increases of 39 points or more in Canada, France, and the United Kingdom. Although sentiment improved significantly in Turkey and Saudi Arabia from 2008 to 2009, majorities in these two countries still disapprove of the job performance of U.S. leadership.
Perceptions of U.S. leadership vary widely within the G-20 member countries. For instance, one in five Russians approve, compared with 87% of South Africans.
To see all countries worldwide for which 2009 U.S. approval data are available, see the updated map and table on the World Citizens' Views on U.S. Leadership, Pre- and Post-Obama page.
Read the complete findings from the U.S.-Global Leadership Project |
Zicot that the society had held another meeting. The affair had been concluded. Another sorceress, a woman named Ti Soeur, had given a definitive veto to Madame Zicot’s plea.
At that meeting, Ti Soeur said, “This business has too many echoes. Moun ki mouri mouri nét.” The dead are dead for good.
XII
Madame Zicot had been so close – that was the worst thing of all. She told me that she spent the next year and a half in a maddening and futile attempt to find Nadathe. To this very day, she still hears rumors. The most painful one was this: that Nadathe had had a baby. Some said that she was in northern Haiti, or in the Artibonite Valley. People meaning well enough told her that they had heard that Nadathe was dead, dead in the definitive sense of the word, that Madame Zicot should grieve and put her heart at rest.
Madame Zicot became certain that the secret societies were now actively impeding her progress. One night she had a meeting with a guide who promised to help her find Nadathe, but that evening, she says, a mystical sleep sent by her enemies came over her. She couldn’t wake up, and the opportunity was lost.
She hadn’t given up hope entirely. A story from the north of Haiti cheered her. There, an old sorcerer died and his children, having been converted to Protestantism, released his zombie slaves.
But there were times when hope flagged. She once tried to sell Nadathe’s clothes. She took them to her cousin Margaret’s house and began to weep. Margaret said, “The tears still haven’t finished in your eyes.” And Madame Zicot said, “No, the Good Lord still hasn’t given me to forget.”
XIII
I am not wealthy by American standards, but this article will probably pay me more than Madame Zicot could hope to earn in a decade. I wondered whether this money would not be sufficient to buy Nadathe’s freedom, if she were still alive. Strip the story of its exoticism – replace the word “zombified” with “poisoned, kidnapped, drugged, and enslaved” – and you have a brutal crime. To profit from her enslavement, not having done all I could to liberate her, seemed to me to cross that narrow frontier that separates curiosity from exploitation.
So I arranged a meeting with Monsieur Val. I wanted to buy Nadathe’s zombie.
Monsieur Val is 58 years old, stick-thin, the father of 21, the son of the former president of his large and powerful secret society, and the father of the likely next president of the same secret society. In his office, visible through a curtain, there was a human skull on the table, next to a foul-smelling poudre d’amour. But my eye was attracted to Monsieur Val’s collection of plastic fruit, ceramic figurines, and teddy bears. One teddy bear wore a tiny T-shirt that read kiss me. i’m irish.
I said, “Monsieur Val, Nadathe Joassaint is worth nothing to anyone as a slave in the mountains. If we can bring her back and give her to her mother, she’s much more valuable – because I can write about her.”
Our conversation here detoured to the concept of being paid by the word. The general gist of Madame Zicot’s story had convinced me that no appeal on humanitarian grounds was likely to be successful in obtaining Nadathe’s liberty and would only arouse suspicion. So I made Monsieur Val the following offer: If he succeeded in obtaining Nadathe’s zombie, I would give him every dollar earned on every word I wrote about her rescue. Monsieur Val agreed. The search began, naturally enough, with Madame Precieuse, and arrived about four months later at the mountain bungalow of a man whom I will call Monsieur H.
I met with Monsieur H. accompanied by Monsieur Val’s son, Estime, who represents his father in dealings far from Jérémie.
I explained my proposal to Monsieur H. He was a mustachioed man in his early 50s, I reckon. He chain-smoked menthol cigarettes and played idly with a deck of tarot cards as I spoke.
When I finished he said, “I have never had a blan here in my home before. I would before today have never – jamais, jamais, jamais! – discussed these matters with a blan. Because your ancestors are not my ancestors!”
He looked at me for a long time.
“Mais…,” he finally said. Then he said something fast in Creole, the only words of which I understood were Barack Obama.
Monsieur H. told me that the election of Obama had made him realize that blan were not the racist, venal, cruel creatures he had always imagined. This was about two weeks after the election.
He looked at me. His eyes were limned with a tracery of fine red veins.
“Did you vote for Barack Obama?” he asked.
Monsieur H. came so close I could feel his breath, smell it like a buzzard’s. The silence was unbearable, yet only I could break it.
“Of course,” I finally said.
This was not actually true – I had in fact forgotten to file my absentee ballot – but I probably would have voted for Obama had I voted.
Monsieur H. smiled.
“Bien,” he said. “Très bien.”
Monsieur H. told me that he was responsible for giving zombies laissez-passer throughout this zone of the Grand’ Anse. All zombies who passed in or out of this region were required to come to his house and obtain the appropriate documents. According to Monsieur H., some months after Madame Precieuse’s arrest, Predieu Dorval came to his house with Nadathe’s zombie – a claim Dorval denies. Monsieur H. gave Dorval a laissez-passer to transport Nadathe onward. Monsieur H. told me that he saw Nadathe with his own eyes. Nadathe could now be found in the house of her new master, which, Monsieur H. said, was not far from where we were at that moment. If I wished to find Nadathe, Monsieur H. was willing to organize – at my expense – a large meeting of the secret society to discuss the proposal. He felt that my chances of success were good.
I agreed to his terms.
Because I was white, I was not allowed to attend the meeting. So Estime Val, with whom I had formed a friendship, was there to represent my interests, as was my Creole instructor Delzor, who though not a member of the society was allowed to attend the daytime sessions of the meeting. (The midnight sessions were limited only to initiates.)
I remained in contact by cell phone with Delzor for the next three days as the negotiations proceeded. I learned that the members of the society did not refer to one another by name, but only by number. Monsieur 17 was in possession of Nadathe’s zombie. At first, Monsieur 17 was absolutely opposed to her release.
“I’ll kill her before I give her up,” he said.
But a few hours later, Delzor called back. The tide had shifted. Monsieur 17 was no longer threatening to kill Nadathe. Now he was asking precisely what I would do with Nadathe if they gave her back to me.
I had in fact prepared for these questions. In Port-au-Prince, I had found an organization, associated with an evangelical church group, that worked to rehabilitate zombies. I spoke with a pastor there, who had intervened in many cases of liberated zombies, sometimes after years of bondage. He told me that a healthy diet, medical treatment, familial affection, and prayer were almost always sufficient to return a zombie to proper health.
Over the course of the next two days, I could feel Delzor’s patience beginning to fray. Each of the sorcerers was frightened of the others, he said, and only dared proceed with Nadathe’s liberation if there was consensus in their decisions. Although each of these sorcerers was a member of the same society, they were also heads of their own smaller societies. And each of these societies, in turn, required unanimity before consenting to Nadathe’s release. It was a decision-making structure guaranteed to fail.
Slowly, my hopes of winning Nadathe’s freedom began to slip away.
The sticking point in the negotiations was the general fear that Nadathe or Madame Zicot would return to the justice system after Nadathe’s release. Madame Zicot, after all, had gone to court twice so far. Now Monsieur 17 was frightened that Nadathe, returned to full possession of her faculties, would remember who he was and where he could be found.
I could not figure out a way to overcome this problem. I had spoken with Madame Zicot not long before and she had assured me that she had no intention of going to court – she had only visited Judge Etienne initially in the hopes of obtaining her daughter. Through Estime Val, I tried to convince Monsieur 17 that the justice system itself would have little interest in pursuing the case, given the reputation of the society. But Monsieur 17 reminded me that Madame Precieuse had certainly not been immune, and she had paid very dearly.
The sorcerers were by then very drunk. They went home. There was another meeting. Some sorcerers who had opposed freeing Nadathe now wished to free her; some who had supported freeing Nadathe had thought things over and decided it wasn’t a good idea.
And that, more or less, was that.
I thought of going to court myself. But I was too frightened. Not for myself: As I write this, I’m far from Jérémie. But I was frightened that if the court got involved, Monsieur 17 would straightaway kill Nadathe and bury her in some remote corner. Or worse: Some members of the society had already accused Delzor of a kind of race-treason, representing a white man in these dealings. I was worried that if I went to Judge Etienne, they would turn Delzor into a zombie too.
XIV
You either believe in zombies, or you don’t.
For my part, I believe that a young woman named Nadathe Joassaint was poisoned, buried alive, stolen from her grave, drugged, transported, and enslaved. I believe that she is alive to this day and in the possession of a man I know only as Monsieur 17, in a region of the Grand’ Anse I feel better not naming in print.
But I don’t know any of this.
Some people see this whole story as an infectious case of mass delusion. To this way of looking at things, Mano and Overne murdered Nadathe and then invented the outlandish story, thus ensnaring an innocent woman, Madame Precieuse. The secret societies took advantage of a mother’s desperation to fleece an easy mark. When I arrived, they took advantage of me in the same fashion.
I found only one witness willing to testify to having seen Nadathe as a zombie, and even I would admit that Monsieur H. was not entirely credible. On the other hand, I found dozens of witnesses to Nadathe’s funeral, people who had seen Nadathe’s lifeless corpse. And, of course, the fact that nobody would produce the zombie for either Madame Zicot or me speaks for itself.
I’ll allow the reader to decide the facts for himself.
But I do have one last piece of evidence.
About 22 months after Nadathe was buried, Ascqué Neville, her fiancé, told me that he had begun to entertain doubts about the whole story. Perhaps Nadathe never came home simply because – because she was dead, dead and in her grave. The simplest way to find Nadathe, he reckoned, would be to go back to the last place he had seen her. So he decided to break open her tomb and look inside. Sometime in September 2008, he did just that.
Her coffin was empty.Origin Edit
New leadership Edit
Ongoing missions Edit
Field mission structure Edit
Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines Edit
Main article: Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines The Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines was initiated in 1999 to increase access to essential medicines in developing countries. "Essential medicines" are those drugs that are needed in sufficient supply to treat a disease common to a population.[117] However, most diseases common to populations in developing countries are no longer common to populations in developed countries; therefore, pharmaceutical companies find that producing these drugs is no longer profitable and may raise the price per treatment, decrease development of the drug (and new treatments) or even stop production of the drug. MSF often lacks effective drugs during field missions, and started the campaign to put pressure on governments and pharmaceutical companies to increase funding for essential medicines. In recent years, the organization has tried to use its influence to urge the drug maker Novartis to drop its case against India's patent law that prevents Novartis from patenting its drugs in India. A few years earlier, Novartis also sued South Africa to prevent it from importing cheaper AIDS drugs. Dr. Tido von Schoen-Angerer, director of DWB's Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines, says, "Just like five years ago, Novartis, with its legal actions, is trying to stand in the way of people's right to access the medicines they need."[118] On 1 April 2013, it was announced that the Indian court invalidated Novartis's patent on Gleevec. This decision makes the drug available via generics on the Indian market at a considerably lower price.[119]
Dangers faced by volunteers Edit
Documentary Edit
1999 Nobel Peace Prize Edit
James Orbinski speaking about MSF in 2015. The then president of MSF, James Orbinski, gave the Nobel Peace Prize speech on behalf of the organization. In the opening, he discusses the conditions of the victims of the Rwandan Genocide and focuses on one of his woman patients:[136] There were hundreds of women, children and men brought to the hospital that day, so many that we had to lay them out on the street and even operate on some of them there. The gutters around the hospital ran red with blood. The woman had not just been attacked with a machete, but her entire body rationally and systematically mutilated. Her ears had been cut off. And her face had been so carefully disfigured that a pattern was obvious in the slashes. She was one among many—living an inhuman and simply indescribable suffering. We could do little more for her at the moment than stop the bleeding with a few necessary sutures. We were completely overwhelmed, and she knew that there were so many others. She said to me in the clearest voice I have ever heard, 'Allez, allez…ummera, ummerasha'—'Go, go…my friend, find and let live your courage.' — James Orbinski, Nobel acceptance speech for MSF Orbinski affirmed the organization's commitment to publicizing the issues MSF encountered, stating[137] Silence has long been confused with neutrality, and has been presented as a necessary condition for humanitarian action. From its beginning, MSF was created in opposition to this assumption. We are not sure that words can always save lives, but we know that silence can certainly kill. — James Orbinski
Lasker Prize Edit
Namesakes Edit
A number of other non-governmental organizations have adopted names ending in "Sans Frontières" or "Without Borders", inspired by Médecins Sans Frontières: for example, Engineers Without Borders, Payasos Sin Fronteras (Clowns Without Borders) and Reporters Without Borders.
See also Edit
References EditSuspicious luggage caused the partial evacuation of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol late Tuesday due to a major “security threat.” The air hub has been given the all-clear and services have returned to normal after military police confirmed that no explosives had been located.
Heavily armed military police wearing balaclavas sealed off parts of the country's busiest airport for hours after arresting a man and calling in explosives experts to check his luggage. A special police robot was deployed at the airport to search for potential explosives.
Robot inspecting red bag in front of Sheraton @Schiphol. pic.twitter.com/cI1pG9xHzp — JKelly (@MiAruba) April 12, 2016
A witness told the AT5 news outlet said that he saw military policemen chasing the suspect before tackling him to the ground. The incident took place at around 9:45pm local time.
Some sort of Security threat is going on At Amsterdam Schiphol airport now... pic.twitter.com/aG3lpj2wa0 — Tony Fonderson (@TonyFonderson) April 12, 2016
Military police and fire personnel were called to the airport and began evacuating the plaza inside of the airport as well as a train station and bus station outside. Once the evacuation was complete each of the three areas was cordoned off to keep people from entering.
After searching the perimeter and examining the baggage of the arrested man in the presence of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team, a special unit of the Dutch Armed Forces tasked with diffusing bombs, authorities went off to lift tight security measures at Schiphol.
"No dangerous materials were found," military police spokesman Alfred Ellwanger told AP, adding that the suspect remains in custody and is under investigation after "a report of a suspicious situation," lead to the evacuation. He had no details on the man's identity.
Airport officials have now cleared the previously cordoned off area of the airport and announced that all services serving the airport have resumed normal operations.I’m shocked because I thought the case was a question of manslaughter. Hung jury, possibly guilty of manslaughter, but more likely ‘not guilty.’ It just seemed to me that the relative sizes of the two people made it clear that my client was in a jam that he couldn’t get out of except to use a firearm.
So said the defense attorney for Merrill “Mike” Kimball after his client was found guilty of murder for fatally shooting 63-year-old Leon Kelley in 2013. Obviously, things did not come to pass the way he thought they would. Regardless of the outcome of an appeal, being convicted of murder is a Negative Outcome.
Cast of characters for the drama:
Stan Brown – 95 year old owner of Brown’s Bee Farm
Karen Thurlow-Kimball – shooter’s wife. Managed the farm and sold the honey
Merrill “Mike” Kimball – shooter (5 feet 11 inches tall, 170 pounds)
Damon Carroll – Thurlow-Kimball’s son
Daniel Lilley – Kimball’s attorney
Leon Kelley – victim (6 feet 4 inches tall, 285 pounds)
Kathleen Kelley – victim’s wife, Stan Brown’s daughter, and witness
Craig Rawnsley – Kathleen Kelley’s son (6 feet 2 inches tall, 205 pounds)
Robin Rawnsley-Dutil – victim Kelley’s stepdaughter and witness
Daryl Rawnsley – deputy chief of the Cumberland Fire Department
Libby Adams – Brown’s daughter-in-law, bookkeeper for the bee business
Matthew Crockett – Assistant Attorney General
John Alsop – Assistant Attorney General
Events preceding the day of the shooting.
Thurlow-Kimball begins working for Brown at the farm in 2009, when Brown’s son died.
Thurlow-Kimball becomes manager of the bee farm.
Brown eventually includes Thurlow-Kimball in his will, leaving the bee business and a part of his property to her. The family deeply resents this.
Oct. 6, 2013
Around 1 p.m., Craig Rawnsley calls Thurlow-Kimball and accuses her of wrongdoing. He tells her “things were going to change at his grandfather’s farm.”
At the time of the phone call, Merrill Kimball had just gotten off his boat and gone to a friend’s house to watch a Patriots game. He drank two rum and cokes while he was there.
Thurlow-Kimball immediately calls Brown’s daughter-in-law, Libby Adams. Adams tells her the Kelley family plans to change the locks on the bee farm sales shop.
The shop contains about two dozen jars of honey, totaling about 700 pounds. The honey, which contractually belongs to Thurlow-Kimball, has a value between $4,000 and $7,000.
Rawnsley-Dutil calls her mother and Kelley, her stepfather, at their home 40 miles away, and asks them to come to the farm. The senior Kelleys then drive to the Bee Farm and arrive before the Kimballs.
Thurlow-Kimball enlists her husband and son to help her get the honey out of the shop. They drive to the shop in two vehicles.
Around 3 p.m., Kimball and his family arrive to load the honey jars.
Rawnsley-Dutil and her brother follow the vehicles up the driveway on foot. Kelley drives up in his 3½-ton truck with the license plate ‘AWFUL.’
Kelley family confronts Kimball family.
Craig Rawnsley blocks the shop door and accuses the Kimball family of trespassing.
Kimball asks who Kelley was. The two men had never met before that day.
Kathleen Kelley calls the police.
Thurlow-Kimball refused to leave the property, insisting on waiting for a police officer to arrive.
Kelley put his hand on Kimball’s shoulders, spins him around, and follows as Kimball backs down the driveway. Kimball later states that Kelley shoved him five or six times total.
Kimball retreats roughly 35 feet being followed by Kelley until he is in the driveway nearly to the treeline. The driveway extends to his right and left, at this point.
Kimball, who is licensed to carry a concealed weapon, draws his Ruger LCP.380, and fires three shots into Kelley’s torso at a range of 4 -10 feet.
Kelley falls down after being shot and clutches his abdomen.
Robin Rawnsley-Dutil immediately takes a photograph of the scene and then begins recording a video.
Kathleen Kelley remains on the 911 call after her husband is shot.
Rawnsley calls his brother, Daryl Rawnsley, deputy chief of the Cumberland Fire Department, for medical assistance.
Kelley is transported by ambulance to a hospital and dies shortly thereafter.
The state police sergeant who was the first officer to arrive at the scene said he could “smell the odor of liquor” on Kimball. Kimball did not seem impaired, other than failing to immediately respond when when the sergeant commanded him to put his hands up and get on the ground.
Kimball maintains the shooting was done in self-defense. “The man attacked me. The man pushed me back. I was in fear for my life. I nearly fell down, and he kept coming.” Kimball’s words were captured on a police cruiser’s onboard camera.
Kimball is questioned but not arrested.
November 2013
A video re-enactment is recorded by Kimball at Brown’s Bee Farm on November 4.
Kimball is indicted on the charge of murder.
He posts bail and remains free.
April 2015 (not necessarily in chronological order)
Kimball rejects a plea offer to manslaughter before the start of the trial.
The trial commences on April 6, 2015.
The prosecution contends that Kimball could have continued to retreat by turning left or right down the driveway rather than shooting.
Maine is one of 16 states whose self-defense laws require retreat for as long as safely possible before using deadly force.
The prosecution alleges that Kimball took a concealed pistol and an extra clip [sic] of ammunition to Brown’s Bee Farm because he expected trouble from the Kelley family.
Kelley family members admit in court that Thurlow-Kimball was not trespassing and that they had no right to tell her to leave.
Members of the Kelley family make several contradictory statements about the events leading up to the shooting.
Rawnsley-Dutil states that Kelley put his hand on Kimball’s shoulders shortly before the shooting, spun him around and followed Kimball as he backed down the driveway. She admits Kelley may have shoved Kimball additional times.
Craig Rawnsley admits he put his hand on Carroll’s shoulder to stop him from moving and states “Damon (Carroll), he is not as big as me.”
Assistant Attorney General Alsop describes the shooting as: “Bam. Bam. Bam. There was no pause. Merrill Kimball fired three rapid shots right in the middle of Leon Kelley.”
The video re-enactment recorded by Kimball is played for the jury.
The state’s chief medical examiner testifies that the first shot had most likely felled Kelley. He also stated that “All three of these were potentially fatal.”
The cellphone photo taken after the shooting is shown to the jury.
Craig Rawnsley testifies that Kelley wouldn’t have “escalated the situation” if he had known Kimball was armed.
Defense Attorney Lilley says “They brought him [Kelley] along because he was mean and he was a badass. They brought him along because he was big.”
“The issue for me in this case is there were three shots fired and whether he was acting in self-defense in all three shots or less,” said Justice Roland Cole.
The jury deliberates for six hours over two days. They have the options of finding him guilty of murder, manslaughter or acquittal.
The jury finds Kimball guilty of murder on April 15, 2015.
The possible sentence is 25 years to life in prison.
Kimball is taken into custody.
Kimball’s lawyer indicates the intent to appeal, which cannot be filed until after Kimball is sentenced. Sentencing will be scheduled in the next six weeks.
The above account is based on the trial reporting of Scott Dolan, Staff Writer for the Portland Press Herald newspaper.
I’ll look at the implications of this over the next few days.While hearing a petition on the recent doctors strike in Maharashtra on Monday afternoon, Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court Manjula Chellur asked whether there was a dress code that reporters covering the Bombay High Court should follow while attending court hearings.
Looking at a reporter present in court to attend the hearing on the petition, she asked, “Is jeans and t-shirt a proper dress code?”
"How journalists come to court wearing jeans and T-shirt?" she asked. She then asked BMC advocate Suresh Pakale whether any such 'culture' was prevalent in 'Bombay', to which Pakale replied that there was not.
Earlier during the hearing, the court had observed that reporters had "a responsible role" to play too. Chellur said that only written orders of the court, and not oral observations, must be reported in a responsible manner.
The court, however, did not pass any direction or guidelines on dress journalists should wear while covering court proceedings. This is for the first time that the high court has objected to the dress worn by journalists.
Justice Chellur is the second woman to be appointed Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court after Justice Sujata Manohar in 1994. She will have a tenure as the court’s 41st Chief Justice till her retirement on December 4, 2017. She has previously served as Chief Justice of the Kerala High Court, as well as of the Calcutta High Court.
Born on December 5, 1955 in Bellary, Justice Chellur completed her Bachelor of Arts degree from Bellary College before joining Renukacharya Law College, Bengaluru to complete her LLB degree in1977.
With inputs from PTI.Subprefecture and commune in Occitanie, France
Condom (Occitan: Condòm; French pronunciation: [kɔ̃dɔ̃]), also referred to as Condom-en-Armagnac, is a commune in southwestern France in the department of Gers, of which it is a subprefecture.
Geography [ edit ]
Localisation [ edit ]
The town of Condom is located in the northern part of the department of Gers, halfway between Mont-de-Marsan (to the west) and Montauban (to the east), and north of Auch.
Condom and its surrounding communes
Roads and transports [ edit ]
Way of St. James
Condom is a town on the Via Podiensis, one of the three major French arms of the pilgrimage route, the Way of St. James. This particular route begins in Le Puy and ends in Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. Pilgrims arrive at Condom after Miradoux and continue on to Larressingle.
Toponymy [ edit ]
There is no relationship between the English word condom and this town. The toponym Condom comes from the Gaulish words condate and magos combined into Condatomagos, which means "market or field, of the confluence". Condatómagos evolved into Condatóm and then into Conddóm. Condom was first recorded in Latin in the 10th century as Condomus or Condomium.[1] It is where the river Gèle flows into the river Baïse.
Although the French word for a condom is préservatif, in 1995 the town's mayor, taking advantage of the incidental relationship between the town's name and the English word, opened a museum of contraceptives, which closed in 2005.[2]
In 1987, a letter was sent from Condom asking to twin with Oakham, England. However this was denied due to the embarrassment caused by the town name in English.[citation needed]
Politics and administration [ edit ]
Mayors [ edit ]
Mayor Term start Term end Jean Dubos 1983 1983 Jacques Moisan 1989 1995 Gérard Dubrac 1995 2008 Bernard Gallardo 2008 2014 Gérard Dubrac 2014
Twin towns [ edit ]
Population [ edit ]
Historical population Year Pop. ±% 1799 6,117 — 1800 6,861 +12.2% 1806 7,298 +6.4% 1821 7,319 +0.3% 1831 7,323 +0.1% 1841 6,915 −5.6% 1846 7,195 +4.0% 1851 7,205 +0.1% 1856 7,553 +4.8% 1861 8,070 +6.8% 1866 8,140 +0.9% 1872 8,282 +1.7% 1876 7,873 −4.9% 1881 8,555 +8.7% 1886 7,902 −7.6% 1891 7,405 −6.3% 1896 7,045 −4.9% 1901 6,578 −6.6% 1906 6,435 −2.2% 1911 6,380 −0.9% 1921 5,773 −9.5% 1926 6,355 +10.1% 1931 6,310 −0.7% 1936 6,233 −1.2% 1946 6,725 +7.9% 1954 6,781 +0.8% 1962 6,850 +1.0% 1968 7,326 +6.9% 1975 7,853 +7.2% 1982 7,634 −2.8% 1990 7,717 +1.1% 1999 7,251 −6.0% 2008 7,193 −0.8% 2010 7,012 −2.5%
Sites of interest [ edit ]
Condom is the site of two castles, the Château de Mothes and the Château de Pouypardin, both started in the 13th century. In total, 19 sites in Condom are listed as monuments historiques by the French Ministry of Culture, including the cathedral, churches and houses.
Condom is known for the production of Armagnac, an international music festival of "bandas", an international chess tournament and an international chess marathon. It is also known for its tourism with farm campings and boating on waterways. It is also home to a museum about Armagnac.[3][4]
A statue of The Three Musketeers and d'Artagnan stands beside the cathedral and was created in 2010 by Zurab Tsereteli.[5]
Notable people [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]GUNTUR: Reversing its own decision, the Guntur district administration is likely to declare University of Hyderabad Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula, who committed suicide on January 17 last year, as belonging to the BC Vaddera community.
His mother Radhika Vemula had said he belonged to the SC community.
Dalit organisations and political parties had staged protests across the country, alleging that his suicide was a result of caste discrimination in the university. Police complaints had been filed under the SC/ST Act against several persons.
The Guntur district administration had earlier declared Rohith as belonging to the SC community, but the Justice (retd) Ash-ok Kumar Roopanwal, which was set up to probe the circumstan-ces of the suicide, ruled that he was not a Dalit.
A fresh screening co-mmittee was appointed to the issue. The committee is on the verge of completing its inquiry and is likely to declare Rohith as a BC in a day or two.
According to the reports, the inquiry committee questioned all family members of Rohith, including his mother and father, on the issue.Standard Sign Shapes
Signs convey information to travelers not only by their messages and color, but through their shape as well.
Special shapes are specifically assigned to certain types of signs so that travelers can recognize them quickly and react appropriately.
In general, the greater number of sides on a sign, the more critical a message it conveys. This is why a circular shape was adopted for the Railroad Advance warning sign (i.e. infinite number of sides), as a collision between a train and a typical vehicle will nearly always end badly. Then next the octagon shape is used for the STOP sign, since not noticing that sign typically has unpleasant consequences, and so on down the line. There are of course exceptions to this rule - a pentagonal County Route marker isn't (typically) a greater threat than a standard square route marker, and even though they have only 3 sides, the YIELD and No Passing Zone signs are still rather important (and the pennant shape of the NPZ sign serves as a sort of "get back over on your own side of the road" arrow).
Standard sign shapes and their assigned meanings:
Circle - Exclusively for railroad advance warning signs
Octagon - Exclusively for STOP signs
Crossbuck - Exclusively for railroad grade crossing signs
Pentagon - Used for school advance warning signs and county route marker signs
Diamond - Used for warning signs
Rectangle, Longer Dimension Vertical - Used for regulatory signs
Rectangle, Longer Dimension Horizontal - Used for guide signs, some warning signs, and temporary traffic control signs
Trapezoid - Used for recreational area guide signs and National Forest route markers
Equilateral Triangle, Point Down - Exclusively for YIELD signs
Pennant - Exclusively for No Passing Zone signs
Other shapes - Typically used for route marker signs
Return to Manual of Traffic Signs Main Page
Richard C. Moeur's Home Page
Updated 15 September 2013 (code fixes)
Scripting: Richard C. Moeur
rcmoeur@aol.com
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Unauthorized use of text and images is strictly prohibited. Refer to Standard Use Agreement for details.Revenge of the week
When some guys hit two home runs in a game, they say it was because they kept their front shoulder tucked, they just happened to get good wood on the ball or, if they really get creative, it was "just one of those nights." Suffice it to say you'll never see a quote like that in Week in Review. Because there are men like Phillies center fielder Doug Glanville. Last Friday, he hit two home runs against his former teammate, Curt Schilling, in Schilling's first start against the Phillies since they traded him last July. Doug Glanville and Travis Lee will remain happy teammates as long as they stay away from the video games. Now the previous four men to hit two homers in a game off Schilling were Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Mike Piazza and Barry Bonds. So it's not as if just anybody can step up there and do it. And how did Doug Glanville explain this performance? This is what he told the Philadelphia Inquirer's Bob Brookover minutes after he and the Phillies had dealt Schilling his first loss of the year: "Curt's a friend of mine," Glanville said. "We used to play video games together. He killed one of my characters one time. I never forgot that." This, folks, is why Doug Glanville is one of our favorite Americans. But it seemed to us that there clearly was more to this saga -- something deep and painful, something tragic and powerful. We went digging for the full story. As Glanville remembers this poignant tale, he and Schilling were playing a computer game called "EverQuest" -- an online version of Dungeons and Dragons. "One day," Glanville told Week in Review, "Schill was playing his character, Cylc" -- whom Glanville described as "a dwarven Cleric," whatever that is -- "and he asked me to team up with him in Faydwer, in the zone of the Butcherblock Mountains, to kill Aviaks, which are basically walking birds." Hang with us here, friends. There will be a baseball point coming. "My good-natured character, Bingbong," -- whom Glanville described as "a dwarven Paladin," whatever that is -- "was at a little lower level (in status) than his," Glanville said. "So Cylc was better able to withstand the return attacks. Nevertheless, we attack." So there they were, battling away against those dastardly Aviaks. Suddenly, Glanville began to hear the sound of bones breaking. He quickly deduced those bones belonged to his beloved Bingbong. He looked around for Schilling's guy, Cylc, for assistance. Oops. No Cylc anywhere in the neighborhood. "Somewhere in there," Glan |
of his MPs, including several frontbenchers, while the SNP and Liberal Democrats are also promising to oppose ministers.
The Labour leader has imposed a three-line whip - the strongest possible sanction - on his MPs to back the bill, which is only two lines long.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Starmer: Brexit bill difficult for Labour
If the vote goes the government's way, the bill will return to the Commons next week for the committee stage, when opposition parties will try to push through a series of amendments.
The bill was published last week, after the Supreme Court decided MPs and peers must have a say before Article 50 could be triggered.
It rejected the government's argument that Mrs May had sufficient powers to trigger Brexit without consulting Parliament.Rick Santorum laughed off Mitt Romney's Wednesday campaign memo which said that in order to overtake the former Massachusetts governor, Santorum or Newt Gingrich needs to start netting an "impossible number of delegates."
"It's pretty sad when all you have is to do math instead of trying to go out there and win it on substance and win it on what Americans want to hear about," Santorum told CNN at a town hall in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Despite his dismissal, Romney does have a commanding lead. Even though former Sen. Santorum (R-Pa.) won in Mississippi and Alabama Tuesday, with Romney finishing in third in both states, Romney ended up winning the most delegates in the day's contests, thanks in part to late results in Hawaii and American Samoa. Romney won at least 41 delegates, while Santorum won at least 35, according to the Associated Press. To date, Romney has 495 delegates while Santorum has 252, by the AP count. To win the GOP presidential nomination, a candidate needs 1,144.These towering seaside structures imagined by Northumbria University student Thomas Savage would offer habitats for wild birds in winter and house water sports enthusiasts during the summer.
Thomas Savage developed the concept for the coastal stretches outside Blyth, a port town in northern England where industrial industries are in decline and the local community is keen to promote more sustainable technologies and activities.
"The brief was to produce a museum with hostel accommodation," Savage told Dezeen. "I found out that the town already had both an ornithological society and a water sports community. Both are active in different seasons, so I realised I could bring them together."
He proposes a series of nine-storey hostel towers along the beach, comprising steel scaffolding and concrete cabins. In the summer and autumn seasons these spaces would form a campsite, with communal areas for preparing food and storing equipment, while during the winter and spring the cabins would be boarded up to create protected nesting areas.
Birds would access the spaces through tunnel-like openings in the roof and birdwatchers would be able to climb up around the surrounding staircases and platforms.
A visitor centre would be located nearby, on the banks above the promenade.
In Praise Of Nests and Other Things is the graduation project for Savage's Part I architecture degree at Northumbria University, under tutor Sebastian Messer.
Other graduate projects featured on Dezeen include a shape-shifting ballet school and conceptual towers designed to replace bees.
Here's a short text from Savage:
In Praise Of Nests & Other Things
The project is located on the outskirts of Blyth, the most populous town in Northumberland. The port remains active, but Blyth's legacy of heavy industry has slowly been replaced with offshore and clean energy technologies. The project seeks to capitalise on the extraordinary, sweeping beaches of the north east coast. A distinct change in visitors and uses occurs between winter and summer. This is highlighted by the project, which switches functions (for its human inhabitants) between bird-watching in winter and spring and water sports in summer and autumn. The scheme provides for both human and avian occupants to take temporary 'roost', each during their season.
The scheme has two sites: the visitor centre on the banks above the promenade and the hostel towers on the beach and in the water. The two buildings are linked by raised reciprocal views from viewing platforms that wrap around the structures.
The original concept designs were made from off cuts of other architectural models, mimicking the nature of birds' nests which depend on found materials in their construction. These were photographed, superimposed and recombined to begin to define an architectural language.So you’ve designed a logo and your clients agreed the design too. Excellent! Now we save and send the file and we’re done? Not quite…
If you want to do a professional job, there’s a little more work you need to do.
The logo will be used in different situations. Be it large or small, black or white, print or web. Whatever the situation, as a professional designer you will want to do all you can to ensure it looks good in every one of them.
You will need to send a number of different files, each intended for a different purpose, so it’s important to know what files you’re sending and why.
There are two main categories of logo design files: Vector and Raster.
Vector Files
A vector file can be scaled to any size without any loss of quality. This is because it’s built up from mathematically precise points. You can see how a vector shape is built up in this image below, from Design Tuts tutorial; Hand Lettering: How to Vector Your Letterforms (a useful tutorial if you’re new to vector illustration).
Vector files are the type your client will require to get anything professionally printed, or if they need design work carried out by another designer, for example; brochures, leaflets, exhibition stands, vehicle printing, pens etc.
As vector files are intended for print use they are provided in CMYK colour mode. CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, which are the 4 colours used to make up the colours on a full colour printed page. There’s also special inks that can be used in some instances, such as Pantone, which we’ll discuss later in this post.
If you could give only one file type, it would be a vector file, as it can be converted to any other file type with the correct software.
Vector file types have a file extension of.ai.eps or.pdf.
Ai: Adobe Illustrator
The AI file is the original, editable, working file.
PDF: Portable Document Format
PDF format is becoming widely favoured by most designers as it can be universally viewed on any computer with Adobe Acrobat (or another PDF viewer). It’s also possible to preserve illustrator-editing capabilities when saving in this format, meaning it can be opened and modified in the same way a AI file can.
EPS: Encapsulated PostScript
EPS file types are now a little outdated. Before Adobe introduced its page layout software InDesign the industry standard software of its type was QuarkXPress. Back then if you wanted to use a vector image in your document, you couldn’t import native Illustrator files as you can now, instead you had to save your AI file as an EPS. With its release of InDesign, Adobe made it easy to place native Illustrator and Photoshop files into a document. Occasionally EPS files may be requested by print companies who are using older technology, so I still provide this file format.
Colour variants
When providing vector logo files, it’s also important to provide various colour formats, which I have detailed below:
Full Colour (CMYK)
This is the file for standard 4 colour printing. If you provide only one of these variants, ensure it’s this version.
Pantone Colour
Pantone is a universally understood colour coding system that’s used by designers and print companies. The problem with CMYK printing is that from print run to print run, there will be slight colour differences. This is because 4 separate inks are being used to build up the colour. With pantone however, a single ink is used, meaning the colours will match exactly in all instances.
Single Colour (Black & White)
In some instances, a single colour version of the logo will be needed. For example, this might be for frosted vinyl’s for glass or single colour documents. You can read more about the uses and need for a black and white version of a logo in my blog post; Does a logo need to work in black and white?
White
A white version of the logo is to be used on coloured backgrounds, or on dark images where good contrast is needed. With white logos, sadly it’s not simply a case of changing the colour and saving the file. There’s a little more that needs to be done.
As you can see from the image above, when a black on white object is reversed we experience what’s known as irradiation phenomenon, whereby the white version looks 10% larger. To counteract this illusion, it’s important to slightly reduce the overall weight of the logo.
Raster Files
Raster files are built up of small squares called pixels. This means that as you increase the size of your image, it will become blocky, or appear to be blurred. This is why a logo design should be created in vector format for the best results.
Raster files are intended for computer use, so are provided in RGB colour mode. RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue, which are the colours used to make up all the colours you see on your screen. Black is the absence of light.
Raster file types have a file extension of.Jpeg or.PNG (there are other raster based image types, such as Gif, BMP and TIFF, but for logo design these two alone should be sufficient)
JPG/JPEG: Joint Photographic Experts Group
Jpeg’s are most commonly seen online. This is because jpeg offers very good compression without overly degrading the image, meaning the image is very small in file size, so will load quickly.
PNG: Portable Network Graphics
PNG images are lossless, which mean they do not lose quality during editing. Most importantly however they allow for transparency.
Logo Lockups
Like it or not, your logo will be used in a lot of different locations. Each location will have a different size and shape, which will cause visibility and recognition issues if the logo doesn’t fit well.
To prevent your design looking bad, if the design allows it, I highly recommend providing your logo design in different lockups. A lockup is simply a different layout configuration.
For example, if your logo is made up of both typography and an icon, you might have 2 layout variants such as; a long/thin version with the icon to the left of the text, and another with the icon above the text. Here’s an example from my recent logo design for People Code.
If your logo includes an icon, it can also be used on its own.
The icon should only ever be used on its own sparingly however, in instances where your audience is already familiar with the company name (For example: within a company’s office exterior, or a website favicon). Companies like Nike, Starbucks and McDonalds have been able to remove the wordmark from their logo because of the continued marketing they expose to the world, along with their role in popular culture.
Small sized variants (optional)
If the new logo is going to be used at small sizes, its important to consider looking at designing variants of the design for this purpose, which include less detail. You can see this in the example below, extracted from Argento Wines brand guidelines.
This has recently become a popular topic due to responsive web design, where smaller devices are becoming common place, however the same principles apply to print too. These blogs are well worth a read on the topic:
Responsive Logos, Part 1: Tips for Adapting Logos for Small Screens
Responsive Logos, Part 2: Making Logos Truly Responsive with Inline SVG
Logo Design Files: Quick Reference
Here’s an overview of the files I send:
Vector (ai, PDF and EPS)
A CMYK version
A Pantone colour version
A black, single Colour version
A White version
Raster Files (in RGB)
Jpeg
PNG
Logo Variants (optional)
Lock-up variants
Smaller size variants
Although you can’t always control how a client will use the logo, by providing the design in the formats detailed above, along with a supporting usage document, you have done all you can to ensure the design is presented its best.
Anything to add? Join in the discussion on Facebook or Twitter.Germany angered by leaked call insulting EU's role in Ukraine crisis
Posted
German chancellor Angela Merkel says a United States official's insult of the European Union's efforts to mediate in the Ukraine crisis is "totally unacceptable".
The US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, has apologised after referring disparagingly to the EU's role during a conversation said to be with the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoff Pyatt.
US officials have not denied the authenticity of the recording, which comes as the EU and US hold talks to end months of unrest in Ukraine.
Mass anti-government protests erupted in the country in November after president Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign a trade agreement with the EU.
In the recording Ms Nuland and US ambassador to Kiev, Geoff Pyatt, discuss frankly which opposition figures should go into the new Ukrainian government.
"That would be great I think to help glue this thing and have the UN glue it and you know, f--- the EU," Nuland says, in apparent frustration at policy differences.
US officials have blamed Moscow for the leak of Ms Nuland's phone call.
A recording of the apparently bugged exchange was posted anonymously on YouTube, but was first highlighted in a tweet from a Russian official.
Dr Merkel, already furious with Washington for several months over reports that US officials bugged her own phone, voiced her anger and expressed support for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who heads the bloc's Ukraine policy.
"The chancellor considers this statement absolutely unacceptable... and wants to emphasise again that (EU foreign policy chief Catherine) Ashton is doing an outstanding job," her spokeswoman said.
"The European Union will continue with its intensive efforts to calm the situation in Ukraine."
In a separate leaked recording, an Ashton aide is overheard complaining about the US for telling Ukrainian opposition members that Brussels was "soft" in its reluctance to impose measures such as sanctions.
Ms Nuland has described the bugging and leaks as "pretty impressive tradecraft" but said it would not hurt her ties with the Ukrainian opposition.
Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt, meanwhile, tweeted: "Tapping phone calls and releasing carefully selected bits to support propaganda efforts is an age-old method by some type of regimes."
ABC/wires
Topics: world-politics, germany, united-states, ukraineA British car classifieds site has started accepting advertisements listed in bitcoin, becoming the first such site to do so in the UK. In December, Auto4You began giving sellers the option of listing a car for sale with a bitcoin price instead of in pound sterling.
Khalid Akram, the site’s founder explained:
“One of the biggest challenges [bitcoin] faces in the UK is liquidity and places to spend it. We need to get the currency to flow within the community. Every time a new vendor starts accepting bitcoin it further legitimises the currency in people’s minds.”
No one has listed a car for sale in bitcoin yet, although Akram said he would personally be listing a used Honda for sale in the cryptocurrency. Akram described himself as a bitcoin “evangelist” and said that introducing the feature on his site was a way of helping the bitcoin community.
Akram started Auto4You in 1999. The site has between 150 and 800 listings on it any one time and attracts 400 to 500 unique visitors a day, he said.
The site doesn’t charge users for advertising a motor for sale. However, users have the option of paying £5 for a ‘premium’ advertisement that will allow their ad to appear on the site’s front page.
Akram said he planned to make Auto4You the UK’s biggest auto classifieds site. The segment is currently dominated by Auto Trader which controls more than 40% of the market and attracts about 11 million unique visitors a month to its more than 400,000 listings.
Auto Trader is a lucrative business that is owned by Trader Media Group, which is jointly owned by private equity firm Apax Partners and media conglomerate Guardian Media Group.
Trader Media Group was valued at about £2 billion by bankers during a scuppered attempt by Apax to buy the Guardian’s share of the business earlier this year.
“We have a huge amount of catching up to do. It’s certainly a big task,” Akram said.
Featured image: Garryknight / FlickrCoordinates:
Chicago Pile-3
Chicago Pile-3 (CP-3) was the first heavy water reactor in the world, going critical on 15 May 1944. It was used in the experimental physics work of the Metallurgical Laboratory for the Manhattan Project.
CP-3 was in operation from 1943–54 and was built near Palos Hills, Illinois on the former (i.e., original) site of Argonne National Laboratory.[1] The site is now known as the Site A/Plot M Disposal Site and is situated within Red Gate Woods, part of the Cook County Forest Preserve system.
CP-3 was initially fueled with natural uranium and used heavy water as a neutron moderator. In January 1950, the reactor was dismantled due to suspicion of corrosion of the aluminum cladding that surrounded the control rods. The reactor was rebuilt and redesignated CP-3′ (CP-3 prime). It was restarted in May 1950 and operated until 1954.[2] The reactor was authorized to operate up to 300 kilowatts.[3]
The two versions of the reactor were used in physics studies, fission product separations, tritium recovery from irradiated lithium, and studies of radionuclide metabolism in laboratory animals. After the reactor was decommissioned, the fuel and heavy water were shipped to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The containment shell for the reactor had pipes, valves, and building debris placed inside and was then filled with concrete. The 800-ton shell was buried on the site in a 40 ft (12 m) deep pit. Today, a historical marker commemorates the site of CP-3 and its sister reactor CP-1/CP-2.[2]
See also [ edit ]This Oct. 18, 2017 photo released by the Maryland Heights Police Department shows 48 stolen pumpkins recovered from an SUV in Maryland Heights, Mo. Police caught three teenagers and are asking residents of a St. Louis suburb to view a "pumpkin lineup" online to see if their Halloween squash are among those recovered. (Maryland Heights Police Department via AP)
MARYLAND HEIGHTS, Mo. (AP) — Police who caught three teenagers orange-handed with 48 stolen pumpkins — and one gourd — are asking residents of a St. Louis suburb to view a “pumpkin lineup” online to see if their Halloween squash are among those recovered.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that pumpkins began vanishing last week from subdivisions of Maryland Heights. Police quickly tracked down the boys and their pumpkin-crammed SUV that Capt. Scott Will says was “top-to-bottom orange.”
The next day, officers snapped a picture of the abducted decor and posted it to Facebook. Will says police have been “inundated” with people coming to track down their Halloween pumpkins. About a dozen remained unclaimed Tuesday. None are carved.
Two 18-year-olds are charged with misdemeanor stealing, while a 16-year-old has been referred to juvenile court.
___
Information from: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, http://www.stltoday.com15 September 2014
Global wind and solar company Mainstream Renewable Power has signed an agreement with Swiss wind farm developer NEK Umwelttechnik to purchase the 225 MW Ayitepa Wind Farm, located 40 kilometres from Accra on the east coast of Ghana. The utility-scale winder power project is expected to reach financial close next year and start generating power early in 2016.
Under the terms of the deal, Mainstream Renewable Power and NEK Umwelttechnik will co-develop the wind farm until financial close. Mainstream Renewable Power, for its part, will manage the construction as well as the operations and maintenance of the wind farm for its lifecycle. The project is currently in the latter stages of development with all major permits secured. Grid and offtake agreements are being finalised.
When fully operational the Ayitepa Wind Farm will generate approximately 10 per cent of Ghana's total electricity generation capacity which currently stands at 2,000 MW.
“It is my hope that this agreement between NEK and Mainstream Renewable Power will accelerate the process towards the realization of wind farms in Ghana, and they can be assured of the full support of the Ministry of Energy & Petroleum,” said Mr. Wisdom Ahiataku-Togobo, director of renewable energy at the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum. “The project is consistent with government policy to increase the contribution of renewable energy in the electricity generation mix. The government has more than two years of bankable wind energy data along the south eastern corridor of the country, where wind energy prospects are very encouraging." 1
Eddie O’Connor, Mainstream Renewable Power CEO, described the project as the “ideal solution for Ghana, because wind and solar power are the only proven technologies in the world which can achieve the dual objectives of speed of deployment and scale.” 2
O’Connor expects the Ayitepa Wind Farm will begin generating electricity in less than 18 months from now. “No other generation technology can match that in terms of speed of deployment,” he said.
According to Dr. Christoph Kapp, NEK Umwelttechnik’s chief executive, the Ayitepa Wind Farm project will not only contribute to a sustainable, clean and independent production of electricity, but it will also be accompanied by “social benefits and improvements” for the local population. Among these benefits: jobs, education, water supply and electrification for nearby villages and towns.
REFERENCESHe wasn’t all icon. He was human:
This life is a path. None of us are perfect. All of us make mistakes. Some of us make mistakes that hurt others. The question is: which direction will we travel? Will we wake up? Tomorrow is the anniversary of John Lennon’s tragic death. Let us honor the real man, not the icon—and in so doing embrace our own failures so that we might engage our potential to be of benefit to others. ~ ed.
~ “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.” ~ Oscar Wilde
Getting Better all the Time:
It is a diary form of writing. All that “I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved” was me. I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically — any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn’t express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the most violent people who go for love and peace. Everything’s the opposite. But I sincerely believe in love and peace. I am not violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster.
~
“Today I learned John Lennon was not as peaceful of a man as so many believe. He was physically violent toward women, and beat his first wife, Cynthia Lennon.”
“I used to be cruel to my woman I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved…Man I was mean but I’m changing my scene and I’m doing the best that I can.”
~ John Lennon
He wasn’t all love. He was human.
He could be unpleasant. He beat his first wife. He evolved. Mostly. He could be cruel to his sons.
And yet, he’s revered as a modern secular hippie peace loving saint.
Both can be true. We create idols, we put said idols on pedestals, only to knock them off and crush them. He never claimed to be perfect. His karma was inherited, and he did mostly good, wonderful, world-changing things with it.
He was well aware of his failings. He did his best, which was sometimes horrible, terrible, sad…and usually wonderful, something to be grateful for. He admitted his worse, singing about it in several songs (below). He was transparent—which is a kind of brave openness that helps to end a problem, a habitual pattern.
Moral of the story: humans change, evolve. Give peace a chance.
All we need is love?
~
As one Redditor comments:
“I think Jimi Hendrix takes the cake for being an asshole to women. He beat the shit out of one of his girlfriends with a public telephone after he thought she was calling another man. He also hit another girlfriend with a bottle of booze because he was drunk and got jealous, she later required stitches
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix And we won’t even get into Clapton. Another Redditor: In other news, politicians that shout the loudest about “family” bang the most prostitutes, and activists that call someone else “oppressive” are the most oppressive when it comes to others’ opinions. Everyone judges everyone else through the lens of their own faults. Write that down.
~ In response to McCartney’s line, “It’s getting better all the time”, Lennon replies, “It can’t get no worse!” Referring to the lyric “I used to be cruel to my woman/I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved/Man I was mean but I’m changing my scene/And I’m doing the best that I can”, Lennon admitted that he had done things in relationships in the past that he was not proud of.
I’d rather see you dead little girl than to see you with another man: catch you with another man, that’s the end, little girl:
~Sen. Chuck Grassley won’t say if he would support legislation banning bumps stocks — devices that dramatically accelerate a semi-automatic weapon’s rate of fire — but the Iowa Republican says it would make sense.
Grassley has scheduled a Judiciary Committee hearing on firearms accessories for Tuesday and expects bump stocks, the device infamously used by Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock to shoot more than 500 people, to be part of the discussion.
Grassley also predicted that the Air Force’s failure to send the name of Sutherland Springs mass shooter Devin Kelley to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System will come up at the hearing.
The database, known as NICS, lists those prohibited from buying guns because of crimes or other circumstances.
Kelley received a “bad conduct” discharge from the Air Force after being court-martialed for assaulting his wife and injuring his stepson. His discharge, conviction and year in jail should have been reported to NICS and could have made it more difficult to legally buy a gun.
“This is something that will come up in the hearing, for sure,” Grassley said during a conference call Wednesday with reporters. “This is very embarrassing to them. They’re studying what went wrong. I presume that if they don’t take action, we will.”
Legislation to ban bump stocks has been introduced in Congress. Nine senators, including Iowa Republican Joni Ernst and Judiciary Committee members Republicans John Cornyn of Texas and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, have asked the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms bureau of the Department of Justice to review its Obama administration rule allowing bump stocks. The devices allow a semi-automatic rifle to be shot faster than a person can pull the trigger.
Inhofe suggested that bump stocks should be illegal if they are used to simulate automatic weapons, which are regulated. Grassley seemed to agree.
“I don’t understand why it would be right for ATF to issue such a regulation when submachines have been outlawed since the 1920s or ’30s,” he said, adding that 1986 legislation made automatic weapons illegal.
“It seems to me that common sense would say they ought to restrict it, I mean, do away with the rule,” Grassley said.
Grassley warned that the hearing may have to be rescheduled because the Department of Justice may not be prepared.
He also noted that in 2013, after the Sandy Hook, Conn., school shooting, his legislation to require states and local governments to submit the names of people who should be barred from buying guns to NICS got 57 votes — three votes shy of the 60 needed to send it to the Senate floor for a vote.
l Comments: (319) 398-8375; james.lynch@thegazette.comDo you yearn for the simpler times of the mid-2000s, when anything from car wheels to stripper heels were just a little bit better if they were made from clear plastic? If so, Cooler Master has released the MasterKeys Pro L RGB Crystal Edition just for you. The Crystal Edition doesn't have both feet stuck in 2006, as oh-so-2016 RGB LEDs and Cherry MX Blue or Brown switches underpin the unprinted transparent keycaps.
Cooler Master touts a redesigned circuit board allowing tight fitment between the Cherry switches and an extra PCB-mounted LED for each key. The manufacturer claims this combination provides the "brightest" LED lighting around. Those LEDs can display a number of canned lighting patterns without additional software. Those so inclined can apply their C++ skills to create custom lighting effects.
The Crystal Edition keyboard packs its very own ARM Cortex-M3 processor, which Cooler Master says is 25% faster than the Cortex-M0 used in "other keyboards." The manufacturer claims this extra number crunching grunt allows for immediate execution of commands and macros. For reference, the ARM9 CPU in the Nokia N73 smartphone from 2006 was good for somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 MIPS. The 72 MHz Cortex-M3 in the Crystal Edition delivers 90-108 MIPS, based on Cooler Master's 1.25-1.5 MIPS-per-MHz claims.
The MasterKeys Pro L RGB Crystal Edition with Cherry MX Brown switches is available now from Cooler Master. Crystal keyboards with Cherry MX Blues are expected to ship October 10. Lovers of blinkenlights will need to shell out $180 for their RGB fix.Huma Abedin has been photographed for the first time on the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton since splitting from her shamed husband Anthony Weiner last week.
The mother of one has kept out of sight since it was revealed that the disgraced politician had been sexting another woman behind her back for a third time.
The most damning of the snaps shows Weiner laying in bed wearing nothing but his boxer briefs while his four-year-old son with Abedin, Jordan, sleeps next to him.
Days after the New York Post published the shocking images the former congressman sent to a mystery brunette, Abedin announced that they were separating.
SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO
Back on the trail: Huma Abedin (circled) was present at the front of Hillary Clinton's campaign plane. It is the first time she has been seen at work since her split from husband Anthony Weiner, who sent a picture of himself in his underwear beside their sleeping son
We're shutting this down: As soon as it became apparent that Huma Abedin could be seen, aides rushed to close curtains between the press and campaign aide sections of the plane
Shock: She has kept out of sight since it was revealed that her husband had been sexting another woman behind her back for a third time. The most damning of the snaps shows Weiner in bed wearing his boxer briefs while their son sleeps next to him (above)
The ex-politician's soon-to-be ex-wife has not been seen publicly on the campaign trail since a week ago Sunday.
She was photographed aboard the Boeing 737 Clinton campaign plane that was preparing to make its inaugural flight on Monday morning.
The picture shows Abedin speaking to her boss near the front of the large aircraft.
However, as soon as it was apparent that she could be seen by reporters, a campaign aide blocked the plane's aisle to keep her out of sight.
Clinton made nice with reporters covering her Monday on the inaugural flight of the campaign plane.
Separated: Days after the shocking images that he sent to a mystery woman were published, Abedin announced that they were separating in a statement (they are pictured above in 2011)
Hill we go: Clinton smiled and laughed through her first meeting with the press on her campaign plane, which was en route from Westchester, New York, to Cleveland, Ohio
Hillary Clinton's campaign plane sits on the tarmac at the Westchester Country airport in New York on Monday morning before departing for Cleveland, Ohio
'I am so happy to have all of you with me,' she told the group as the aircraft prepared for take-off. 'I was just waiting for this moment.'
The presidential candidate is riding the same plane as her travelling press corps for the first time today.
She has suffered blows from opponent Donald Trump for ducking the media. Her last press conference was 275 days ago, his daily 'Hillary in Hiding' email reminder said Monday.
Clinton said she would speak more 'formally' to journalists on the plane later in the day.
She walked the length of the plane, divided into three sections, shortly after to exchange niceties with journalists sitting in the back of the large aircraft.
The Boeing 737 sports Clinton's 'Stronger Together' campaign slogan and her website, HillaryClinton.com
Clinton's signature 'H' - for Hillary - is on the tail
'Hey guys, welcome to our big plane. It's so exciting... I think it's pretty cool, don't you?' she gushed.
Clinton said she was there to 'welcome' press to the new plane. 'I'll come back and talk to you more formally,' she stated.
Clinton debuted her campaign plane this morning in Westchester County, New York, at an airport near the Democrat's home in Chappaqua.
The Boeing 737 sports Clinton's 'Stronger Together' campaign slogan and her website, HillaryClinton.com, two American flags - one for each side of the aircraft - and the the candidate's signature 'H.'
Lettering on the plane is'scion blue' as is a wrap that covers the engine and tail of the aircraft.
A 'next generation,' series, the Boeing 737-800 has 168 seats and will be able to make non-stop flights between the East and West coasts. It also has Wi-fi.
It was manufactured in the United States, the campaign told reporters traveling with Clinton today, 'in accordance with its standard practices for sourcing materials from its vendors.'
The charter plane is operated by Xtra Airways and Air Partner.
Clinton is having Labor Day events in Ohio and Illinois on Monday. She'll campaign in Tampa, Florida, on Tuesday.
She did not appear in public over the weekend.
Special livery: The Boeing 737 has been painted in the colors of the campaign and with the Democratic candidate's logo
She said of her holiday weekend Monday morning: 'It was good. It was really good. We had a good time... the last moment before the mad dash, the next two months. So I hope you guys are ready.
'I'm ready. I'm more than ready.'
Clinton has not held a press conference in 2016 and has not held an informal Q and A with reporters on the trail with her since the end of July.
The lack of openness has become an increasing point of tension between her campaign and reporters.
The Democrat will have a tougher time avoiding questions from the media now that they're riding on the same aircraft with her, however.By Paul Brown / Climate News Network
In Colombia’s paramos (a high-altitude ecoregion), court action banned development and protected the right to clean water. (Luis Alejandro Bernal Romero / CC 2.0)
LONDON, 15 June, 2017 – Governments that make promises they do not keep to cut greenhouse gases or to protect their citizens against climate change are finding themselves more frequently facing climate court action by their own citizens.
According to a UN environment (the United Nations Environment Programme, UNEP) report, climate change cases have been filed in 24 countries — with the US, with 654 individual cases, facing by far the largest number. Australia has seen 80 cases, the UK and the European Union Court of Justice 49 each.
In many cases it is the promises made by governments at the Paris climate conference in 2015 that are providing the legal arguments which campaigners are using in the courts.
These issues are complex and vary according to the legal system of the country involved. But many boil down to whether the government in question is doing its share to hold the average global temperature rise down to below 2°C, or as close as possible to 1.5°C, the primary promise the politicians made in Paris.
Another type of case involves human rights, the right to clean air, health, and protection from threats like sea level rise. Where governments have enacted legislation to protect the public but failed to implement it, citizens can sue them for their failures and ask the courts to order them to act.
A successful example of this came in September 2015 when a court in Pakistan granted the claims of Ashgar Leghari, a farmer, who had sued the national and regional governments for failure to carry out the National Climate Change Policy of 2012 and the Framework for Implementation of Climate Change Policy (2014-2030).
In this case it was not the failure to reduce greenhouse gases that was the issue – since Pakistan produces relatively small quantities – but the government’s failure to protect citizens against their effects.
The court ruled: “As Pakistan is not a major contributor to global warming it is actually a victim of climate change and requires immediate remedial adaptation measures to cope with disruptive climatic patterns.
“The delay and lethargy of the state in implementing the Framework offend the fundamental rights of citizens.”
As a remedy the court directed several government ministries to each nominate “a climate change focal person” to help ensure the implementation of the Framework and to present a list of actions by 31 December that year.
They also created a Climate Change Commission composed of key ministries, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and technical experts to monitor the government’s progress. Later the court appointed 21 members of the commission and gave it a range of powers.
Environmental priority
In Colombia in 2016 a court protected a high altitude ecosystem, the paramos, which was under threat from development. The country’s Constitutional Court banned all mining operations in the paramos, putting the protection of the environment first and ending 347 mining licenses with rights in the ecosystem.
It ruled that the government was wrong to allow development and that the area should be protected – because to damage it would release carbon into the atmosphere and add to climate change.
In addition, 70% of the country’s drinking water comes from the region, and the court also ruled that the government’s statutory provisions allowing development were unconstitutional, because they would endanger the public right to clean water and relieve government agencies of their obligation to justify decisions certain to result in the degradation of environmentally sensitive and valuable areas.
Most of the cases have been brought in richer western countries, although the idea is spreading worldwide, the UNEP report says, with many more cases being filed in the last two years.
The countries involved |
, were then prepared from the general theory and copied or published separately. The tables presented certain values computed for astronomically significant functions. The correction from a mean planetary position to a true position, according to the distance from the planet’s apogee is an example. From these tables, another more detailed table known as an ephemeris was then computed, providing the actual predicted positions of the planets for a particular year, day, and time.
The Alfonsine tables were computed in the thirteenth century using the astronomical theory in the Almagest. The original version was written in Castilian using astronomical data compiled by a team of astronomers in Toledo under the patronage of King Alfonso X. Their calculations begin with the year 1252. A Latin edition was prepared in Paris during the 1320s, the first printed edition of which appeared in 1483. The Prutenic tables were computed from De revolutionibus by the German astronomer Erasmus Reinhold, and were first published in 1551.
On May 1, 1564, the longitudes of Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter were the subject of Tycho’s first recorded comparison between his own observations and the predictions of Ptolemy and Copernicus.
Planet Observed Stadius Carello Venus 25˚ 22˚ 54′ (-3˚ 6′) 24˚ 3′ (-57′) Mars 14˚ 12˚ 52′ (-1˚ 8′) 11˚ 20′ (-2˚ 40′) Saturn 0˚ 27˚ 36′ (-2˚ 24′) 29˚ 53′ (-0˚ 7′) Jupiter 3˚ 1˚ 30′ (-1˚ 30′) 0˚ 50′ (-2˚ 10′)
Tycho compared his observations to two ephemerides, those of Johannes Stadius and Giovanni Battista Carello, published in 1556 and 1557 respectively. The ephemeris of Stadius is based on the Prutenic tables computed from De revolutionibus, while the ephemeris of Carello was based on the Alfonsine tables computed from Almagest. In this comparison, the Ptolemaic theory was superior for Venus and Saturn, and the Copernican theory superior for Mars and Jupiter.
It should be noted that in his observational notebook Tycho recorded only the observed and predicted longitudes. He did not explicitly compute the difference between observations and predictions. This is noted in parentheses.
Five years after this first comparison, Tycho visited the Bohemian astronomer Cyprian von Leowitz, a professor of astronomy and mathematics in the town of Lauingen. According to Tycho, von Leowitz told him that, in his opinion, the predictions of Copernicus agreed better with observations of the superior planets and solar eclipses, while Ptolemy’s predictions were more accurate for lunar eclipses and the positions of the inferior planets. Von Leowitz, as our analysis shows, was correct about the relative superiority of the two theories in predicting the longitudes of the planets.
The Data from Tycho’s Notebooks
Tycho’s longitude and latitude comparisons for the individual planets are presented in a series of tables over the following sections.
Tycho variously used ephemerides based on the Alfonsine and Prutenic tables, or more usually, computed the predicted positions directly from the tables. Any prediction from an ephemeris based on the Alfonsine tables, or directly calculated from them by Tycho, is labeled “Ptolemy.” Similarly, any prediction based on the Prutenic tables or De revolutionibus is labeled “Copernicus.” For example, the figure of +1˚ 50½′ which is found under the label Mercury and Copernicus on October 25, 1585, indicates that the prediction of Copernicus was +1˚ 50½′ ahead of Tycho’s observation. Ptolemy’s prediction, on the other hand, was +2˚ 58′ ahead. Thus Copernicus was superior by 1˚ 7½′ in this instance.
Each table notes only the difference between Tycho’s actual observations and the predictions. As noted earlier, Tycho did not generally compute the differences between the predictions and his observations, except toward the end of his life.
The median superiority for each planet is provided at the bottom of each table. Rather than the mean, which would have required comparing all the observations over the entire period, the median is likely a much better estimate for how Tycho would have perceived the relative superiority of the two theories.
Longitude Comparisons
Table 1a. Mercury Longitude Comparisons
Date Ptolemy Copernicus Net Ptolemy Net Copernicus 1586 Oct 25 +2˚ 58′ +1˚ 50 ½′ 1˚ 7 ½′ 1586 Oct 29 +0˚ 59′ +1˚ 35′ 36′ 1586 Oct 31 -0˚ 2′ +1˚ 12′ 1˚ 10′ 1586 Nov 1 -0˚ 28 ½′ +1˚ 5′ 36 ½′ 1586 Nov 2 -0˚ 56′ +0˚ 56′ Tie Tie 1586 Nov 4 -1˚ 42 ½′ +0˚ 39 ½′ 1˚ 3′ 1586 Nov 7 -2˚ 50 ¼′ +0˚ 15′ 2˚ 35 ¼′ 1586 Nov 8 -3˚ 9′ +0˚ 11′ 2˚ 58′ 1586 Nov 10 -3˚ 38′ +0˚ 5′ 3˚ 33′ 1586 Nov 11 -3˚ 57 ¼′ -0˚ 5′ 3˚ 52 ¼′ 1589 Mar 24 -1˚ 1′ -0˚ 20′ 41′ 1589 Mar 27 +0˚ 4′ 37′′ 0˚ 20′ 23′′ 15′ 46′′ 1589 Mar 28 +0˚ 32′ 47′′ -0˚ 8′ 13′′ 24′ 34′′ 1589 Mar 31 +2˚ 15′ 4′′ +0˚ 16′ 34′′ 1˚ 58′ 30′′ 1591 Feb 16 -12′ 13′′ +52′ 37′′ 40′ 24′′ 1591 Feb 17 -8′ 15′′ +41′ 45′′ 33′ 24′′ 1591 Feb 18 -1′ +31′ 30′′ 30′ 30′′ 1591 Feb 19 +11′ +24′ 20′′ 13′ 20′′ 1591 Feb 20 +23′ 52′′ +16′ 52′′ 7′ 1591 Feb 21 +42′ +14′ 28′ 1591 Feb 22 +1° 7′ 50′′ +16′ 50′′ 51′ 1591 Feb 26 +3° 22′ 54′′ +39′ 54′′ 2˚ 43′ 1592 Feb 3 +34′ 15′′ +10′ 45′′ 23′ 30′′ 1595 Aug 30 -1° 59′ 10′′ -16′ 10′′ 1° 43′ 1595 Sep 1 -1° 47′ 30′′ -33′ 30′′ 1° 14′ 1595 Sep 2 -1° 33′ 30′′ -35′ 30′′ 58′ 1595 Sep 3 -1° 19′ -38′ 41′ 1595 Sep 4 -1° 1′ -36′ 25′ 1595 Sep 6 -14′ 30′′ -26′ 30′′ 12′ 1595 Sep 11 +2° 15′ -1′ 2° 14′ 1595 Sep 22 +18′ 15′′ +44′ 15′′ 26′ 1601 Apr 29 +61 -36′ 25′ Median 30 ½′ 1˚ 5′
Table 1b. Venus Longitude Comparisons
Date Ptolemy Copernicus Net Ptolemy Net Copernicus 1564 May 1 -57′ -3˚ 6′ 2˚ 9′ 1564 Dec 10 +2′ +40′ 38′ 1564 Dec 14 -16′ +17′ 1′ 1568 Nov 1 -18′ -22′ 3′ 1568 Nov 9 +5′ -28′ 23′ 1578 Oct 23 +1˚ 36 ½′ -2˚ 48 ½′ 1˚ 12′ 1585 Sep 23 +2 -12′ 10′ 1585 Oct 11 -6 ⅓′ -16 ⅚′ 10½′ 1589 Apr 5 -1˚ 4′ +1˚ 48′ 44′ 1589 Apr 8 -1˚ 3′ +1˚ 44′ 41′ 1589 Apr 13 -1˚ 0′ 20′′ +1˚ 48′ 40′′ 48′ 20′′ 1589 Apr 15 -0˚ 57′ 20′′ +1˚ 43′ 40′′ 46′ 20′′ 1589 Apr 20 -0˚ 56′ 5′′ +1˚ 35′ 55′′ 39′ 50′′ 1589 Apr 22 -1˚ 5′ 10′′ +1˚ 21′ 50′′ 16′ 40′′ 1589 Apr 23 -0˚ 48′ 50′′ +1˚ 34′ 10′′ 46′ 20′′ 1589 Apr 24 -0˚ 45′ 30′′ +1˚ 33′ 30′′ 48′ 1589 Apr 26 -0˚ 43′ 30′′ +1˚ 30′ 30′′ 47′ 1591 Sep 27 -31′ 43′′ -31′ 13′′ 30′′ 1591 Sep 30 -32′ 10′′ -27′ 10′′ 5′ 1591 Oct 2 -38′ -29′ 9′ 1591 Oct 9 -36′ 19′′ -19′ 19′′ 17′ 1591 Oct 10 -38′ 24′′ -19′ 24′′ 19′ 1591 Oct 16 -42′ 30′′ -12′ 30′′ 30′ 1591 Nov 10 -1° 26′ 20′′ +31′ 40′′ 54′ 40′′ 1591 Nov 11 -1° 22′ 45′′ +39′ 15′′ 43′ 30′′ 1595 Sep 22 +9′ 45′′ -39′ 15′′ 19′ 20′′ 1596 Jun 11 -28′ -31′ 3′ 1596 Jun 20 -36 ⅚′ -1˚ 23 ⅚′ 47′ 1596 Jun Elong. off
9 days * Elong. off
8 days * 1-2 days 1600 Feb 22 +29′ 2′′ +23′ 25′′ 5′ 37′′ Median 38′ 18′
* Tycho observed that the predicted day of maximum elongation was incorrect by 8 and 9 days for the predictions of Ptolemy and Copernicus respectively.
Table 1c. Moon Longitude Comparisons
Date Ptolemy Copernicus Net Ptolemy Net Copernicus 1586 Oct 24 -40′ -50′ 10′ 1587 Jan 6 -20′ -17′ 3′ 1587 Aug 4 +3′ +28′ 25′ 1587 Aug 5 0′ +16′ 16′ 1587 Aug 17 +25′ +7′ 18′ 1587 Aug 18 +44′ +20′ 24′ 1591 Aug 23 -12′ 47′′ +1′ 13′′ 11′ 34′′ 1593 Mar 15 -47′ -8′ 39′ 1594 Dec 10 +42 ¼′ +16 ¼′ 26′ 1594 Dec 11 +1° 14 ⅓′ +35 ⅓′ 39′ 1594 Dec 14 +56 ⅔′ +43 ⅔′ 13′ 1594 Dec 15 +39 ⅙′ +28 ⅙′ 11′ 1594 Dec 20 -1° 4 ½′ -1° ½′ 4′ 1594 Dec 21 -43 ½′ -1° 2 ½′ 19′ 1594 Dec 22 -14 ¾′ -53 ¾′ 39′ 1594 Dec 23 -⅚′ -36 ⅚′ 36′ 1594 Dec 26 +10 ⅔′ +34 ⅔′ 14′ 1594 Dec 27 +20′ +57′ 37′ Median 21′ 15′
Table 1d. Sun Longitude Comparisons
Date Ptolemy Copernicus Net Ptolemy Net Copernicus 1583 Jan 26 +22′ 54′′ -28′ 36′′ 5′ 42′′ 1583 Mar 26 +19′ 15′′ -20′ 45′′ 1′ 30′′ 1583 Mar 27 +19′ 30′′ -20′ 30′′ 1′ 0′′ 1583 Mar 28 +15′ 34′′ -22′ 23′′ 6′ 49′′ 1583 Apr 2 +19′ -19′ Tie Tie 1583 Apr 4 +38′ +19′ 19′ 1583 Apr 5 +18′ -19′ 1′ 1583 Apr 9 +18′ -18′ Tie Tie 1583 Apr 14 +18′ -17′ 1′ 1583 Apr 15 +18 -16′ 2′ 1583 Apr 16 +17′ -16′ 1′ 1583 Apr 18 +16′ 38′′ -15′ 22′′ 1′ 16′′ 1583 Apr 19 +16′ 37′′ -15′ 23′′ 1′ 14′′ 1583 Apr 20 +16′ 37′′ -15′ 23′′ 1′ 14′′ 1583 Apr 25 +15′ -15′ Tie Tie 1583 May 5 +13′ -12′ 1′ 1583 May 6 +13′ -12′ 1′ 1583 Aug 15 -1′ -1′ Tie Tie 1583 Sep 5 -½′ -2 ½′ 2′ 1583 Sep 8 Dead on -4′ 4′ 1583 Sep 11 -½′ -4 ½′ 4′ 1583 Sep 23 +1′ -6′ 5′ 1583 Sep 29 +1 ½′ -6 ½′ 5′ 1583 Oct 1 +1 ⅓′ -6 ⅔′ 5 ⅓′ 1583 Oct 10 +2 ⅓′ -8 ⅔′ 6 ⅓′ 1583 Oct 12 +3 ½′ -8 ½′ 5′ 1583 Oct 15 +3 ⅓′ -10 ⅔′ 7 ⅓′ 1583 Oct 20 +4 ⅓′ -11 ⅔′ 7 ⅓′ 1583 Oct 24 +6′ 5′′ -12′ 55′′ 6′ 50′′ 1583 Oct 26 +5′ 15′′ -12′ 45 7 ½′ 1583 Oct 30 +6′ 15′′ -13′ 45′′ 7 ½′ 1583 Nov 7 +8′ -16′ 8′ 1583 Nov 8 +8′ 10′′ -15′ 50′′ 7′ 40′′ 1584 Aug 23 -2′ 31′′ -3′ 5′′ 34′′ 1584 Sep 14 +1′ 28′′ -3′ 35′′ 2′ 7′′ 1584 Oct 3 +6′ 32′′ -4′ 13′′ 2′ 19′′ 1584 Oct 7 +9′ 55′′ -2′ 44′′ 5′ 11′′ 1585 Mar 9 +15′ 40′′ -30′ 43′′ 15′ 3′′ 1585 Mar 13 +15′ 28′′ -29′ 30′′ 14′ 2′′ 1585 Mar 15 +15′ 36′′ -28′ 25′′ 12′ 49′′ 1585 Mar 17 +14′ 20′′ -29′ 30′′ 15′ 10′′ 1585 Apr 15 +9′ 36′′ -25′ 39′′ 16′ 3′′ 1585 Apr 26 +6′ 49′′ -22′ 33′′ 15′ 44′′ 1586 Mar 9 +15′ 8′′ -30′ 53′′ 15′ 45′′ 1586 Mar 10 +15′ 50′′ -30′ 23′′ 14′ 27′′ 1586 Mar 11 +12′ 40′′ -33′ 30′′ 20′ 50′′ 1586 Mar 17 +4′ 22′′ -29′ 12′′ 24′ 50′′ 1586 Mar 19 +14′ 17′′ -29′ 2′′ 14′ 45′′ 1586 Apr 1 +12′ 19′′ -27′ 21′′ 15′ 2′′ 1586 Apr 13 +10′ 33′′ -25′ 57′′ 15′ 24′′ 1586 Apr 16 +9′ 25′′ -24′ 48′′ 15′ 23′′ 1586 Apr 18 +8′ 38′′ -24′ 24′′ 15′ 46′′ 1586 Apr 19 +8′ 43′′ -24′ 3′′ 14′ 20′′ 1586 Apr 27 +6′ 7′′ +36′ 11′′ * 30′ 4′ 1586 May 7 +3′ 46′′ -21′ 17′′ 17′ 31′′ 1586 May 8 +3′ 26′′ -22′ 4′′ 18′ 38′′ 1586 May 11 +5′ 3′′ -19′ 28′′ 14′ 25′′ 1586 May 18 +1′ 35′′ -19′ 36′′ 18′ 1′′ 1586 May 25 +1′ 20′′ -16′ 43′′ 15′ 13′′ 1586 May 29 -1′ 45′′ -18′ 0′′ 16′ 15′′ 1586 Jul 23 -3′ 1′′ -7′ 11′′ 4′ 10′′ 1586 Jul 24 -0′ 30′′ -4′ 8′′ 3′ 38′′ 1586 Jul 27 -0′ 3′′ -3′ 7′′ 3′ 4′′ 1586 Aug 4 +0′ 36′′ -2′ 3′′ 1′ 27′′ 1586 Sep 4 +2′ 21′′ -1′ 18′′ 1′ 3′′ 1586 Sep 24 +5′ 56′′ -3′ 17′′ 2′ 39′′ 1586 Oct 10 +10′ 50′′ -2′ 52′′ 7′ 58′′ 1587 Mar 9 +0˚ 15′ 44′′ -0˚ 32′ 10′′ 16′ 34′′ 1587 Mar 10 +0˚ 15′ 34′′ -0˚ 32′ 4′′ 16′ 30′′ 1587 Mar 17 +0˚ 14′ 14′′ -0˚ 31′ 13′′ 16′ 59′′ 1587 Sep 12 +0˚ 1′ 22′′ -0˚ 3′ 36′′ 2′ 14′′ 1588 Mar 27 +0˚ 12′ 38′′ -0˚ 28′ 34′′ 15′ 56′′ 1601 Mar 19 +15′ -36′ 21′ Median 18′ 1′ 14′′
* The sudden decrease in accuracy for the Copernican prediction on April 27, 1586 is likely due to a calculation error. Note that the error is negative for both the immediately preceding and following observations.
Table 1e. Mars Longitude Comparisons
Date Ptolemy Copernicus Net Ptolemy Net Copernicus 1564 May 1 -2˚ 40′ -1˚ 8′ 1˚ 32′ 1568 Nov 1 -1˚ 8′ +53′ 15′ 1570 Apr 26 -1˚ 29′ +14′ 1˚ 15′ 1578 Sep 15 -3˚ 28′ -3 ¼˚ 3′ 1580 Nov 17 * -59′ -32′ 27′ 1582 Dec 30 -5′ +4′ 1′ 1584 Nov 13 -1˚ 34′ 15′′ +37′ 45′′ 57′ 30′′ 1585 Jan 14 -3˚ 26½′ +2˚ 18¼′ 1˚ 8¼′ 1585 Jan 22 * -3˚ 32¼′ +2˚ 16¾′ 1˚ 15½′ 1585 Jan 24 -3˚ 31¾′ +2˚ 5½′ 1˚ 16¼′ 1585 Jan 31 -3˚ 39′ +2˚ 20′ 1˚ 19′ 1586 Sep 23 -34′ +28′ 6′ 1591 Apr 29 +2° 33′ 35′′ -4′ 10′′ 2° 33′ 25′′ 1591 May 12 +3° 18′ 10′′ +9′ 3° 9′ 10′′ 1591 May 13 +3° 22′ +10′ 20′′ 3° 19′ 40′′ 1591 May 19 +3° 45′ 15′′ +15′ 30′′ 3° 29′ 45′′ 1591 May 21 +3° 49′ +15′ 35′′ 3° 33′ 25′′ 1591 May 24 +3° 56′ 40′′ +12′ 3° 44′ 40′′ 1591 May 29 +4° 8′ 40′′ +6′ 10′′ 4° 2′ 40′′ 1591 Jun 6 +4° 21′ -8′ 4° 13′ 1591 Jun 8 +4° 19′ 18′′ -10′ 42′′ 4° 8′ 36′′ 1591 Jun 10 +4° 15′ 30′′ -16′ 30′′ 3° 59′ 1591 Jun 11 +4° 15′ -18′ 3° 57′ 1591 Jun 12 +4° 14′ -22′ 3° 52′ 1591 Jun 28 +3° 42′ -50′ 2° 52′ 1591 Jul 17 +2° 29′ -1° 17′ 1° 12′ 1591 Sep 26 +2° 16′ 45′′ -13′ 15′′ 2° 1′ 30′′ 1591 Dec 10 +1° 25′ 30′′ -31′ 30′′ 54′ 1593 Jul 21 +4° 58′ 15′′ -2° 57′ 15′′ 2° 1′ 1593 Jul 22 +4° 58′ 15′′ -2° 57′ 15′′ 2° 1′ 1593 Jul 30 -3° 42′ 30′′ -3° 42′ 30′′ Tie Tie 1593 Jul 31 +5° 6′ 30′′ -3° 42′ 30′′ 1° 24′ 1593 Aug 10 * +5° 18′ 30′′ -4° 7′ 30′′ 1° 11′ 1593 Aug 17 +5° 8′ 55′′ -4° 18′ 5′′ 50′ 50′′ 1593 Aug 18 +5° 8′ 55′′ -4° 18′ 5′′ 59′ 10′′ 1593 Aug 20 +5° 2′ -4° 28′ 34′ 1593 Aug 21 +5° 2′ 30′′ -4° 28′ 30′′ 34′ 1593 Aug 22 +5° 0′ 45′′ -4° 31′ 15′′ 29′ 30′′ 1593 Aug 23 +4° 58′ 40′′ -4° 33′ 20′′ 25′ 20′′ 1593 Aug 24 -2′ 50′′ † -5° 33′ 50′′ 5° 17′ 1593 Aug 29 +4° 43′ 35′′ -4° 33′ 25′′ 10′ 10′′ 1593 Dec 10 +1° 24′ -15′ 1° 9′ 1593 Dec 19 +1° 22′ 10′′ -12′ 50′′ 1° 9′ 20′′ 1594 Dec 10 -4′ -14′ 10′ 1595 Sep 7 +50′ -1° 30′ 40′ 1595 Sep 30 +9′ 30′′ -1° 46′ 30′′ 1° 37′ 1595 Oct 12 -1′ 30′′ -1° 56′ 30′′ 1° 55′ 1595 Oct 16 -5′ 45′′ -1° 55′ 45′′ 1° 50′ 1595 Oct 25 -7′ -1° 59′ 1° 52′ 1599 Oct 20 -45′ 57′′ +16′ 3′′ 29′ 54′′ 1599 Oct 21 -47′ 25′′ +16′ 35′′ 30′ 50′′ 1599 Oct 24 -54′ 41′′ +16′ 19′′ 38′ 22′′ 1599 Oct 25 -55′ 20′′ +17′ 40′′ 37′ 40′′ 1599 Oct 27 -59′ 10′′ +17′ 50′′ 41′ 20′′ 1599 Oct 29 -1˚ 1′ 10′′ +19′ 50′′ 41′ 20′′ 1600 Mar 2 ‡ -2° 59′ 46′′ +1° 25′ 14′′ 1° 34′ 32′′ 1600 Mar 9 ‡ -2° 51′ 4′′ +1° 12′ 56′′ 1° 38′ 8′′ 1600 Mar 15 ‡ -2° 49′ 30′′ +57′ 30′′ 1° 52′ 0′′ 1600 Mar 16 ‡ -2° 47′ 53′′ +56′ 7′′ 1° 51′ 46′′ Median 1° 37′ 1˚ 16 ¼′
* In opposition. † Likely an error in recording the Ptolemaic prediction. Counted here as a very superior prediction for Ptolemy. ‡ Tycho computed the difference between his observations and the predictions of Ptolemy and Copernicus.
Table 1f. Jupiter Longitude Comparisons
Date Ptolemy Copernicus Net Ptolemy Net Copernicus 1564 May 1 -2˚ 10′ -1˚ 30′ 40′ 1568 Jan 19 -1˚ 31′ -3′ 1˚ 18′ 1583 Aug 6 +33′ -12′ 21′ 1583 Aug 28 35′ -14′ 30′′ 20′ 30′′ 1583 Sep 5 +34 ½′ -13′ 0′′ 21½′ 1583 Sep 6 +31 ¾′ -14 ¼′ 17½′ 1583 Sep 10 +31′ -15′ 16′ 1583 Dec 11 +38 ½′ -7 ½′ 31½′ 1584 Aug 20 +30′ 29′′ -32′ 31′′ 2′ 2′′ 1586 Sep 23 +16′ +33′ 17′ 1586 Dec 21 -16′ -25′ 9′ 1589 Jan 30 -1˚ 29′ +4′ 1˚ 25′ 1589 Feb 21 -1˚ 27′ +11′ 1˚ 16′ 1590 Mar 15 * -1° 45′ 54′′ +24′ 59′′ 1° 20′ 55′′ 1590 Mar 17 * -1° 45′ 59′′ +32′ 1′′ 1° 13′ 58′′ 1590 Jul 11 * -1° 52′ 17′′ -12′ 44′′ 1° 39′ 33′′ 1591 Apr 14 -1° 46′ 10′′ +24′ 30′′ 1° 22′ 60′′ 1591 Apr 20 † -1° 45′ 15′′ +23′ 45′′ 1° 11′ 30′′ 1591 Apr 22 -1° 45′ 50′′ +25′ 20′′ 1° 20′ 30′′ 1591 Apr 23 ‡ -1° 45′ +25′ 20′′ 1° 19′ 40′′ 1591 Apr 24 -1° 42′ +27′ 1° 17′ 1591 Apr 26 -1° 43′ +26′ 1° 17′ 1591 Apr 29 ‡ -1° 46′ 30′′ +24′ 30′′ 1° 22′ 1591 Apr 30 -1° 47′ 13′′ +23′ 47′′ 1° 23′ 26′′ 1591 Jun 12 -1° 46′ 20′′ +19′ 40′′ 1° 26′ 40′′ 1592 May 16 -1° 29′ +17′ 1° 12′ 1592 May 18 -1° 30′ 40′′ +15′ 20′′ 1° 15′ 20′′ 1593 Jun 29 † -51′ 50′′ +8′ 10′′ 43′ 40′′ 1594 Oct 28 +1′ 10′′ -11′ 50′′ 10′ 40′′ 1596 Jul 25 +1˚ 44 ⅓′ +1˚ 38 ⅔′ 5⅔′ 1596 Aug 8 +21 ⅔′ -41 ⅓′ 19 ⅔′ 1596 Oct 12 +11 ⅓′ -49 ⅔′ 38 ⅓′ 1596 Oct 15 +17 ⅙′ -49 ⅚′ 32 ⅔′ 1598 Dec 20 1˚ 4′ at most 1˚ 4′ at most Tie Tie 1599 Oct 20 -34′ 41′′ +16′ 3′′ 18′ 38′′ 1599 Oct 21 -42′ 51′′ -15′ 51′′ 27′ 1599 Oct 24 -44′ 28′′ -19′ 28′′ 25′ 1599 Oct 25 -43′ 31′′ -17′ 31′′ 26′ 1600 Feb 3 † § -60′ 29′′ -4′ 29′′ 56′ 1600 Feb 4 § -60′ 48′′ -4′ 28′′ 56′ 20′′ 1600 Feb 5 § -60′ 29′′ -4′ 29′′ 56′ 1600 Mar 15 § -58′ 21′′ -3′ 21′′ 55′ 1601 Jan 6 -1° 29′ 40′′ +9′ 40′′ 1° 20′ Median 17′ 1° 12′
* Tycho compared tables calculated by the German astronomer Michael Maestlin with the Prutenic tables and the Alfonsine tables on March 15, March 17, and July 11, 1590. The less accurate of the two Copernican predictions was used. † In opposition. ‡ Two different values for the same day were given for the accuracy of Copernicus, differing by 4′ on April 23, 1591 and 2′′ on April 29, 1591. § Tycho computed the difference between his observations and the predictions of Ptolemy and Copernicus.
Table 1g. Saturn Longitude Comparisons
Date Ptolemy Copernicus Net Ptolemy Net Copernicus 1564 May 1 -0˚ 7′ -2˚ 24′ 2˚ 17′ 1568 Jan 19 +52 -5′ 47′ 1568 Nov 1 +13′ +2′ 11′ 1568 Nov 19 +11′ -1′ 10′ 1582 Aug 19 +46′ 44′′ +16′ 44′′ 30′ 1583 Aug 6 +1˚ 26′ +24′ 1˚ 2′ 1583 Aug 28 +1˚ 17′ 47′′ +18′ 47′′ 59′ 1583 Sep 5 +1˚ 17′ 7′′ +16′ 7′′ 1˚ 1′ 1583 Sep 6 +1˚ 15 ⅙′ +14 ⅙′ 1˚ 1′ 1583 Sep 10 +1˚ 13′ +12′ 1˚ 1′ 1585 Sep 23 +1˚ 59′ 50′′ +4′ 50′′ 1˚ 55 |
studio and asking for more money and additional shooting.
"We just thought there's a way that we could structure this that might be more satisfying, that might give us a sense of the beginning, the middle and the end. It might just tick all the boxes that it doesn't seem to be doing at the moment...and their faces kind of froze because we were hitting them up with not just the fact that it had become three movies, but we also wanted to do a bit more shooting during the year to fill out a bit more of the storylines because we liked where some of it was going but we couldn't necessarily shoot everything that we wanted on our original plan."
Of course, the execs were shocked. This kind of news isn't an everyday occurrence. But I'm sure they soon realized the financial advantage of stretching out The Hobbit over three holiday seasons, each one potentially renewing interest in the previous entry as well as The Lord of the Rings trilogy. So far so good.
The first film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey earned an astounding $1 billion worldwide, making it the 16th highest grossing film worldwide. And The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is opening strong with $73 million, which while less than early projections and about $11 million less than its precursor made on opening, is still enough to win the weekend and pad the studios coffers.If Internet traffic is going to triple over the next five years, as Cisco predicts, we're gonna need a bigger boat.
On Wednesday, Cisco (CSCO) unveiled its latest solution to help wireless carriers and Internet service providers manage their customers' insatiable demand for more streaming videos, app downloads and social networking.
The new core router technology, known as "CRS-X," will provide speeds of 400 Gigabits per second -- and that's just for one slot on the router's rack. Each rack is scalable up to 6.4 Terabits per second, and the entire CRS-X system is capable of nearly 1 Petabit per second if multiple racks are set up in tandem.
That is insanely fast -- double anything that currently exists on the market.
A single CRS-X rack will be able to provide streaming HD video to every New Yorker simultaneously, Cisco claims. A full, multichassis setup is capable of downloading the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in a split second and can stream every movie ever created in about a minute.
Core routers sit at the epicenter of the Internet, serving as the traffic cops at the biggest intersections on the busiest data highways. They connect visitors' requests to sites like Google (GOOG), Netflix (NFLX) and Facebook (FB) and they send data back to the right place in return.
They're a crucial part of the Internet backbone, and one that Cisco has a comfortable lead in. Cisco has 750 CRS customers, selling 10,000 systems to date, and it commands a roughly 65% share of the core routing market. That's more than double No. 2 Juniper's (JNPR) share.
Related story: FCC hopes to avoid 'end of world' for cell phones
Cisco says its solution is cheaper than Juniper's offerings. For instance, customers who installed Cisco's previous core router, dubbed CRS-3, in 2010, can upgrade to CRS-X by simply swapping out their CRS-3 cards for the new ones. In previous updates, Juniper has required customers to buy entire new router setups to upgrade their systems.
"It's as easy as putting in new line cards," said Stephen Liu, Cisco's director of service provider marketing. "For all intents and purposes, it'll then be a CRS-X -- except for what the paint on the outside says."
Cisco says the CRS-X will help customers prepare for the "Internet of Everything," a much-discussed (but yet-to-arrive) world in which household items, cars and even clothing will connect to the Internet. Instead of connecting 4 million devices simultaneously, carriers and ISPs may soon need to connect 40 million items at the same time.
That's why modern core routers like the CRS-X manage different kinds of traffic in separate ways. You'll have a miserable experience if your Netflix video stream keeps getting interrupted, but you likely wouldn't notice if it takes a split second longer to load a website.
"The innovation our customers are getting isn't just about faster speeds and more lanes on the highway," said Liu. "It's more like a GPS system that helps you find the best path based on traffic congestion."
Though the CRS-X won't go on sale until the fall or even begin shipping until the end of 2013, customers are already saying they're impressed. Mike Haberman, vice president of network operations at Verizon (VZ) Wireless said the new CRS system will help the nation's largest wireless provider meet its service demands "well into the future."Bitcoin (BTC), the leading cryptocurrency, reached a high in Zimbabwe today as more people look to convert their bank balances to “real money” as well as getting their money out the country.
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Today, Monday 25 September 2017, on BitcoinFundi, the local Zimbabwean cryptocurrency exchange BTC traded for as much as $7,200/BTC translating to an 85% premium based on the Coinbase price of $3,900.
Techzim is not sure whether this is the highest that the cryptocurrency has traded, as neither Techzim nor anyone has openly kept records, tracking the local rate of BTC.
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A number of factors could be driving the demand for the digital currency, hence a premium that is almost double what the RTGS/transfer rate is said to be trading at.
This comes at a time when Zimbabweans are having flash-backs of 2008, a period when Zimbabwe reached hyperinflation coupled with queues for almost everything and shop shelves that were devoid of everything. Shoppers were seen stocking up on groceries, in fear of basic commodities disappearing from shelves based on messages circulating warning of the same.
The Minister of Home Affairs had to step in to warn people to desist from sharing such alarmist messages, thus causing panic buying.
Currently, banks are prioritising processing of telegraphic transfers based on the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe’s ‘priority list‘, while Visa/Mastercard payments are also being controlled or culled altogether. thus making it difficult for individuals and cooperates alike to make external payments. Zimbabwe is a net importer, with a trade deficit of over $1.2 billion, thus translating to the appetite for forex being high and importers are forced to look into options like BTC to get their funds out the country.
Another factor is our huge thirst for ex-Japanese vehicles and a number of people turning to bitcoin in order to make payments to car sellers such as BeForward of Japan. As ‘hard currency’ disappears from the street
As ‘hard currency’ disappears from the street, the demand for alternative payment options such as bitcoin will but increase, resulting in the rate increasing further.
Those that are using BTC as a means of sending money back to Zimbabwe will be excited with this rate, not only smiling all the way to the bank but back from it too…
Quick NetOne, Telecel, Africom, Econet Airtime Recharge
Number to recharge: Airtime amount: Eco Cash number:A ROCK fan killed himself after being tortured by a painful battle with tinnitus - which made him constantly hear country and western music.
Glen Mitchell, 53, took his own life just 12 weeks after being diagnosed with the debilitating condition which was caused by listening to a noisy band at his local pub.
SWNS:South West News Service 3 Glen Mitchell with his wife Linda on a trip to London
It got so bad the retired firefighter couldn't turn the bathroom light on as the noise of the extractor fan hurt his ears.
Even the sound of a boiling kettle was too much to take.
Wife Linda said her formerly "happy, healthy and fun loving" husband completely changed after suffering a mental health breakdown as a result of his ordeal.
She said before he took a fatal overdose of painkillers, Glen had such a severe physical reaction to sound that even her BREATHING caused him pain.
The 45-year-old former council worker has now blasted NHS doctors for failing to provide treatment which she believes would have prevented Glen's death.
SWNS:South West News Service 3 It got so bad he could not even turn the bathroom light on as the noise of the extractor fan hurt his ears
Linda, of Duston, Northampton, said:"I had been married to Glen for ten years but we'd been together for 22 and had a really happy life.
"He was a happy, healthy, fun loving bloke who was hard working, active and very fit. All that changed so quickly, it is almost hard to comprehend.
"It all started when my husband Glen and I went to our local pub to watch a live band.
"They played modern rock music like The Jam, that sort of thing, but they were very loud to the point where we just walked out.
"What followed was heart-breaking, frustrating and ultimately - unnecessary. As the tinnitus continued, Glen became exhausted.
"He cherished silence at bedtime but because of the various noises he was suffering from as well as ear pain and spasms, he was unable to sleep.
"This, combined with the anxiety that his tinnitus would never go away, contributed to a very rapid mental decline.
"Eventually we went to our GP but we were too easily dismissed and not offered any support or advice about where to turn for the tinnitus or obvious levels of anxiety.
"Everyone just seemed disinterested and we felt very alone.
Alamy 3 Tinnitus is a debilitating, painful and exhausting condition. File picture
"I just want to make people aware of the issue because there seems to be a knee-jerk reaction from doctors that you should just get on and try and live with it.
"But it can cause so much devastation and it proved to be absolute torture for my husband - both psychically and mentally.
"My husband really liked his rock music and was into U2 and ACDC, but the funny thing was, he was hearing country and western in his head.
"There are more side-effects to tinnitus than just ringing in the ears, you can get whistling, buzzing, grinding and hissing sounds too and Glen had all of that.
"But also you can get musical hallucinations, hearing music that isn't playing, and Glen kept hearing country and western.
"He would say 'if I'm going to suffer from this, at least let me hear some decent rock and roll music'.
"I couldn't even lay next to him in bed by the end because my breathing caused him pain. "
WHAT IS TINNITUS? Tinnitus is a medical term to describe the perception of noise either in one ear, both ears or in the head, when there is no corresponding external sound. It is often described as a “ringing in the ears” but the exact sound heard can vary from person to person. The sounds most commonly experienced include a ringing, buzzing, whistling, humming or hissing sound. These perceived sounds may come and go or be continuous and the condition can develop suddenly or over time. In the majority of cases, some may only notice the condition at quiet times, including at night when they are trying to sleep. But, others may find that the condition intrudes upon their daily life and really bothers them.
Linda said her husband would be awake at 4am every morning pacing the streets in a bid to exhaust himself to try and get a good nights sleep.
He soon became suicidal and made an attempt to take his life but Linda would find him and get him to hospital in time.
Glen was soon referred to ear, nose and throat specialists but it was never confirmed that he had damage or hearing loss.
Linda added: "By this time he had also developed hyperacusis, a sensitivity to sound, and I was really pushing for more support.
"I could see that when he did have the chance to talk about his condition and get reassurance from medical professionals that it was helping.
"But, his mental health was getting worse as his tinnitus and hyperacusis worsened, and it was a vicious circle that we just couldn't break.
"I was furious with the way he was dealt with, we did not get the support we needed and we were told to just try and get on with life as normal.
"But that was impossible, after two weeks he tried to take his own life by taking an overdose of painkillers and then ten weeks later he did the same with Tramadol.
"The psychological effects of sleep deprivation combined with the tinnitus, hyperacusis and being told there was no cure just became too much for him to take.
"His death could have been prevented with the right level of psychological support and that is why it is so hard to take."
Linda is now sharing her story for the first time four years on as part of the British Tinnitus Associations (BTA) 'Share Your Sound' campaign.
She added: "How a humorous, loving man, full of life could have got to that point so quickly is just devastating.
"I'm determined that lessons be learnt from Glen's death.
"It shouldn't and doesn't need to get to such a tragic point and I want to encourage anybody out there with tinnitus not to lose hope. There is help out there.
"I am really passionate about supporting GPs to become more knowledgeable about tinnitus and the potential impact the condition can have so they are more able to treat patients and improve their quality of life before things escalate."
For tinnitus support, visit the British Tinnitus Association's website: www.tinnitus.org.uk.
If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this article, please call the Samaritans on (free) 116123 or 020 7734 2800.
MOST READ IN UK NEWS NET NASTY Stacey Solomon fears for kids after Momo Challenge spreads to YouTube & Fortnite Exclusive PIE ROLLER £148m EuroMillions winner scoffs 50 home-delivered Cornish pasties every WEEK ROCK STAR DEAD The Cure and Iggy Pop drummer Andy Anderson dies aged 68 after cancer battle Exclusive BRUTE FARCE Albanian killer fighting deportation over right to happy family life beats wife MOMO NO-NO Momo Challenge in 'Peppa Pig and Fortnite vids' as YouTube and Instagram slammed PURE EVIL Cross-dressing killer dad was'sorry' to murder wife and kids but 'had no choice'
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US-led Coalition: Iraqi Kurds put us in touch with Kurdish fighters in Kobani
SDF shell positions of Turkey-backed rebels in response to attacks on Kurdish district northwest Syria
ARA News
AMUDE – After growing tensions between the rival Kurdish parties, the local office of a Kurdish party and an independent radio station were burned. The local authorities have ordered the Kurdish security police of Asayish to investigate the incidents.
The local building of the Kurdish National Council (KNC) in Girkê Legê was burned on 24 April, and the independent radio station ARTA FM was burned on Tuesday night with its executive director Sefqan Orkesh being threatened to death if he would not stop the radio broadcasting.
The KNC in northern Syria has called for protests after the burning of ARTA FM, and blamed the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the local administration, which denied any involvement in the incidents, and condemned them.
“We will not be intimidated by these cowardly acts and stop our work to strengthen free, independent media in the region. However, we also do not want to put our staff at risk,” Sirwan H. Hossein, ARTA FM’s founder and General Director said in a press statement.
“We demand that the Auto-Administration authorities immediately open a serious, independent investigation and punish those responsible for this crime. We also demand that serious measures are taken to protect media workers, civil society activists and civilians in general. That is what the People’s Protection Units (YPG) are supposed to be there for,” he added.
Aldar Xelil, one of the most powerful Kurdish politicians in the reigon and a leading member of the Democratic Society Movement in Syria (TEV-DEM) condemned the incident of the burning of the KNC office.
“The KNC office in Girkê Legê was burned down by unknown assailants late night on 24.04.2016 and the task rests with the democratic Auto-administration and in particular the Asayish to investigate the matter and hold the criminals responsible because the protection of personal safety and property of the citizens in the region is our responsibility,“ he said in a public statement.
Local authorities of the Kurdish-led Auto-Administration also condemned the incident, and considered the incident as an attempt to tarnish the image of the administration after the heavy clashes happened last week between the Syrian regime militias and the Kurdish forces of the Asayish and YPG, that killed dozens of people.
The burning of the ARTA office came one night before a mass ceremony for the 35 Kurdish fighters and civilians killed in clashes with the Syrian regime.
“We see ourselves as responsible to run the administration and protect our areas, and we ordered the responsible bodies to promptly investigate it and expose this criminal act against the media in Rojava, and arrest and put the criminals on trial in public,” the local administration said.
Reporting by: Wladimir van Wilgenburg
Source: ARA News
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Join our Weekly NewsletterOne of the main things that's been holding me back from attempting an amp build from scratch or kit alike, is the cost of transformers. You may notice from my other posts that I am a bit of a sucker for a vox (AC4TV, and AC30CC2), and further more that there is gaping whole between the two amps I do have in terms of output power (~4W/~30W). So a 15 to 18 W amp just makes sense.Now, for me it makes sense to stick with EL84's (thus eliminating the need to stock multiple output tubes for my amps). This brought me to the 18watt & pp-watt communities. There are lots of good people in those forums, and a great wealth of experience and an overall willingness to help work through ideas.I had been studying the project over at Trinity amps for quite sometime ( <<lightning project>> ), and it seems to fit the bill nicely. So this was going to be my build.I managed to acquire an old Heathkit AA-151 dual mono integrated tube amp from a buddy ( <<AA-151 Manual>…THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Children born of illicit relationships who bear the ignominy of leaving the 'father' column blank in their birth certificates can now stake claim to certificates that show their true parentage.In a revolutionary order, the local self-government department has directed all civic bodies to correct the father's name in birth certificates based on DNA test. The order has been issued based on the soaring number of pending applications in various civic bodies pertaining to change in the father's name. At present, the name of father is marked in the birth certificate based on documents received from the hospital and no application for any change in the father's name is entertained since it cannot be proved. Although rules say that the birth registrar can make cancellations and corrections in a birth certificate based on his/her conviction, DNA test was never allowed.In December 2014, the birth registrar of Malappuram municipality P K Ganeshan had forwarded a letter asking whether DNA test could be used as basis for changing the name of a child's father in the birth certificate. A similar case had arisen in Thiruvananthapuram corporation which even led to legal tangles when a woman applied for changing the name of the father of her twins after five years of marriage. The chief registrar had sought a clarification on these applications since numerous such cases were being reported from other civic bodies."Often it led to much con fusion and children had to bear the brunt since certificates would show the father's name as 'unknown'. With this order, we can direct for a DNA test and parentage can be ascertained," said K P Sa bukuttan Nair, deputy chieF registrar, panchayat department. The problem usually arises when the woman is married to a person other than the biological father. Later, she applies for the birth certificate with the present husband's name as the child's father. However, local bodies do not change the name of the father since the woman fails to prove the child's paternity.The government has stated that the registrar can change the name of the father based on a set of documents, including DNA biological information from a government-approved laboratory, hospital documents testified by concerned officials, court order and a local inquiry by the registrar. LSG principal secretary James Varghese said the order was issued to do away with confusion regarding applications pertaining to paternity. "This will be in effect from January 1. It is going to be an important order in birth registration," he said.Taste Test: Cheap, Domestic Cans of Beer
By Fritz Hahn
The competitors -- all of which can be yours for less than a buck each.. (Fritz Hahn/washingtonpost.com)
Last year, I convened a panel of friends and coworkers to taste and rate Caribbean beers. This time around, we took on domestic canned beers in search of the perfect brew for a holiday weekend cookout. We were looking for one with broad appeal, one that people could enjoy all day in the afternoon sun and one that was cheap. How cheap? My only rule was that each individual beer had cost less than $1, or no more than $6 a six-pack.
This was a blind tasting, with beers served in unmarked cups. Participants were asked to rate the beer on a scale of 1 to 5 on the overall taste -- this was relative, given the quality of beer -- and a separate score of 1 to 5 based on how refreshing the beer would feel on a hot summer day. (Temperatures were in the 80s on both tasting days.) The average scores for each beer were then combined to get the overall tally.
And before you ask, it wasn't a panel full of beer snobs: Testers ranged from a sommelier at a highly-rated restaurant to a self-described Coors Light drinker. Let's see what they said.
Overall Winner
National Bohemian
Combined score: 7.14286 (Taste: 3.7/5; Refreshment: 3.4/5)
Price: $8/12-pack at DeVino's in Columbia Heights
The surprise winner was Baltimore's own Natty Boh, which testers rated highest on flavor and third for refreshment. Some of the praise: "The best one -- actually tastes like beer!" "High carbonation and the most hops." "Zesty... got a little more kick."
"Flavor! Weird!" wrote one Going Out Guru, who was obviously not expecting much after sampling a few other brews. Another praised Boh as "Mellow and smooth."
Of course, reactions were mixed. "Most assertive and palatable flavor," said one, damning with faint praise. "I would happily drink this beer because it doesn't have a nasty aftertaste," added another. Final view: "Not great, but at least distinctive"
Second Place
Miller High Life
Combined score: 7 (Taste: 3.4/5; Refreshment: 3.6/5)
Price: $4.99/6-pack from Chevy Chase Wine and Spirits
The Champagne of Beers proved popular with testers on both ends of the spectrum, who rated it second for both flavor and refreshment. "The best... I wanted to drink it though a straw in a tall glass with ice," raved one. "Cold and fizzy. Would probably like this with a dog," said another. Of course, there were notes of caution. "The tastiest, but not exactly refreshing." Another taster opined he "would not want to drink multiples of this one -- If my thirst got the best of me, I would regret the subsequent bloat."
Third Place
Pabst Blue Ribbon
Combined score: 6.5 (Taste: 3.1/5; Refreshment: 3.4/5)
Price: $5.29/6-pack from Chevy Chase Wine and Spirits
One of the most popular bargain beers around town didn't exactly win over our testers. They praised the "rich" taste and said it "goes down smooth." "I wouldn't have to be drunk to drink this," said one. But its refreshment divided the panel. One called it a "tabula rasa" and wanted tp "knock 'em down on the beach," while another held that PBR has "too much body for a thirst quencher." One participant turned up her nose completely: "Sort of icky. Makes me want to drink something else. Anything else."
Fourth Place
Bud Light
Combined score: 6.07143 (Taste: 2.4/5; Refreshment: 3.7/5)
Price: $4.99/6-pack from Chevy Chase Wine and Spirits
On a hot day, this is the beer our panel wants most. "Very refreshing, due to the complete lack of flavor," said one wag. It got high marks all around for being "bright, cold and bubbly," but didn't get much praise beyond that. "I bet this is the cheapest -- minimally flavored fizzy water," offered one. Said one expert: "Very carbonated; tastes like soda water. Good as the fifth or sixth beer of the night."
Fifth Place
Schaefer
Combined score: 5.92857 (Taste: 3/5; Refreshment: 2.9/5)
Price: $3.99/6-pack from Chevy Chase Wine and Spirits
One tester said Schaeffer was "lighter and fruitier [than some of the others] -- tastes like there should be an orange slice thrown in." On the other hand, another said it was "way too sugary to be refreshing." For the most part, though, Schaefer was just considered bland. "No aluminum taste, no hoppiness -- a suitable accompaniment to salty food." Or this random dismissal: "Cold and carbonated -- good enough for when you're already drunk and it's hot." And one just summed it up: "Yuck."
Last Place
Schlitz
Combined score: 5.5 (Taste: 2.4/5; Refreshment: 3.1/5)
Price: $3.99/6-pack from Chevy Chase Wine and Spirits
"The beer that made Milwaukee famous" was not a favorite of our testers. Let's just run down the comments:
"Tastes a little bit of hops, a little bit of cardboard"
"Would only drink this if was served in a koozie."
"Kind of like drinking sparkling water with beer ice cubes. But it's easy to drink."
"Frothy -- definitely cheap tasting, like a [Milwaukee's Best] nose"
"Tasteless and slightly reminiscent of saliva."
-- FritzTraining On The Minute:
A New Approach To Density Training
By Tyler English
“EMOM” or “Every Minute on the Minute” has become a very popular phrase recently among my coaching staff and clients at TEF.
For most of my clientele the ultimate goal isn’t to lift the largest amount of weight possible, but instead, increase the work capacity over the entire session.
To stay-at-home-mothers, business owners and your typical gen pop client, increasing the density of a training session is always a win-win.
Think of it this way. Your typical everyday fat loss client doesn’t know what their 1RM Squat, Press or Deadlift happens to be and the probably don’t care all that much. Sure, they achieve plenty of PR’s along the way, but for most of my clients, it’s about the body transformation.
Now there are many ways to increase the density of a program, but by increasing the overall work capacity, while increasing the anaerobic and aerobic threshold of the program, can lend more bang for your fat loss client’s buck. With training with an EMOM approach, you can get help clients build lean muscle while burning a greater amount of body fat, especially due to the post workout spike in EPOC.
There are numerous ways you can implement the “on-the-minute” training. For me and my clients, we either train on the minute, alternate between even and odd minutes for two exercises, or we implement EMOM “on the half minute.”
I’ll typically use a single movement or a combination of two movements in a superset format.
Let’s take a look at how you can take your client’s program to a new level with EMOM Training.
Core Training
1) Integrated Core Movement (Ex. DB Renegade Row, Farmer Walks)
3 x 8 (EMOM – For 3 minutes)
The client would complete 3 sets performing work at every minute.
Power Development
1) Integrated Power Movement (KB Swings, Loaded Jumps, etc.)
6 x 4 (EMOM – On the Half Minute – For 3 minutes)
The client is performing a set every 30 seconds, for a total of 6 sets.
Strength Development
1) Compound Movement (Deadlifts, Squats, Presses, Chins, etc)
6 x 6 (EMOM – 6 minutes)
I’m a big fan of allowing clients one major compound lift to focus on before implementing a typical MRT program.
Metabolic Resistance Training (MRT)
1A) Total Body / Hybrid Movement (DB Squat & Press, Sandbag Clean, KB Lunge & Press, etc)
1B) Upper Body Pull (Chin, Row Variation)
Example:
1A) Sandbag Clean – Even Minutes x 8
1B) Chin Up – Odd Minutes x 6
EMOM – 10 Minutes
Rest 2 Minutes
2A) Pull (KB High Pull, BB Row, Pull-up, Inverted Row, etc)
2B) Push (Push-up, DB OH Press, Sandbag Press)
Example:
2A) KB High Pull – Even Minutes x 12
2B) DB OH Press – Odd Minutes x 12
EMOM – 8 Minutes
Rest 1 Minute
3A) Energy System Development (Sled Variations, Bodyweight)
3B) Core Variation (Valslide Bodysaw, TRX Atomic Crunch, etc)
Example:
3A) Sled Push – Even Minutes x 30 yards
3B) Hanging Knee Raise – Odd Minutes x 10
EMOM – 6 Minutes
Remember, this is a small sample size of the possibilities when implementing EMOM training. You can also implement competing exercises, as I have had great success with in my more advanced clients, as well as increasing the work capacity with longer supersets.
As always, when programming, be smart, be effective and have fun with it.For decades Hollywood has whispered about Harvey Weinstein and his alleged impropriety. Journalists sniffed around, but none ever could—or, perhaps, would—bring one of the industry’s darkest and longest-kept secrets to light. Until just over two weeks ago, when New York Times investigative reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey delivered a chilling exposé detailing 30 years of sexual harassment and assault accusations against the 65-year-old Miramax and Weinstein Company co-founder. It sent shockwaves.
They’ll both give you the same response: They did it for their daughters.
“You never know what'll happen when you launch your story into the world,” says Kantor, 42. It’s a Tuesday afternoon at the newspaper’s Eighth Avenue headquarters and she's sitting with Twohey, side by side on a couch in the executive suite, recounting the startling revelations they uncovered—not just in their reporting but in the overwhelming response that followed. Twohey, 40, nods: “It’s been explosive.”
Twohey (left) and Kantor (right) with their editor, Rebecca Corbett Katharina Poblotzki
Dozens of A-listers have since opened up about unwanted sexual advances from Weinstein. He's been sacked from his own company, expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and may yet face criminal charges. And beyond Hollywood, women everywhere have come forward to share their own experiences with sexual assault and harassment—the hashtag #MeToo has been Tweeted almost one million times. That number is constantly growing.
If you ask the reporters, both mothers of young girls, why they chased this particular story, they’ll give you the same response: They did it for their daughters. “I'd sit with my baby girl before work every morning and say, ‘Mom is going to the office to do something really important,’” says Twohey. “It will hopefully make the world a safer place for girls like you.”
There's also another woman behind the break: Kantor and Twohey's editor Rebecca Corbett, who had encouraged them to pursue untold stories as part of the newspaper's commitment to do more aggressive sexual harassment reporting this year. Two months after their colleague Emily Steel released the bombshell Bill O’Reilly investigation that led to his termination in April, Kantor, who helped uncover the bruising work conditions at Amazon, began looking into Weinstein. She recruited Twohey, known for her work uncovering Trump’s questionable treatment of women in 2016, the very same week she returned from her maternity leave.
“They attacked our reporting and attacked us as individuals.”
“It was a no-brainer,” Twohey says. “This story had the potential to make a big impact and we had the ability not just to expose people, but to have them face consequences as a result.”
In order to take on Weinstein—who at one point threatened legal action against the Times—they needed backing from top brass. Executive editor Dean Baquet supported them from the start, something Kantor and Twohey were especially thankful for during the high-pressure four-month process. "The institution was willing to stand up to somebody powerful, willing to lose advertising to do this story," says Kantor. "So if we didn't stand up for what is right and give this all we got, what were we doing with our careers? Why are we here?"
Kantor, left, and Twohey, right Katharina Poblotzki
So Kantor and Twohey kept digging, deeper and deeper, even when they became targets for intimidation by Weinstein and his legal team themselves. “It was extremely intense,” Twohey admits. “They attacked our reporting and attacked us as individuals.”
(Weinstein's attorney, Patricia Glaser, did not immediately respond to MarieClaire.com's request for comment. When the Times story was initially published, Weinstein's then-lawyer issued a statement that "he denies many of the accusations as patently false.")
“Harvey began appearing in my dreams six weeks ago.”
Twohey and Kantor were undaunted, partly because they'd both committed to justice-journalism at an early age. Twohey's father was a Chicago Tribune editor and her mother was a TV news producer, and they taught her to care about current events and how they were covered. “I learned from them that a reporter could take you into a world where you give a voice to the people who need one,” she says.
Kantor, a New York City native, says her Jewish heritage imbued in her a need to stand up for “profound injustice” from the start. “I grew up around people with numbers on their arms—my grandparents are Holocaust survivors,” she says. “It led me to think about the big questions we often ask in investigative journalism: ‘How could something like this have gone on? What allowed this to happen?’”
A photo of Kantor and her daughter at her desk Katharina Poblotzki
That's initially what she thought she was getting with Weinstein—a look into his past. What she got instead was his present. “When we started, we said to ourselves, This is a story about stuff that happened a very long time ago, so it’s about correcting a record,” says Kantor. “But when we found out about the 2015 incidents, it shifted the moral gravity of the piece. We began to see a serial pattern that had gone on for years.”
The discovery—a scathing internal memo they obtained containing sexual assault accusations written by former Weinstein employee Lauren O’Connor just two years ago—was "journalism gold," as Twohey calls it. In the document, O'Connor writes: “I am a 28-year-old woman trying to make a living and a career. Harvey Weinstein is a 64-year-old, world famous man and this is his company. The balance of power is me: 0, Harvey Weinstein: 10.”
They tracked down other internal company records and settlements that had been paid out. “We went in saying, ‘Is this a repeat situation? Is this a serial situation?’” says Kantor. “Some people in the industry knew he had a reputation, but the magic of reporting is that we can put those puzzle pieces together. When we realized the scope of this story, it was like, ‘Oh man, this has been going on for years to a lot of women.’”
Consumed by the pressure to give these women the justice they deserved, Kantor and Twohey worked day and night to find sources willing to talk. "There's tension in investigative reporting where, on the one hand, you're trying to take everything wide open, but, on the other hand, we're dealing with confidential sources," says Kantor. "It's hard keeping that many secrets, so Megan was the person that I could go to and talk about everything I was learning."
When they weren’t in the office, they were texting and emailing each other about the material. After tucking their kids into bed, new ideas kept them awake at night. If they did sleep, the story lingered. “Harvey began appearing in my dreams six weeks ago,” says Twohey. “It was disturbing—and also motivating—that I couldn’t turn it off at night. In my dreams, I was still chasing those records, still chasing interviews.”
Twohey at her desk Katharina Poblotzki
They secured dozens, including former Miramax and Weinstein Company employees and big-name stars. Especially important was garnering the trust of Ashley Judd, one of the first celebrities to speak to them on the record about Weinstein's alleged advances in his hotel suite. “When we got hold of Ashley, we told her, ‘Hey, we're not just asking you to go out on a diving board alone and tell the world what happened,’” Kantor says. “We explained that we’d built a really strong investigative story and that we wanted her to, in a way, speak |
é d’aller venir en aide aux migrants de Stalingrad en arrachant quelques grilles qui les incommodaient, et l’avait fait.
Mais là l’idée, c’était de partir en masse de la République jusqu’au domicile du Premier Ministre. Une banderole apparue opportunément fit le tour de la place tandis qu’un flux ininterrompu vidait peu à peu l’AG au profit de ce départ improvisé. Le préfet n’avait manifestement pas prévu cette éventualité, car s’il y avait à peine assez d’effectifs pour bloquer les boulevards Voltaire et Beaumarchais, l’avenue de la République, elle, était libre. On vit ainsi quelque 2000 personnes se mettre en marche dans la nuit parisienne au cri d’ « apéro chez Valls » et parcourir un bon kilomètre sans que le moindre dispositif policier ne trouve l’occasion de l’arrêter.
Il y eut bien quelques voitures de police, mais elles durent décamper en vitesse. On fut donc bientôt rendu rue de la Roquette, non pas à une « centaine » comme l’on dit les médias mais à deux milliers et non pas « deux rues » du domicile du Premier Ministre, mais bien à l’entrée de sa rue. Alors que plusieurs camions de gendarmes mobiles s’arment en attendant le cortège, ce dernier ne ralenti pas, voire accélère jusqu’au contact. Ce premier assaut sur cette entrée de la rue Keller fut repoussé par une quantité obscène de gaz lacrymogène. Quelques militaires qui gardaient on ne sait quelle « cible potentielle » eurent à subir les dommages collatéraux de cet assaut sous la forme d’un certain nombre de bouteilles jetées dont ils se protégeaient avec une bombe lacrymogène de poche. On se déplaça alors vers le boulevard Ledru-Rollin pour accéder à l’autre extrémité de la rue Keller. Lorsque la banderole arrive à la hauteur du commissariat central du XIe arrondissement, ce sont tous les fonctionnaires qui se réfugient en trombe à l’intérieur. La voie libérée, c’est tout le matériel d’un chantier proche qui pleut contre les véhicules et la devanture du commissariat.
🔴Le commissariat du XIe attaqué. Plus de 400 pers. se dirigent chez Valls en criant "Apéro chez Valls" #NuitDebout pic.twitter.com/yW0Cxfsur0 — LIES BREAKER (@Lies_Breaker) 9 avril 2016
Parvenu à la seconde extrémité de la rue Keller, qui n’était guère protégée que par un mince cordon de CRS, il manqua peu de choses (certainement quelques masques à gaz et bâtons) pour que l’apéro prévu soit atteint. Mais là aussi : nuage de lacrymogène, puis afflux de CRS en renfort. Il fut alors décidé de rentrer place de la République. Finalement, le week-end désastreux de Manuel Valls en Algérie n’aura pas été égayé par ces 2000 invités surprise. Les fêtards rigolards, assuraient déjà que ce n’était que partie remise et la frange la plus extrémiste entonnait "Apéro chez Vall! After chez Macron".
En guise d’adieux, un container de bouteilles vides atterrit lui aussi sous forme de pluie sur le commissariat du XIe et ses voitures sérigraphiées déjà en sale état. Les policiers réfugiés à l’intérieur assistaient, médusés, à un tel déchaînement de générosité. Les CRS tentèrent bien de nasser tout ce beau monde au niveau de la rue de la Roquette.
Mais puisqu’il était impossible de faire le partage entre quelqu’un qui y fait la fête le samedi soir et quelqu’un qui y veut faire la fête à Manuel Valls, il fallut libérer tout le monde. Un dernier cortège de quelques centaines de personnes rentra à la République par le boulevard Voltaire, escorté par un balai de Gendarmes Mobiles.
Then, people came to support us and we were released. Some banks were crashed in our way back to Republique sq. pic.twitter.com/9ahCEf6V4O — 15MBcn_int (@15MBcn_int) 10 avril 2016
Dans une immense sérénité et une approbation générale, toutes les agences bancaires, d’intérim ou immobilières connurent le fracas du métal sur leurs vitrines. Au retour à République, tous les fourgons de CRS usuellement postés avaient disparu. On fit un feu de joie, sur la rue.Texas Tech has dismissed cornerback Nigel Bethel II following an incident during an on-campus basketball game on Saturday.
Amber Battle, who was the Red Raiders' leading scorer with 16.4 points per game last season, reportedly will have surgery after allegedly being punched in the face by Nigel Bethel II. AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez
Bethel, a freshman from Miami, punched Texas Tech women's basketball player Amber Battle in the face during a pickup basketball game.
"Texas Tech Athletics has a zero tolerance policy on this type of behavior," the school announced in a statement.
According to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Battle is expected to have surgery after sustaining a broken bone from the hit. Battle was the Red Raiders' leading scorer with 16.4 points per game last season, and also led the team in rebounds and assists to earn second-team All-Big 12 honors.
Texas Tech spokesperson Blayne Beal confirmed to ESPN.com that Battle was the victim in the incident, but did not know when or if she will require surgery.
Bethel was Texas Tech's highest-rated recruit in its incoming freshman class, an ESPN 300 prospect from Miami's Booker T. Washington High School who joined the program this summer.
He was expected to participate in both football and track at Texas Tech.
ESPN.com's Damon Sayles contributed to this report.Construction of a life-size replica of the Titanic has begun at a Mediterranean-themed attraction in China.
The company behind it, Seven Star Energy Investment Group, said it should be completed by late next year.
The copy of the famous, doomed liner will be part of the Romandisea Seven Star International Cultural Tourism Resort, along the Qijiang River in Sichuan Province's Daying County.
As well as providing a feel of what the vessel was like, the attraction will also provide visitors with a simulation of the original Titanic's collision with an iceberg and subsequent sinking.
Veteran Hollywood production designer and producer Curtis Schnell, who is working on the project, said it was being done in a "very respectful way", adding that the Titanic was more than "just a ship".
"We're trying to get as close as we can," he said.
"There are still problems with some things, and we are not building every room in the ship by any means, but the shell of the ship and the exteriors will be quite accurate and there will be interior rooms to be able to tour, and seen from the standpoint of historical accuracy."
Image: The ship as envisaged in a promotional video. Pic: Romandisea resort
Seven Star's CEO, Su Shaojun, said the initial budget of one billion yuan (£116m) had now been exceeded, but did not say what the new figure was.
He added that it is something China "needs" and that "every person must want something like this".
Local people hope the development, which will also feature a man-made beach and replicas of European castles, will boost the economy.
Estate agent Dan Yongwei said: "This will definitely be dynamic for our industry and the tourist industry, as well as the economy.
"It's very obvious to say that there will be large numbers of tourists coming to Daying."
The 1997 movie about the disaster starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet is said to have attracted a large following among younger Chinese people.
The ship was on its maiden voyage between Southampton and New York when it sank on 15 April, 1912.
More than 1,500 people lost their lives.Newlyweds in Massachusetts have big plans for a winning lotto ticket that hit big! iStockPhoto
EASTHAM, Mass. (AP) — Newlyweds from Cape Cod are planning to buy a house, pay off student loans and buy a truck after winning $15 million on an instant scratch-off ticket.
WCVB-TV reports that Stacy and David Foster, of Orleans, who were married May 1, went to a store on Route 6 in Eastham on Saturday and asked for a $30 Supreme Millions ticket from a machine behind a different register.
The clerk told the Fosters the register was closed and said they'd have to choose a ticket behind an active one since ticket sales are tracked separately.
The Fosters claimed their $15 million grand prize Monday and went home with a one-time payment of $9.75 million after taxes.
The store will also receive $50,000.
___Not so long ago, an association with a US president, whether sitting or retired, would have been regarded as something of immense value.
But a luxury hotel which bears the name of the current incumbent of the White House has decided that it no longer wants the connection - and is seeking to cut ties.
The Trump International Hotel and Tower, in Panama City, Panama, is attempting to distance itself from Donald Trump, despite his elevation to the most powerful political position on the planet.
A 70-storey structure with a 65th floor infinity swimming pool, an in-house casino and a prime location on the seafront in the Panamanian capital, the hotel has been marketed as a Trump property since 2005 - when it was initially branded as the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower.
It is thought that the hotel paid $32m (£24m) for its association with the businessman turned world leader.
The Trump International Hotel and Tower
The move would see the hotel remove all Trump branding - and lay off the hotel management company run by the president's family.
It comes with the property reportedly struggling with under-occupancy. Al Monstavicius, a retired Nevada doctor who says he bought a penthouse unit in the hotel "because I thought Trump's name made it a safe investment" has told the Chicago Tribune that his suite has had only 30 per cent occupancy in recent months.
Part of the business was sold in August - the hotel's restaurants and conference centre, as well as 202 attached condominiums, were bought by a Florida investment company, Ithaca Capital Partners.
Ithaca are believed to have proposed the sundering of links with the Trump name, and a relaunching of the property under a new identity.
However, talk of a divorce has been given short shrift by the holding company for Mr Trump's business operations.
"Not only do we have a valid, binding and enforceable long-term management agreement," a spokesperson for The Trump Organisation commented, "but any suggestion that the hotel is not performing up to expectations is belied by the actual facts."
The Panama City property is not the first hotel to attempt to distance itself from the US president.
Earlier this month, it was reported that the Trump SoHo hotel in New York will cease to wear the Trump name before the end of the year.
The five-star retreat in Lower Manhattan is changing hands - its management contract has been bought by CIM Group, a real estate investment company based in California.
CIM has paid an undisclosed sum to The Trump Organisation to end the association - and will be free to rebrand the building in December.
The Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto severed its own connection in June, and is now known as the Adelaide Hotel Toronto.
The Adelaide Hotel Toronto rebranded in June
While claims of falling guest numbers have dogged some Trump hotels since Mr Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States last November, he may, perhaps, be relieved to see his name removed from the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Panama City.
Recent reports have shed light on one Alexandre Ventura Nogueira, a salesman of apartments at the property. Mr Nogueira has been charged with fraud, and has admitted that some of his investors have had links to the "Russian mafia".
There is no suggestion Mr Trump was aware of any criminal activity associated with the hotel.LOS ANGELES—The Novelists Guild of America strike, now entering its fourth month, has had no impact on the nation at all, sources reported Tuesday.
The strike, which scholars say could be the longest since 1951, when American novelists may or may not have voluntarily committed to a six-month work stoppage, has brought an immediate halt to all new novels, novellas, and novelettes from coast to coast, affecting no one.
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Nor has America's economy seen any adverse effects whatsoever, as consumers easily adjust to the sudden cessation of any bold new sprawling works of fiction or taut psychological character studies.
"There's a novelists strike?" Ames, IA consumer Carl Hailes said. "That's terrible. When is it scheduled to begin?"
The strike kicked off last fall when the NGA announced it had hit a roadblock in negotiations with the Alliance of Printed Fiction and Literature Producers, failing to resolve certain key issues concerning online distribution, digital media rights, and readers just not getting what writers were trying to do with a number of important allegorical devices.
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After a press conference at the Massachusetts home of NGA president John Updike—who called the strike an attempt by novelists "to give both the sublime and mundane alike their beautiful due"—members of the guild began picketing their studies, desks, and libraries and refusing to work on any further novels until the APFLP and the American reading public agreed to their demands.
So far, sources say, no one has attempted to cross the picket lines, most of which are located in private homes. However, unconfirmed reports indicate that at least one novelist may be breaking the strike by writing under the pseudonym "Richard Bachman."
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"We must, as a people, achieve a resolution to this strike soon," novelist David Foster Wallace said at a rally Monday at Pomona College in Claremont, CA, where he is a professor. "The thought of this country being deprived of its only source of book-length fiction is enough to give one the howling fantods."
"I thank you both for coming," he added.
While the strike has been joined by an estimated 250,000 novelists—225,000 of whom have reportedly stopped in the middle of their first novel—it has done no damage to any measurable sector of the economy, including bookstore chains, newspapers, magazines, all major media, overseas markets, independent film studios, major film studios, actors, editors, animators, carpenters, those in finance or banking, the day-to-day lives of average Americans, or anything else anyone can think of as of press time.
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A report published last week by the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication found that the strike has thus far had an economic impact of approximately 0.00 to 0.01 percent. In addition, consumer habits remain unaffected, with 0 percent of those polled saying their reading habits had changed "significantly," 0 percent saying they had changed "somewhat," and an additional 0 saying they had changed "slightly." A significant number of respondents reported no reading habits.
Although some initially worried that the strike could affect Hollywood by limiting material for television or film adaptation, fears were quelled when studio executives announced in January that they would continue optioning comic books and graphic novels.
The publishing industry itself, which many believed to be most vulnerable, has nonetheless managed to weather the crisis. Publishers have reissued new editions of early, pre-union novelists—such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Jane Austen, both of whom have previously established successful track records—and have seen no no change in monthly sales.
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Some members of the public attempted to express concern over the prospect of the strike going on much longer.
"If this situation is not brought to a halt soon, it could have serious ramifications for, you know, literary culture, I guess," said Kyle Farmer, a Phoenix-area real estate consultant and avid golfer. "It would be tragic if we had to go a whole year without a new novel from Kurt Vonnegut or Norman Mailer," he added, unaware that both authors died in 2007.
No high-profile, red-carpet, star-studded telecasts of the PEN/Faulkner Awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Awards, or the Man Booker Prize Awards were affected by the strike, since no such telecasts have ever existed.Some engineers and environmentalists, however, say 1234yf is not a good option.
“None of the people in the car industry I know want to use it,” said Axel Friedrich, the former head of the transportation and noise division at the Umweltbundesamt, the German equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency. He added that he opposed having another “product in the front of the car which is flammable.”
Dr. Friedrich, an engineer and a chemist, is also a member of the scientific advisory council of the International Council on Clean Transportation, the group that commissioned the tests that exposed Volkswagen’s cheating on diesel emissions. He collaborated on tests of 1234yf with Deutsche Umwelthilfe, a German environmental group, which also raised fire concerns. While cars, obviously, contain other flammable materials, he was specifically worried that at high temperatures 1234yf emitted hydrogen fluoride, which is dangerous if inhaled or touched.
“I wouldn’t like to use it as a car owner, because it gives me a higher risk and higher cost,” Dr. Friedrich said. “It’s a really unfair solution by the car industry. This is not what government and society should have accepted.”
Honeywell and Chemours (which until last year was a unit of DuPont) have been adamant that the product is safe, and they are not alone. After the Daimler issue emerged, SAE International, an engineering consortium that includes all of the major automakers, said 1234yf was “highly unlikely to ignite,” though the issue led to a brief split with German automakers. The Joint Research Center of the European Union has also said there was “no evidence of a serious risk.” It is being used across the auto industry and has gained approval from regulators in the United States and Europe.
“Daimler was the only manufacturer that cited an issue,” said Ken Gayer, vice president and general manager of Honeywell Fluorine Products.
“All other car manufacturers at the time had incorporated 1234yf, which is mildly flammable, into their designs, with modest design changes, and proven to themselves conclusively that they could safely use the product,” he said.
Daimler’s concerns led to a reassessment. “The entire industry stepped back and said, ‘Could we possibly have missed something?’” Mr. Gayer said. “We reviewed all the work we did, and we also ran new tests to try to understand better what Daimler’s issue was.”A new view of multiple sclerosis (MS) may arise from the first extensive study of brain tissue from the earliest hours during a bout of the disease. The results, published February 23, 2004, in the advance on-line edition of the Annals of Neurology, suggest that the earliest event is not, as previously believed, a misguided immune system attack on a brain substance called myelin.
Instead, the first event appears to be the death of the brain cells that produce myelin, triggering a subsequent immune system mop-up operation to clean up the cells and the myelin, said author John W. Prineas, MBBS, of the University of Sydney in Australia.
Multiple sclerosis is an enigmatic disorder of the nerve fibers of the brain and spinal cord. Scarring (sclerosis) replaces myelin, which normally insulates the nerves from damage and speeds electrical conduction through the fibers.
Depending on which nerve fibers are hindered, patients can experience problems ranging from weakness and clumsiness to numbness, visual disturbances, and even emotional and intellectual alterations. In some patients, MS manifests itself in cycles of relapse and remission; in other patients, the disease may progress to a stage of severe debilitation, either slowly or rapidly.
According to Prineas, the study he conducted with coauthor Michael H. Barnett, MBBS, began several years ago while he was working at the New Jersey Medical School in Newark. A fellow neuropathologist in Manhattan asked whether Prineas and his colleagues would be interested in examining brain tissue from a 14-year-old girl who died unexpectedly 17 hours into a relapse.
Sudden death can occur in MS if the damage (or lesion) occurs in parts of the brain that control vital functions such as breathing and blood circulation.
"This patient proved to be unique in the history of multiple sclerosis in that there was lesion available for study that was less than a day old," said Prineas.
According to the dominant theory of MS, when the researchers examined the hours-old lesion, they should have found the beginnings of an immune system attack.
But Prineas and Barnett noticed that the myelin in the lesion was still intact, and there was no evidence that the typical armada of immune system cells and molecules had moved into the area yet. Instead, oligodendrocytes cells, which produce the myelin, were dying. Myelin is, in fact, an extension of oligodendrocytes that wraps itself around nearby nerve fibers.
"This encouraged us to re-examine other early MS cases in our brain bank," said Prineas. "Similar lesions, albeit extremely rare, were identified in a number of other early MS cases, which allowed us to conclude that the changes observed probably occur at the onset of any typical new lesion."
The results could have significant consequences for MS research, much of which is focused on understanding why the immune system attacks myelin. The focus may have to shift to understanding why the myelin-producing cells begin to die.
"The important point, at this stage of our investigation, seems to be that we have no laboratory model for this sort of pathology," said Prineas.
The Annals of Neurology, the preeminent neurological journal worldwide, is published by the American Neurological Association, the world's oldest and most prestigious neurological association. The 1,400 members of the ANA--selected from among the most respected academic neurologists and neuroscientists in North America and other countries--are devoted to furthering the understanding and treatment of nervous system disorders. For more information, visit http://www.aneuroa.org.A teddy bear-faced carnivore from the Andean cloud forests and a ghostly cave snail that travels only a few centimetres per week have been named among the top 10 species of 2014.
The 10 species chosen by an international group of taxonomists from 18,000 new species named last year were announced Thursday by the International Institute for Species Exploration at the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
The goal of the annual list is to draw attention to the loss of biodiversity and the discoveries of new species that are made "even as species are going extinct faster than they are being identified."
"One of the most inspiring facts about the top 10 species of 2014 is that not all of the 'big' species are already known or documented," said Antonio Valdecasas, chair of the selection committee, in a statement, noting the discovery of the cat-sized olinguito in the Andes mountains of South America and the 12-metre tall Kaweesak's dragon tree in Thailand.
The list has been released annually since 2008 in honour of the May 23 birthday of Carolus Linnaeus, an 18th century Swedish botanist considered to be the father of modern taxonomy.Despite restrictions on money and free time partying is integral to North Korean culture. But how does it compare to cutting loose in the South?
Based on the popular image of the DPRK the idea of “having fun in North Korea” might appear as mere black comedy. Life is, indeed, hard for the average North Korean, and the usual enablers of fun – free time and disposable income – are in short supply.
How much do you know about North Korean life? – quiz Read more
In South Korea an excellent road and rail network means that anywhere in the country is within easy reach and people have money to spend on a seemingly endless range of diversions. None of these things are true of North Korea. South Koreans are also not required to attend “self-criticism” sessions and neighbourhood meetings on a regular basis.
However, just like the rest of the world, North Koreans still seek out opportunities to enjoy themselves.
Eumjugamu: an important part of life
The literal meaning of eumjugamu is “drinking, music, and dancing.” The three tend to go together and nowhere more so than in the two Koreas. Although one will very rarely read of it in a “serious” English language book about Korea, Eumjugamu is an important part of life.
Anyone who has spent time in South Korea will attest to the joys of a night out drinking beer and soju (a colourless spirit traditionally based on potatoes or rice), followed by an hour or two in a noraebang (karaoke) room. And as we approach seven decades of division in Korea, the spirit of eumjugamu –
which can be traced back to shamanic tradition and ancient festivals like Dano – is so deeply rooted in Korean culture that those in the North still have an undimmed love for it.
Eumjugamu – drinking, music, dancing – is an important part of life
The DPRK’s leaders have certainly been no exception. Kim Jong-il was known for his love of partying. He was a particularly heavy drinker, who favoured expensive Hennessy cognac. His circle was noted for its alcohol consumption, and his son Kim Jong-un appears to be following suit.
But what of the ordinary North Koreans’ drinking habits? It is impossible for the average North Korean to afford the tequila enjoyed by Kim Jong-un. Most will only have had state-produced drinks like Yangdok-Sul or the famed Taedonggang beer on special occasions, and will probably never have tried any of the powerful fruit-based brews (such as Paektusan Blueberry Wine) that can be bought by foreigners on visits to the country.
Other spirits on sale to tourists include a strong, hangover-inducing pine mushroom soju, and a peculiar alcohol that is apparently made from seal penis.
Customarily, bottles of alcoholic drinks were distributed on the birthdays of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, at New Year, and on the 9 of September – the day the DPRK was founded. These were not working days, so drunkenness was a given.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Soju is the most popular alcoholic beverage in Korea. Photograph: Tracy A Woodward/Getty Images
Today however such distributions are much less reliable.Since this is the era of grassroots capitalism in North Korea, there now exists a growing private trade in alcohol. Mass-market beer is also available, but soju is the most cost-effective and legal way of getting drunk in North Korea.
North Koreans have also always enjoyed homemade moonshine, or nongtaegi. For the majority – especially those in the countryside with little or no disposable income – this remains the only option. Typically, homebrewing will be rudimentary, using corn, fruit or ginseng left to ferment in a bottle or jar, and buried under a pile of clothes for warmth.
The hangover produced by this type of alcohol is considered rather exceptional. Though nongtaegi is illegal, any efforts to stop its production are doomed to failure. Those whose job it is to eradicate it often enjoy it as much as anyone else.
According to one defector, around 80-90% of North Korean men drink every day. There is even a popular song, “Weol, hwa, su, mok, geum, to, il Banju”, which can be translated as “Drink on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday”.
A world away in the capital Pyongyang, the growing elite means that new bars and restaurants are springing up all the time. There are several microbrewery bars that produce their own lagers and ales on site.
Whiskey is prized, and not just as a drink in itself, but also as a kind of currency: a bottle of decent whiskey can make a policeman look the other way, a professor award a top grade, or, indeed, gain a foreign tourist special treatment.
Cutting loose at house parties
Unlike in South Korea, house parties are very common in the North. In a country where public behaviour is subject to a relatively high degree of control, a party at home is a natural way of cutting loose.
University students in Pyongyang live with their parents, just as their counterparts in Seoul do. This makes it difficult for them to party at home – but their solution is to convene in abandoned buildings, of which there are many in the city.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, many students actually enjoy being sent away to the countryside to participate in compulsory agricultural labour: though it infuriates parents to see their children being taken away from the lecture hall to do menial work far away from home, the students themselves use it as an opportunity to party every night and meet members of the opposite sex.
Guitars and karaoke
Among all social classes in North Korea, parties are often enlivened by someone producing a guitar or other instrument, and leading a sing-along. Soju helps the good times roll, and even if the electricity runs out (as it probably will), the house party will keep going by candlelight.
Noraebang machines that hold a library of songs ready for karaoke can also sometimes be found in the homes of wealthier citizens. These machines are the mainstays of singing rooms in South Korea, but it would come as a surprise to most people in Seoul to imagine Pyongyangites keeping them in their apartments.
Soju helps the good times roll, and even if the electricity runs out (as it probably will)
These days, North Koreans also have increased access to foreign music, largely made possible by the MP3 player. Cheap players are brought in from China (as well as the MP3 files themselves).
North Korean pop songs could never be accused of being “cool.” There are plenty of love songs, of course, but their lyrics tend to be rather sanitised. Then there are the songs that no young person really wants to listen to at all: those that praise the ruling family, exhort the listener to work diligently, or deliver nostalgic memories of home towns and mothers. By contrast South Korean pop is about love, sex, and break-ups.
‘Goat chimneys’
Cigarette smoking is common among North Korean men of all social classes. A man who smokes heavily may be referred to in old slang as a yeom-so guldduk – literally meaning “goat chimney”, on account of a famous North Korean cartoon of a smoking goat. Some roll their own cigarettes with pages taken from the state newspaper Rodong Sinmun (though carefully avoiding the tearing of any pictures of ruling family members), and others choose among the dozens of local cigarette brands available in North Korea.
Kim Jong-un himself is a smoker, just as his father and grandfather were. And for the benefit of hardcore Pyongyangologists, it can be revealed here that his preference is for a hitherto little-known local brand named 7.27, named after the date on which the Korean War ended – 27 July. 727 is also used on the number plates of cars driven by the upper elite.
A man who smokes heavily may be referred to in old slang as a yeom-so guldduk - literally, 'goat chimney'
Probably the most well-known cigarette brand outside of North Korea is Pyongyang. These are not the best local cigarettes, though. That honour apparently goes to Craven A. The cigarettes otherwise known as “Cat” – due to the image used as its logo – make an excellent low-level bribe.
Since the year 2000 the government has sporadically engaged in anti-smoking campaigns, with Kim Jong-il himself having described smokers as being among the “three greatest fools” of the 21st century – the others were those who do not appreciate music, and those who are not computer literate.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Members of the Korean People’s Army light cigarettes in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photograph: Eric Lafforgue/Barcroft Media
Other narcotics
In 2013 the international media worked itself up into a state of excitement over North Korea’s apparent status as a weed-smoker’s paradise, but this proved to be a drastic exaggeration. As with many other countries the world over, hemp has long been considered a beneficial plant by Koreans.
As recently as the 1930s, the hemp plant was cultivated in every single province of Korea: many considered it an alternative to tobacco, something else suitable for filling out a hand-rolled cigarette.
Interviews with defectors also suggest that North Koreans are not serious consumers of marijuana. The drug of choice is, in fact, something much more pernicious: crystal meth.
Meth, known colloquially as eoreum or bingdu (both mean “ice”, a name by which the drug is also known in the US) is a drug unfortunately suited to the realities of life in North Korea: it is cheap, requires no elaborate equipment or specialist knowledge to make, and keeps the weary and hungry on their feet – at least until they become addicts.
The North Korean Walter Whites funnelling crystal meth into China Read more
The seeds of North Korea’s meth problem were sown by the state. The regime has long relied on illicit business activities (including drug manufacture) to shore up its finances and help fill the coffers of “Office 39”, the group that exists to make money for the ruling family.
In a short space of time, meth has spread throughout North Korean society, addicting urbanites.
Elites probably smoke more than anyone else though, as they have more money to spend. Several sources claim that taking a hit in front of others involves little stigma, even among respectable middle-aged ajumma meth is also used as a substitute for medicine: many people with chronic diseases who lack the money to pay for proper treatment turn to it for temporary pain relief.
This is an edited extract from North Korea Confidential by Daniel Tudor and James Pearson, which will published in the UK by Tuttle on 14 April 2015
Daniel Tudor is the former Korea correspondent for The Economist and a regular columnist for the Korean newspaper Joongang Ilbo. James Pearson is a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Seoul, covering North and South Korea.Nurx is a small telemedicine app that makes access to birth control and the morning after pill a little more convenient. The app, which has expanded to 13 states and Washington, DC, is simple: for $15 a month, you enter your health and insurance information, choose your birth control preference, and have it delivered to your home. The information is reviewed by a doctor in your state who signs off on the prescription. In theory, Nurx shouldn’t be controversial since all it fundamentally does is eliminate a visit to a gynecologist’s office. The app also provides access to two brands of the morning after pill, Plan B and Ella. As Nurx expands into more states, the accessibility to the morning after pill has anti-abortion groups concerned.
Nurx, it seems, has waded into an old fight that long preceded the app: Namely over whether or not Plan B and Ella are abortifacients and how much government intervention should take place before a woman obtains the morning after pill. Stat News reports:
The Food and Drug Administration has approved a popular brand, Plan B, for over-the-counter sale in all states for women who pay out of pocket. But if a woman is using her insurance benefits to cover the drug, she’ll typically need a prescription for Plan B. And a newer emergency contraceptive, Ella, is only available with a prescription. The app, then, short-circuits this divide and lets insured women easily get the morning-after pill in a way more akin to the over-the-counter interaction.
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By eliminating the step for women using their insurance, the app is essentially working against legislative roadblocks to the morning after pill being constructed in conservative states. Stat notes that nine states have restrictions on emergency contraception, making the morning after pill harder and harder to obtain (particularly if women want to use insurance rather than pay out of pocket).
Those laws have largely been passed in response to anti-abortion advocates who argue that the morning after pill is an abortifacient. This isn’t a particularly new argument—Hobby Lobby used it during their Supreme Court case—but it reflects an increasing commitment from anti-choice groups that life begins at fertilization rather than the implantation of a fertilized egg into the uterine wall. But that stance is out of sync with the realities of women’s bodies. Again via Stat:
[...] according to Susan Wood, an associate professor of health policy at George Washington University. They assume that “a fertilized egg is the same as pregnancy and is the same as a person,” Wood said. She says that’s simply not the case because about half of fertilized eggs never implant in the uterus. “A woman is not pregnant until the egg is implanted and stabilized,” Wood said.
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Regardless, Nurx, as well as state telemedicine laws, seem to be on the legislative agenda for a number of anti-abortion groups. In North Carolina, for example, activists asked lawmakers to review the app as part of the state’s review of its telemedicine laws. It’s likely that as Nurx expands, it will face legislative hurdles or immense pressure to stop providing the morning after pill.The US Supreme Court refused Tuesday to block a law allowing same-sex marriages in Washington DC, clearing the way for the legislation to go into effect Wednesday.
Chief Justice John Roberts, in a three-page opinion that sidestepped the legal issues involved, said the matter should be decided by local courts and decision makers in the US capital city.
Roberts rejected a petition by opponents of gay marriage for a stay that would have prevented the law from taking effect.
“Without addressing the merits of petitioners’ underlying claim… I conclude that a stay is not warranted, Roberts wrote.
Roberts responded to the emergency petition but said |
"The media advisory and accompanying motion on the notice paper were the first we had heard of either."
Last week, Reid won an apology from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after Trudeau said the Conservatives and New Democrats were being actively consulted and seemed to suggest the opposition parties were holding up the process.Read, read, read, read, read.
Go to the library and read up on the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Iraq War, the Iranian Revolution, and the histories of Afghanistan, Poland, and Israel. The older the publication date, the better. All revisionists have an agenda. Then hop on the internet and read up on current events: recent drone strikes, Iran’s last election, Putin’s annexation of Crimea, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions on Voting Rights Act and Same-Sex Marriage, etc. Familiarize yourself with journalistic language, slant, spin, and verbiage. (In fact, go ahead and check out this famous George Orwell Essay: Politics and the English Language Fact-check the debates. (Ignore campaign speeches and the reporting of campaign speeches; they are vacuous fluff akin to pep rallies.) Make a list of every quantitative claim either candidate says and verify it: Last month’s job growth, last year’s GDP, the 1989 nationwide crime rate, the number of abortions performed per day, the gender pay gap, etc. Challenge every adult you know to share what personal experiences led them to believe the way they believe and vote the way they vote. (Note, it is extremely important at this step to talk to people with whom you disagree and to listen and absorb conflicting ideas.) Start a blog. There is no age requirement to post personal essays & ideas on the internet, or to comment on others’. Become engaged. Use the knowledge and understanding you have gained from steps 1–5 to challenge others’ public postings and challenge your challengers’ reactions to yours.
Now, four years will have gone by. The year will be 2020. You will be 18 and eligible to vote for the first time. Donald Trump may be running for reelection. Or, if he loses in 2016, he may be running for a second time in 2020. Even if he’s not on the 2020 ticket, you will still be an informed eligible voter. Don’t vote your heart. Vote your mind.
Note: I admire that you are aware and engaged at such a young age. When I was 14, I didn’t care about politics or history or current events. I never started forming distinct opinions on this stuff until I was in my late twenties. In that regard, you are already eons ahead of me.A series of allegations in Germany and Holland have plunged the Catholic Church into a renewed crisis over how it has dealt with child abuse after it emerged that the Pope's brother ran a renowned choir at the centre of some of the latest claims.
Reports of systematic historical abuse by clergy have surfaced at three schools in the Regensburg diocese in Bavaria. One of them is the much-heralded Regensburger Domspatzen, a thousand-year-old male choir and boarding school, whose choral master for 30 years was the Pope's older brother, Georg Ratzinger.
Monsignor Ratzinger has agreed to testify in any eventual prosecutions – but says that he knew of no abuse. And last night the German Justice Minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, joined a growing chorus of politicians in Berlin to criticise the church over its attitude to the investigation, accusing Catholic institutions of a policy of secrecy.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
"In many schools there was a wall of silence allowing for abuse and violence," said Ms Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a prominent critic of the church. She pointed to a Vatican directive from 2001 which required that even the most damaging allegations should be first investigated internally and then reported to the authorities. A church spokesman called her criticisms "absurd".
A separate sex scandal has also enveloped the Catholic Church in the Netherlands after three people said they were abused at a boarding school run by priests in the 1960s. Since the allegations were published on Friday more than 200 people have come forward to a designated helpline claiming that they were also abused by monks and priests.
The new allegations are a source of major embarrassment to the Vatican, which had been hoping to draw a line under child abuse. Over the past decade the issue has enormously damaged the church's reputation and finances.
The allegations in Germany first surfaced last month when investigators began looking into a series of Jesuit schools, but the scandal broadened out over the weekend into the heart of deeply Catholic Bavaria. The allegations coming out of the Regensburg diocese are particularly awkward because the Pope and his brother spent much of their careers in senior positions there, which will inevitably raise questions as to whether they ever encountered or heard about clergy who sexually abused minors.
Throughout the 1970s Joseph Ratzinger taught theology at the University of Regensburg. His older brother Georg took over the Regensburger Domspatzen in 1964 and, over the next 30 years, helped turn the male-only choir into one of the best in the world.
But he says that he never heard of any abuse in his time with the choir. Asked by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica whether he would talk to German officials, the 86-year-old Mgr Ratzinger replied: "Obviously I'd be ready to do so, but I am not able to provide any information on any deed that could be punished, because I don't have any – I never knew anything about it."
Any abuse at the Regensburger Domspatzen, he said, occurred before he took over. He did admit that pupils at the school were subjected to a climate of "discipline and rigour" but added that this was necessary in order to reach "a high musical, artistic level".
But Franz Wittenbrink, a German composer who lived at the school until 1967, described the school as being run by "a sophisticated system of sadistic punishments in connection with sexual lust". He was also quoted by Der Spiegel as saying that it was "inexplicable" that the Pope's brother knew nothing of what was happening.
The new sex scandals have emerged just weeks after Pope Benedict XVI gave Ireland's bishops a public dressing down for failing to deal with child abuse which he described as a "heinous crime". He also called on Catholic bishops to tackle allegations with "honesty and courage". But, while the Vatican has given its backing to a full investigation of the allegations, the Pope has so far remained personally silent on the matter.
We Are Church, a prominent Christian support network for abuse victims, has now called on the Pope publicly to declare whether he knew of any abuse allegations when he was a bishop.
"He must answer the question about what he knew and what he did about it," said Christian Weisner, the group's German spokesperson.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowSquare Enix may very well call Final Fantasy Versus XIII something else by the time it is finished.
According to a recently change on the Versus game page at Amazon Japan, the title has been marked with ‘tentative’.
Now that means, Square Enix is not decided on the name yet, or we are all thinking too hard about it. Whatever it is, the change was recent, and according to a few rumours out there the game could be called something else just like how Final Fantasy Agito XIII was changed to Type-0.
According to Square Enix, majority of their staff are working on Final Fantasy XIV, so that’s the reason why Versus development has been going so slow. Nomura has been promising some new information for a very long time, but with the recent Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII reveal, it looks like people have to wait even more for it.
Here’s the said screengrab of the title change:
What do you think? Let us know below.Last month, a YouTuber from Crimea commenced a conspiracy when they posted a video called “There are no forests on Flat Earth Wake Up.” In an instant, the worldview of thousands of people flipped upside down.
To be fair, these people already believed that the Earth is a flat disc, with the Arctic at the center and a NASA-guarded periphery. But now they believe this, too: What we call forests are just tiny remnants of an ancient and vibrant world, one that featured trees with trunks as wide as mountains that reached to the heavens.
It’s a bizarre, incredible idea that has taken the Flat Earthers by storm. More than 10,000 video responses have been posted to date, including summaries, reactions, roundtable discussions, and debunks.
Watch those videos, and you will hear people speak of how they approached the idea with skepticism, only to find that it began to resonate with them in a peculiar way. I have a confession to make: it resonated with me, too. Sure, the facts presented did nothing to sway my mind about the size of ancient trees, or the shape of the globe. But the feeling of mourning for a planet as it was before humans collectively took it for all its worth? Yeah, I get that.
Looks like a tree? Must be a tree.
No, really: Flat Earthers and other conspiracy theorists aren’t crazy. Their ideas are illogical, but they are built on a foundation of genuine scientific curiosity. Unfortunately, the investigation of that curiosity gets sidetracked by errors in thinking that are difficult to counteract. Add to the mix the ability to spread ideas and congregate virtually on the internet, and the result is an echo chamber where dissenting voices are easily ignored, and competing arguments only serve to deepen beliefs.
This notion that today’s forests are a poor version of their formers selves is catchy for the same reason as Flat Earth theory in general — the triumph of perceptual and emotional logic over intellectual vigor, in the context of declining trust in authority and an increasing sense of powerlessness and loss of control. I feel that, too.
Here’s how the “no forests” theory plays out: Sure, there are things that we call forests, but these are in reality just low-lying bushes, the impoverished remains of an ecologically rich world that held 40-mile high trees, with trunks two miles across. How do we know? They’ve left their stumps behind. Flat top mountains are remnants of behemoth trees, cut down by impossibly large machines. Jagged mountains are severed stumps of trees that fell or were knocked over in some great calamity — a nuclear war or great fire, perhaps.
Flat-top mountain, or tree stump?
All rock on Earth is not rock — it is merely the rubble left behind of this ancient, sacred forest, which was once completely alive. River valleys are old quarry mines, their steep cliffs carved out by enormous machines. Volcanoes are just heaps of industrial waste left behind from this ravaging of the flat Earth; the toxic chemicals inside them react, generating heat and fire, and the occasional explosion.
Each of these assertions is backed up with side-by-side photos of the geological feature and the thing the narrator imagines it to truly be. The images show amazing similarities. We are challenged to spot ten differences, but we can’t because there are only two: material and size, our narrator contends.
Industrial mining carved the Grand Canyon, according to the theory.
The Earth appears flat, and so it must be so. Devils Tower in Wyoming looks like the petrified stump of a giant tree, so it must be. After all, if you can’t trust your own eyes, what can you trust?
Of course, it’s not true that the mountains used to be trees, but from a wider perspective, the Flat Earthers aren’t completely wrong. We are living on an impoverished version of our planet, undone by our own hands. The forests that remain are shadows of their former selves. We’ve become so accustomed to the world as it is today, that it’s almost impossible to imagine the richness it once held.
Old trees are the exception to the rule on Vancouver Island, where intensive industrial logging has been the norm for more than a century.
There’s a map of an area close to where I live on Vancouver Island, off Canada’s Pacific Coast, that tells you where to go to see the old trees. One tree here, one tree there, a small patch of a few dozen somewhere else. In the top corner of the map an icon of an evergreen marks the spot where an ancient fir tree stands, nicknamed Big Lonely Doug.
I’ve visited some of these trees, and they do seem lonely. Trees, believe it or not, are social beings. They share information and resources through underground networks, and the biggest ones communicate farther and wider than the rest. Darwinian logic would suggest that they must compete for sunlight and nutrients, but there’s evidence of resource sharing and cooperation, even between species. The health of individuals depends on the health of ecosystems. When the surrounding forest was levelled, the last one standing felt it.
The Harris Creek Spruce sits fenced in and alone in a forest of much younger trees.
This has been the approach to preservation in these parts — cut it all down, except the one that is particularly awe-inspiring. Build a fence around it so your kids and grandkids will one day get a glimpse of the forest that once was. It’s the same with elephants and pandas — we spend enormous resources to keep them in cages so we can visit as tourists, even as we fail to preserve what’s left of the habitats they need to survive in the wild.
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In barely more than a hundred years, Vancouver Island has gone from an ancient forested wilderness with individual trees over a thousand years old, to what is, in essence, an eight-million-acre tree farm. By the estimate of the Ancient Forest Alliance, three-quarters of the old growth forest on Vancouver Island and southwest British Columbia is gone. In the most productive river valleys, only nine percent of this ancient ecosystem remains. If you were to take one tree out of ten from these forests, you would have literally decimated it. These river valley landscapes have been decimated 20 times over.
The dark green shows areas of productive old growth forests before industrial logging and in 2012. Yellow areas have been clear cut or otherwise disturbed at least once.
In tree farms, humans operate large machines to chop down the trees in clearcut blocks, and they are trucked away to lumber yards and paper mills. The forests are not left to regenerate naturally. Instead, human tree planters come along with nursery-grown saplings, their roots entangled with fertilizer and fungicide-rich soil to speed their growth, and they insert them into the soil at regular intervals. Over the years, humans visit these plantations with chainsaws or herbicide sprays to push back competing species — which are defined not by a lack of ecological value but by a lack of profitability. Eighty or a hundred years later, when these trees are still in their adolescence, they will be razed again, and the cycle will start anew.
Just like industrial agriculture, industrial tree farming greatly impoverishes the environment where it takes place. Tree stands that are all the same age (and, often, all the same species) lack natural defence systems against pests, disease, and fire. Human interventions to keep our investments safe are typically ineffective or short-lived.
A clearcut forest on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula.
The Flat Earthers are wrong about the rock and the mountains, but they aren’t wrong to say we’re living on the dead corpse of a once-vibrant planet. When humans spread across the planet tens of thousands of years ago, massive die-offs followed, particularly of the large animals that are so critical to ecosystem health. Over the last 200 years, human destructiveness has picked up steam, with fossil fuel burning bringing unprecedented climate shifts. At the same time, the population is exploding, and more and more resources are pulled from the Earth to support our insatiable demand.
It’s possible that today’s Earth holds just a tenth of the abundance that it once did, contends J.B. MacKinnon in his book, The Once and Future World. The silver lining is that while the amount of life supported by this planet has fallen, its capacity to support life is unchanged. The return of nature doesn’t necessarily require the end of the human species, but it will require us to invite wilderness back in — not just to partitioned-off protected areas, but into all aspects of life.
Dinosaurs born after the asteroid impact didn’t know they were in the process of going extinct. The event itself was cataclysmic, but the die-off that followed probably took thousands of years, too long for any individual animal to notice that anything had changed at all. For humans, too, our perception is distorted by an amnesia for what has come before.
The dinosaurs (except for birds) were gone forever, but their absence was an opportunity for mammals to spread out and diversify, emerging from tiny mouse-like things over millions of years to the extraordinary diversity of Ice Age giants. The Pacific coastal forests, as they once were, are gone forever, too. Mountains will never be tree stumps, but ancient forests will rise again.SEE RELATED STORY: Four supervisors voice support to search for new police chief
One of San Francisco’s supervisors is now echoing the calls of protesters for The City to begin searching for a new police chief.
Supervisor Jane Kim, who is also running for state Senate in November, on Wednesday became the first high-level political official to call for the removal of Chief Greg Suhr.
“It is clear that we need a change to address these systemic problems and bring our city together,” Kim said in a statement Wednesday. “Chief Greg Suhr has served San Francisco for over 30 years and we should thank him for that service. But even he must acknowledge that leading a culture shift in that department would be easier and faster if there was new leadership there.
“It is time to launch a search for a new chief who can implement fundamental reform.”
Kim’s statement comes in the wake of preliminary findings by an independent Blue Ribbon panel that found systemic problems in the San Francisco Police Department.
On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors peppered Mayor Ed Lee with questions about police reform after the legislators were themselves berated by protesters and the hunger strikers known as the “Frisco 5.”
Lee has remained in support of Suhr, even reiterating that support in a meeting with reporters Tuesday where he announced additional funding to aid his already large package of reforms. Suhr has meanwhile repeatedly said he has no plans on leaving his post.
Suhr did not immediately reply to a request for comment Wednesday.
Kim is the first high-level elected official to publicly support naming a new chief, even as protesters have been calling for his firing since the shooting death of Mario Woods Dec. 2, 2015. The City Attorney’s Office has said police acted lawfully when they shot Woods after he refused to drop a knife, but civil rights attorneys have disputed that finding. Video footage also indicates Woods did not raise the knife at officers just before he was shot.
While Kim praised Suhr’s service, she said his position has become untenable if The City wants reforms to go forward.
“The reality is that as long as Chief Suhr continues to lead this department, as long as we focus on City Hall politics rather than the best interests of The City, we will be unable to truly address the very serious problems raised by this report and the very serious concerns raised by residents of San Francisco.”
Her statement continued:
“Simply asking for new training or new money is not enough. We need new leadership as well, and to make that shift in a way that protects the public and our police officers we should launch a national search at once. Perhaps we will find a candidate from the department who is ready to lead change. Perhaps we will not. But we owe it to the public and the police to find the very best leadership for our department.”
Read more criminal justice news on the Crime Ink page in print. Follow us on Twitter: @sfcrimeink
Click here or scroll down to commentMore than 77,000 people aged 120 or over – 884 aged 150 or higher – are listed on government records as still alive
More than 230,000 Japanese people listed as 100 years old cannot be located and many may have died decades ago, according to a government survey released today.
The justice ministry said the survey found that more than 77,000 people listed as still alive in local government records would have to be aged at least 120, and 884 would be 150 or older.
The figures have exposed antiquated methods of record-keeping and fuelled fears that some families are deliberately hiding the deaths of elderly relatives in order to claim their pensions.
The nationwide survey was launched in August after police discovered the mummified corpse of Sogen Kato, who at 111 was listed as Tokyo's oldest man, in his family home 32 years after his death.
Kato's granddaughter has been arrested on suspicion of abandoning his body and receiving millions of yen in pension payments after his unreported death.
Soon after came the discovery that a 113-year-old woman listed as Tokyo's oldest resident had not been seen by her family for more than 20 years. Welfare officials have yet to locate Fusa Furuya, who was last seen in about 1986.
Japan's failure to maintain accurate records of its oldest citizens is also being blamed on strict privacy laws and weakening family and community ties. "It appears that these people were isolated, given that it is unclear whether they are dead or alive despite the family registration system," the justice minister, Keiko Chiba, told reporters.
The survey uncovered 234,354 centenarians who are listed as still alive but whose addresses could not be confirmed. Ministry officials suspected some deaths went unreported in the confusion that followed the end of the second world war, while other people may have lost touch with relatives or moved overseas without informing the authorities.
The discovery has proved a major embarrassment in a country that supposedly reveres its oldest citizens.
Every September people who have just turned, or are about to turn, 100, receive a congratulatory letter and a trophy from the prime minister.
The debacle is partly a symptom of the bureaucratic struggle to maintain accurate records in one of the world's fastest-ageing societies: more than one in five Japanese are aged 65 or over.
According to the health ministry, the country has 40,399 centenarians with confirmed addresses, more than triple the number a decade ago. Japanese women can now expect to live an average of 86.4 years – the longest life expectancy in the world – while the average among men is 79.6 years.
The government said the findings would have a minimal impact on longevity figures, which are based on census data collated during home visits. In addition, men over 98 and women over 103 are not factored into life expectancy calculations.Last week, I was out in Long Island scouting around Jericho Turnpike, which, if you’ve never had the pleasure of driving, is one of those hellish, strip mall-lined highways with traffic lights that are perfectly synchronized to make your travel time as long as possible.
As I was driving, I happened to notice a McDonalds sign up ahead. Nothing too special about that, except where the McDonalds should have been, there seemed to be a big white mansion. Maybe it was around back or something?
And then I realized…
The mansion was the McDonalds.
Holy. Crap.
This 100+ year old Georgian mansion is indeed a McDonalds, and while well known to locals, it totally caught me by surprise. I practically expected a maitre d’ to greet me as I went inside.
Known as the Denton House, its bones date back to 1795, when it was constructed as a farm house by one Joseph Denton, a descendent of the founder of the village of Hempstead. In 1860, it was given a Georgian makeover, complete with gingerbread ornamentation, and throughout the 1900’s, found commercial use as a funeral home and a series of restaurants.
By 1986, it was abandoned and on the verge of falling down.
McDonalds purchased the property with the intention of tearing it down and replacing it with a standard McDonald’s restaurant. Thank God for the citizens of the New Hyde Park, who worked to secure landmark status for the building in 1987.
McDonald’s had no choice but to restore the property and work within the parameters of the landmarks commission, which ultimately resulted in their most beautiful restaurant in America (if you know of a better example, please let me know).
It was decided to restore the property to its 1926 appearance, based on an old photograph. Opened in the early 1990’s, the house remains in fantastic shape to this day.
One of the mansion’s most striking aspects is its beautiful glassed-in veranda…
…which offers a pretty unique McDonald’s eating experience (how cool would it be if it was actually open, or covered by screens?).
But the details continue around on its eastern side…
…from its shuttered windows and brick chimneys to its eaves dripping with gingerbread ornamentation:
The western half is equally stately…
…though, er, methinks the drive-through might not be original to the Denton farmhouse:
But had someone showed me this picture, I would have NEVER guessed it was a McDonald’s.
Unfortunately, the inside has been totally gutted and redone without much inspiration.
Still, it is far more unique than your typical McDonald’s, with a grand staircase leading to an upstairs dining area.
Also, there’s something fascinating about being in an enormous open-air mansion, and I definitely appreciate how the roof has been revealed.
Almost as an afterthought, the small ordering area is nestled to one side:
I love the New Hyde Park McDonald’s, if for no better reason than how clearly it makes the argument for historic preservation. We can live in a world of this…
…or this:
Really don’t have anything else to add.
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And hey, if you've made it this far, why not follow us via RSS, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tumblr?The mountain Labour still needs to climb in terms of economic credibility has been revealed by an exclusive LabourList/Survation poll, which shows that nearly half of all voters (46.8%) believe that Labour “cannot be trusted with the economy”. Less than one-third (30.1%) believe that Labour can be trusted with the nation’s finances.
This question kicks off a set of polling data which we’ll be revealing each day this week on LabourList, as we seek to find a way towards “Securing Economic Credibility” for the party in a way that is also true to Labour values and electorally viable.
Yet crafting an economic message that can win through in an election campaign won’t be easy with Labour facing such widespread disdain over its economic plans. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Tory voters don’t believe that Labour can be trusted on the economy (which obviously skews the results somewhat), but a worrying 11% of those who voted Labour in 2010 and 9% of those who are currently planning to vote Labour have also failed to be convinced by Labour’s economic plans. Lib Dem voters – both those who backed the party in 2010 and those who plan to vote Lib Dem now – are also more likely than not to believe that Labour can’t be trusted with the economy.
In none of the segments of our poll (gender/age group/region) do those who trust Labour on the economy outnumber those who distrust the party, indicating that even in Labour’s heartlands and strongest demographic groups there is real pessimism that the party has the necessary answers on the economy and has learned the lessons of the past. This distrust of the party is particularly pronounced amongst voters aged 55+, nearly two-thirds (58.6%) of whom think that the party can’t be trusted to run the exchequer.
Both Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are set to give speeches this week outlining Labour’s approach on the economy, and both are acutely aware that as things stand the party lacks the fiscal credibility we need to win in 2015. Yet whilst there has been much talk already of both men using this week to set out “tough choices” on spending, and show that the party can be fiscally responsible (i.e. make cuts), it isn’t yet clear that the party will be using this week to make the case for a genuinely Labour, growth-driven approach to the economy.
Our data, which we’ll be bringing you over the coming days, suggests that there is an audience out there for a message that both Ed Miliband and Ed Balls could advocate powerfully, and would resonate far beyond those who voted Labour in 2010, or even those who are currently planning to back the party in 2015…
Survation interviewed 1,121 adults aged 18 and over via online panel on May 24th 2013. The results have been weighted to the profile of all adults, and the data for the question referred to in this post can be found hereAuthorities have arrested a 69-year-old man who they say was planning a mass shooting at an Islamic center in Jacksonville, Florida.
Bernandino Gawala “Nandie” Bolatete faces charges of knowingly receiving and possessing a silencer without registering it as required by federal law, according to the authorities.
At a Monday press conference, Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams said Bolatete, “had expressed a strong anti-Islamic sentiment” and “had weaponry to carry out the attack.”
A criminal complaint released by authorities said Bolatete had been under investigation since October, when a tipster notified authorities of the alleged plot. Authorities said they immediately devised a plan to protect the mosque and to have an undercover officer befriend Bolatete, a Jacksonville resident.
“Due to many safeguards we had in place during this investigation, at no time were … any of the members of (the center) at risk,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Charles Spencer said Monday.
Bolatete was arrested Friday after buying a silencer from the undercover officer. The suspect could face more charges, officials said.
FBI Authorities say Bernandino Gawala "Nandie" Bolatete was plotting a mass shooting.
The complaint contains chilling excerpts of comments allegedly made by Bolatete during extensive recorded conversations and text messages. According to police, he told the undercover officer that his health was declining due to kidney problems and he wanted to “shoot up” a mosque before he died.
“I just want to give these freaking people a taste of their own medicine … they are the ones who are always doing these shootings,” Bolatete wrote in a Nov. 14 text message, authorities said.
According to the FBI, Bolatete said he planned to carry out the attack at the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida on St. Johns Bluff Road.
Bolatete told the undercover officer he owned several guns, including an AR-15 rifle, police said. He also allegedly had planned the attack down to where he intended to start shooting – from inside the mosque’s tower.
“It will be great,” Bolatete told the undercover officer, according to the criminal complaint.
FBI Bernandino Gawala "Nandie" Bolatete allegedly purchased a silencer from an undercover officer.
At another point in the conversation, Bolatete allegedly said he was prepared to die during the attack.
“I’m not thinking of getting caught … I’ll die there in that area,” he said, according to police. “They’ll be some sort of suicide thing … suicide by police.”
The suspect also allegedly confessed to killing a police officer in the Philippines after an argument about a parking spot. The date and validity of that alleged incident is not yet known.
A bond hearing is set for Bolatete Tuesday afternoon at the federal courthouse in Jacksonville.
A former co-worker of Bolatete told News4Jax that she was shocked to learn of his arrest.
“He’s a sweet old man who wouldn’t hurt a fly,” she said, adding that she’d never heard him say anything derogatory about Muslims.
Bolatete works at a liquor store, his brother, Pete Bolatete, told the television station.
“He is a gun aficionado. He likes to collect guns,” the brother said. “Really, we talk about what we are going to do when we retire and go back to the Phillipines. Talking about, maybe starting a gun club.”President Obama announced Wednesday that he will deny a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, blaming Republicans for imposing a "rushed and arbitrary deadline" which he said did not give officials enough time.
GOP lawmakers immediately excoriated the president for the decision. House Speaker John Boehner said Obama is "selling out American jobs for politics," and said Republicans in Congress would continue to push for the pipeline.
The decision does not necessarily kill the project. The State Department said the denial "does not preclude any subsequent permit application" -- and within hours pipeline company TransCanada announced that it would reapply for a permit.
But the decision at least delays the project, one that unions and GOP lawmakers alike said would be a boon for job creation as well as energy security.
"Until this pipeline is constructed, the U.S. will continue to import millions of barrels of conflict oil from the Middle East and Venezuela and other foreign countries," TransCanada said in a statement Wednesday, saying it is "disappointed" by the administration's call. "Thousands of jobs continue to hang in the balance if this project does not go forward."
Obama administration officials and congressional Republicans were pointing the finger squarely at each other over the decision.
The White House claimed Republicans' decision to attach a pipeline provision to the short-term payroll tax cut extension last year scuttled the project -- that provision compelled the Obama administration to make a decision on the pipeline in two months.
Obama, in a written statement, said that deadline "prevented a full assessment of the pipeline's impact."
"This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people," Obama said. "I'm disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my administration's commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil."
The State Department made the initial recommendation to Obama on the grounds that there wasn't enough time to review. Obama agreed with that recommendation. According to the White House, Obama called Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to "personally convey" that decision.
But Republicans accused Obama of playing politics and expressed concern that the decision would kill jobs -- 20,000 of them, according to House Republican Leader Eric Cantor.
"The president has showed through his actions that those actions do not match that rhetoric, and by deciding to block the development of the Keystone pipeline, he has essentially decided to block the creation of 20,000 new jobs," Cantor said Wednesday.
The decision reverberated on the 2012 campaign trail, as the Republican presidential candidates joined congressional Republicans in blasting the president.
Newt Gingrich called the decision "stunningly stupid," on the grounds that it kills construction jobs and endangers energy security. He also warned that the decision would compel Canada to sell its oil to China.
"What Obama will have done is kill jobs, weaken American energy security, and driven Canada into the hands of China out of sheer, utter stupidity," he said.
For three years, the State Department has been reviewing the initial proposal to run a pipeline from Canada down to Texas through a sensitive Nebraska aquifer -- authority it has because of the transnational path the route takes. The pipeline had been through several other federal, state and local approvals, but the department backed away from signing off on the plan last year after environmentalists and local lawmakers complained.
Industry workers and Republicans contend the project would create thousands of jobs, and Canada's prime minister has warned if the U.S. can't get on board, the North American nation will look to team with China.
"Unfortunately Prime Minister Harper of Canada just this week said because of the volatile indecisiveness on the part of this president, that they feel they are being held hostage and they will take their energy elsewhere specifically to Asia and China," Jack Gerard, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, told Fox News Radio.
In December, Congress attached to the payroll tax cut a deadline of 60 days for the State Department to determine approval for an alternative route. The language says if Obama rejects the pipeline, Obama must then issue a report to Congress "that provides a justification for determination, including consideration of economic, employment, energy security, foreign policy, trade and environmental factors."
On Tuesday, Obama's own jobs council suggested that it agrees with the pipeline concept. While not specifically mentioning Keystone in a report out Tuesday about improving competitiveness, the council said that when it comes to energy projects in general, the government needs to "expeditiously, though cautiously, move forward on projects that can support hundreds of thousands of jobs."
"We think this all-in energy strategy can create significant economic growths and significant job creation," said Lewis Hay, NextEra Energy CEO and a member of the president's job council.
Obama has noted his environmental concerns when it comes to energy exploration, but insisted Tuesday that a balance could be found.
"I think the recommendations are sound. We see enormous potential in production of traditional fossil fuels," he said without mentioning Keystone.
As oil prices rose Wednesday on fresh signs the U.S. economy was improving, which could lead to stronger demand for gasoline and other energy products, the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, argued that the pipeline doesn't make the U.S. any more energy secure just because it would get oil from a close neighbor and friend.
Instead of carrying common crude oil, the Keystone XL pipeline would carry thick, toxic bitumen for refining in the Gulf states, effectively transporting pollution from Canada to the United States," reads the NRDC report..
"It is not in the national interest to lock the United States into supporting an expensive and dirty form of oil for many years to come. Also, additional capacity for tar sands oil perpetuates America's addiction to oil, and undermines the clean energy alternatives that would bring genuine energy security," |
Pew Environmental Group was titled “Unexamined Risks, Unacceptable Consequences.” The 135-page report did not mince its words on the dangers posed by oil operations in the Arctic.
It stated that “remote location, extreme climate and dynamic sea ice exacerbate the risks and consequences of oil spills while complicating cleanup.” It stated that cleanup technology in icy waters was “unproved” and that a blowout “could devastate an already stressed ecosystem.”
Shell Vice President Pete Slaiby, head of operations for Alaska, said he understands the concerns of native people as well as the fears of environmental conservation organizations that a catastrophic oil spill would be impossible to contain if it were to be trapped in the ice.
"I understand the fear, but I don’t share it. And I’ll explain why,” Slaiby said, speaking in late August at the Arctic Imperative Summit, a gathering of global leaders in business, government, the environment and the native people of the Arctic.
“I’m here today because the company I work for believes as I do that offshore exploration can be done in a way that protects the environment. We can co-exist with the subsistence users and provide benefits and security to the entire nation and local stakeholders alike,” said Slaiby, who is well known in Alaska as the face of confidence and candor for big oil’s bold pursuit of offshore oil in Alaska.
And there is much to pursue. A 2008 study by the US Geological Survey found the Arctic to hold 90 billion barrels of oil and 1.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or about 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and about 30 percent of its natural gas. Alaska has since the late 1970s benefited from large oil fields on shore in the North Slope. It has known about offshore Arctic oil since the late 1980s, but only now with advanced methods of drilling and the historic melt has it become feasible to go after it in a big way.
Vast oil fields, said by geologists to rival those of Texas and Saudi Arabia, lie about 60 miles off this tiny village on the Chukchi Sea. It is an irony as biting as the frigid temperatures that will set in here in the autumn that the very oil companies that contributed so much to global warming now stand to benefit from the dramatic melt it is causing.
This story is presented by The GroundTruth Project.U.S. federal biologist Jay Orr never knows what's going to come up in nets lowered to the ocean floor off Alaska's remote Aleutian Islands, which separate the Bering Sea from the rest of the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes it's stuff he has to name.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biologist is part of a group that uses trawl nets to survey commercially important fish species such as cod in waters off Alaska. Sometimes those nets come up with things no one has seen before.
With co-authors, Orr has discovered 14 kinds of new snailfish, a creature that can be found in tide pools but also in the deepest parts of the ocean. A dozen more new snailfish are waiting to be named. Additional species are likely to be found as scientists expand their time investigating areas such as the Bering Sea Slope, in water 200 to 1,600 metres deep, or the 7.8-kilometre deep Aleutian Trench.
"I suspect we are just scraping the top of the distributions of some of these deep-water groups," Orr said from his office in Seattle.
Five boats with six researchers each surveyed Alaska waters in late June. The teams trawl on the Bering Shelf every summer and in either Aleutian waters or the Gulf of Alaska every other year.
'We don't know what these are'
The scientists put down a 40-metre trawl net that captures whatever is along the ocean bottom. A ton of fish is a standard sample. Along with fish, they get clues to the seafloor habitat. Sponges, for example, indicate a hard seafloor, or substrate.
A 2002 photo taken during the second leg of the Aleutian Islands survey shows a snailfish. The Alaska Fisheries Science Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has helped name more than a dozen new species over the last decade. (James Orr/NOAA Fisheries/Alaska Fisheries Science Center via AP)
Fifteen years ago, research biologist Michael Martin suggested a small modification: a net just under a metre wide at the front of the trawl net.
"We realized we didn't have a really good picture of the substrate that we were trawling over, and we figured we were missing some things in the big meshes that the larger net had," Orr said. "So one of the other guys here decided to put this little net on, mainly as a means to see what the substrate looked like."
On one of the first hauls, the small net returned with a variety of small, soft-bodied fish, including snailfish, that likely would have fallen out or gotten mashed in the main net. Orr took a look and knew they had found something different.
As someone who studies fish, "I sort of knew what I was looking for and what was known out there," he said. "The first ones that came up, I saw them right away and said, `We don't know what these are. These haven't been named."'
Naming the new species
Snailfish have no scales, feel gelatinous and look like fat tadpoles. Aristotle described a Mediterranean variety found in ancient Greece as "sea slugs."
Orr has wide latitude for giving new species both common and Latin names. A red, white and black snailfish with a big, bulbous nose struck him as funny-looking. He gave it the common name of "comic snailfish" and the Latin name Careproctus comus, after Comus, the god of comedy in Greek mythology.
Snailfish made headlines in 2014 when researchers recorded them swimming about eight kilometres below the surface in the Marianas Trench, making them the deepest-dwelling vertebrate on the planet. The Marianas Trench is about 320 kilometres southwest of the Pacific island of Guam and is known as the deepest part of the world's oceans.
A critical part of the work is on the species his agency actively manages. Orr helped distinguish the northern rock sole, which spawns and grows differently than other rock sole. Fishing at the wrong time could disrupt a population important to the seafood market.
"Ultimately we're managing an ecosystem," Orr said. "It's really important to know what each of the elements are."A few weeks back, it was uncovered that Microsoft was working on a new application under the Skype umbrella that would take on Slack. The product, called Skype Teams, is in development and the company is gearing up to start testing it with select clients around the globe.
The application has been in development for roughly 18 months and the company is now testing it privately with a select group of testers. The current plan, at this time, is to expand the beta tests in November with a full release in January; these plans could change at any time but are the current roadmap for release according to sources who asked not to be named.
Skype Teams will be part of Office 365 and will be available to anyone who is already subscribed to a business plan, likely starting with E3 SKU. Skype Teams integrates deeply with your Office 365 content as well, with the ability to share your calendar inside the app as well as join meetings too.
To no surprise, this application is built on the company’s new cloud platform and very well may be the future of Skype for Business. Make no mistake, Microsoft is going for the jugular on Slack with this product as many corporate customers already use Office 365 and with this product being bundled into that service, there will be no need to pay for Slack.
Because this application has been in development for over a year, early previews are of a higher quality than we typically see from preview/beta applications. Those who are able to test the application say that it works without any major hiccups and that you can tell the team has dedicated a significant amount of resources to make sure that when SkypeTeams launches, it is on par with Slack.
Microsoft also plans to support a wide variety of platforms with the company listing Windows, OS X, iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
Microsoft has been positioning itself as a productivity focused company for several years and many have wondered why they never purchased Slack as it fits nicely into their portfolio. It is said that executives inside the company tried to convince senior management to make a bid for the company last year but those efforts were shot down in favor of internal products.
Seeing as we now have a better look at Skype Teams and how the company will position the product within its Office 365 portfolio, it makes sense why Microsoft did not buy Slack. The big outstanding question is how Microsoft will convince companies who are on Slack to move to Skype Teams and if it will be possible to bring that Slack data and ingest it into the new Skype product.Several hundred military vehicles, including mobile intercontinental ballistic missile complexes (ICBMs), are taking part in extensive field exercises throughout Russia, training in counter-sabotage and performing simulated launch drills.
About 400 military vehicles, among them autonomous missile launchers Topol, Topol-M and Yars, accompanied by command posts, security vehicles, anti-sabotage complexes armed with drones and combat robots are out in the open for drills, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement.
Land-based mobile missile systems must be protected at every stage while on the patrol, which lasts up to a month. The military vehicles are rolling through the woods from the European part of Russia to the remote wilderness of the Altay Region.
The crews of mobile ICBM complexes are always training quick relocations, missile prelaunch tests and equipment readiness. This time the focus of the drills is counter-sabotage measures.
Counter-sabotage protection of ICBM convoys is maintained by special units armed with necessary technical means to detect ‘enemy’ forces waiting on the route of the convoy and to eliminate the threat.
At the ‘heart’ of the counter-sabotage effort of each convoy is Taifun-M armored reconnaissance vehicle developed specially for the Russian strategic missile forces. It operates a whole range of sensors, radars and scanners, controlling the space around the missile convoy. It can detect any suspicious human activity several kilometers away, also using a UAV, and guide a special unit accompanying the convoy on target, suppress electric circuits of roadside mines etc.
The ICBM convoys will simulate passing radiation contaminated territories, repelling attacks from the air and from the ground, and also counteracting with other troops operating within the area of their responsibility.
The summit of the drills is going to be conducting simulated launches by crews of mobile ICBM complexes taking part in the exercise, the ministry said.
16 intercontinental drills: Russian missile forces to double test launches in 2016 https://t.co/gHhGDVb8FCpic.twitter.com/sKaEHPxRTD — RT (@RT_com) January 10, 2016
In January 2016, Russia’s missile corps announced plans to conduct 16 intercontinental ballistic missile launches this year, double that of 2015.
By the end of 2016, strategic missile forces plan to conduct about 120 command, tactical and special exercises to maintain maximum readiness throughout the year.
US missile shield can't protect vs massive Russian ICBM attack – chief of missile forces https://t.co/WGqWZ01Gv7pic.twitter.com/pJcrdeehPd — RT (@RT_com) December 16, 2015
The Russian strategic missile forces, formed December 17, 1959, consist of 40 regiments and support and security units. About 500 operational crews made up of approximately 6,000 personnel remain on duty at all times.
Nuclear missile forces are armed with six principal types of missiles: three stationary silo-based versions and three mobile ones. The Russian nuclear deterrent force also includes naval and air-based components.The Brazil nut tree is one of 85 species identified by researchers as having been domesticated or exploited by Amazon peoples over the last several thousand years. Image: Marco Simola (CIFOR) via flickr
New studies show the effect of climate change on fish in the Amazon, and find evidence that human impact on the rainforest goes back thousands of years.
LONDON, 8 March, 2017 – Climate change driven by human action has begun to register in the fish markets of the Amazon, according to new research.
And a second, independent, study suggests that the Amazon has always been subject to change – humans had influenced the vegetation patterns in the world’s biggest rainforest long before Columbus crossed the Atlantic and European nations launched the Industrial Revolution.
In the first study, in the journal Scientific Reports, Brazilian and US scientists looked at fish survey statistics and hydrological records in the central Amazon over the years 1999 to 2014.
They found a direct link between the quantities of water and its quality and the types and numbers of fish species found.
The effect of drought
The most dramatic change followed a severe drought in the region in 2005: neither the water regime nor the fish available in the markets has returned to its previous state, say the researchers.
One of the region’s most valuable species, the tambaqui or Colossoma macropomum has declined in abundance in the area under study since the drought.
This species flourishes on the fruits and seeds that fall in the flooded forests, and is obviously sensitive to changes in rainfall and river flow.
“The Amazon region is showing evidence of altered rainfall patterns. Until this study, with few exceptions, studies of potential effects of climate change in the Amazon have focused on forests and other organisms on land,” says Kirk Winemiller, a professor in the wildlife and fisheries sciences department of Texas A&M University in the US, and one of the authors.
“But since the drought, many fish species are less abundant within the study area, while others have increased. Smaller species with high reproductive rates have increased, while large species, including those with the highest consumer market value, have become less prevalent.”
But although commercially valuable species such as the tambaqui evolved naturally to graze on a vegetarian bonanza made possible by annual floods of the rainforest, even its fruit diet may have been enhanced by human change.
“This lays to rest the long-standing myth of the ‘empty Amazon’. Even areas that look empty today are crowded with ancient footprints”
A study in the journal Science suggests that the forest may not have been pristine for many millennia. A huge international study has found that tree species domesticated and distributed by indigenous peoples long before the European settlement continue to play an important role in the composition of the forests.
The researchers looked at data from 1,170 plots of forest and identified 85 species – among them cocoa, manioc and the Brazil nut – that were domesticated or exploited by Amazon peoples over the last several thousand years.
Domesticated species
These species were five times more common in surveys of the 16,000 tree species in the Amazon than non-domesticated plants, and they were more common and more diverse in the forests closest to archaeological sites.
It remains possible that, rather than spreading their favoured species, humans chose to live close to naturally richer resources. But the researchers think humanity had a hand in changing forest composition, if only because some species were found in places far from their natural ecological niches.
“This lays to rest the long-standing myth of the ‘empty Amazon’,” says Charles Clement, senior researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Amazon Research, in Manaus, and a co-author.
“Early European naturalists reported scattered indigenous populations living in huge and apparently virgin forests, and that idea has continued to fascinate the media, policy makers, development planners and even some scientists.
“This study confirms that even areas of the Amazon that look empty today are crowded with ancient footprints.” – Climate News NetworkThe Kelowna Rockets were too much for the Kamloops Blazers on Saturday night. The Rockets jumped out to a 5-0 lead midway through the game and cruised to a 5-0 victory.
The Rockets opened the scoring 3:05 into the first period. Riley Stadel finished off a play on an odd man rush to give the Rockets a 1-0 lead. Dalton Yorke of the Rockets scored in similar fashion as he jumped up in the play and buried a goal to make it 2-0 for the Rockets after the first period. The Blazers outshot the Rockets 10-9 in the period.
The second period was all Rockets as they scored 55 seconds into the period. Cole Linakar had two chances in front and scored on the second one to make it 3-0. Shortly later, Jordan Bortsmayer scored on abreakaway and Joe Gatenby from the point as the Rockets built up a 5-0 led only 6:11 into the second period.
Connor Ingram played half the game as he finished with 13 saves on 18 shots. Cole Kehler came in for his first WHL preseason action, and he was tested early. Kehler played well in the period as the Blazers continued to trail 5-0 and were outshot 18-3 in the period.
The Blazers struggled generating offense for most of the night. They had a few sparse chances in the third period, but couldn’t beat goaltender Jackson Whistle in a 5-0 loss.
Kehler had an outstanding game stopping all 19 shots he faced in the second half. The Blazers and Rockets both went 0-for-3 on the power play.
The Blazers have the week to prepare as they go to Vancouver next week to play the Victoria Royals on Saturday, September 6 at 3:00pm and the Vancouver Giants on Sunday, September 7 at 5:00pm. Both games will be played at Sungod Arena in Delta.Audio of the dispatch call from a Mandalay Bay security guard capturing the pivotal moment before Stephen Paddock opened fire on thousands of unsuspecting concert-goers in Las Vegas, Nevada, has been released.
The 24-second audio released Friday contains the voice of security guard Jesus Campos, 25, as he reports “shots fired” at Mandalay Bay from the 32nd floor of the hotel-casino.
Read more
“Hey, there are shots fired in 32-135,” Campos says, according to the audio released by MGM Resorts International.
Campos was referring to the room number where Paddock brought a large cache of weapons, and had been preparing to fire on the crowd watching the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival across the street from the hotel.
When Campos approached Paddock’s hotel room, Paddock shot him in the leg. The shooter also had cameras positioned on a cart outside his room and on his door as well. Paddock fired some 200 rounds at the door while Campos was outside. The security guard was struck one time, police said, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Paddock carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, killing 58 people, and injuring hundreds more.
Since the October 1 massacre, Campos has only spoken about the incident one time, when he talked with Ellen Degeneres on her television show, which aired on October 18.
On the show, he described how he called in the report about shots being fired to hotel security after being shot in the leg. The hotel, and the police, have not yet said when authorities from the hotel notified police of the shooting. Paddock continued to fire his gun for 10 uninterrupted minutes.
At an October 13 news conference, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo noted that an earlier timeline of events released by police, which suggested Paddock shot Campos six minutes before he started firing into the crowd at 9:59pm on October 1, may not have been accurate, according to the AP.
READ MORE: Las Vegas shooter's laptop hard drive missing, brother charged with child porn
Lombardo said that 9:59pm was when the security guard first reported that he had came across a doorway that Paddock blocked off.
The audio clip was not released with a timestamp, and no explanation from MGM was given as to why the clip is just being released now, the LA Times reported.A rock climber on North Vancouver's Crown Mountain fell to his death Wednesday while his partner tried in vain to save him.
North Shore Rescue's Mike Danks says the two men were climbing the Widowmaker route, when, according to the survivor, the lead climber fell and ripped his fall-protection out of the cliff face with the weight of his body.
The survivor was rescued after suffering 3rd-degree burns when he tried to grab the rope they were joined with to stop the fall.
Danks says the man fell about 75 metres to his death.
"What caused the fall, we don't know," Danks said. "He ended up falling, hitting the ledge where his friend was and ended up falling... into the bottom of the gully.
"This is a real tragedy for us. Our condolences go out to his family."
Danks says his group got the call at around 2:30 p.m. PT when a person told North Vancouver RCMP they had heard screaming and the sound of rocks falling in the Hanes Valley.
A helicopter spotted the surviving climber stranded on a ledge 60 metres up and the dead hiker at the bottom of the cliff face. The survivor told rescuers that the lead climber was about 15 metres above him when the fall happened.
The surviving climber was recovered and is now in Lions' Gate Hospital.
Danks says the Widowmaker is a route for experienced climbers. He did not immediately know the experience level of the climbers. He says conditions were not believed to be a factor.
"Accidents happen. I don't think anybody's to blame. It's just one of those things."
The climber was confirmed deceased at approximately 5 p.m., and the B.C. Coroner's Service is now investigating, Danks said.
Rare failure of gear
Doug Acorn is a climber with 20 years experience. He is familiar with the Widowmaker route and said the community is anxious to learn details of what happened.
"We just wonder if it's a good friend of ours and at this point I still don't know," he told Rick Cluff, host of The Early Edition.
In this case, it was the lead climber who fell to his death. Acorn explained that a lead climber goes first, placing protective gear at intervals along the climb. That gear is designed to catch the climber in case of a fall.
According to Danks, the climber placed four pieces of protection in a crack in the rock while he was ascending but all four pieces of gear failed.
"Generally, this gear does not fail. In fact, it's pretty rare to even hear a story of one piece of gear failing," said Acorn.
Search and rescue believes the pair were climbing off the established route which Acorn compared to skiing out of bounds.
"You want to stay as close as you can to the runs. When you go out of bounds, that's when things happen," he explained.
Acorn said the Widowmaker's name is usually more ominous than the climb itself, though it is an exposed high-alpine climbing route and not recommended for beginners.
Acorn said the route "requires a diverse set of skills to safely go up."
With files from CBC Radio One's The Early EditionBy Christian Jarrett
Women are underrepresented in science and technology careers, and female students are especially likely to drop out of STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) degree courses. One cause is a relative lack of female role models, combined with feelings of not belonging in a male-dominated environment. This is why Ada Lovelace Day – the celebration of women in science and technology that takes place around the world every October – is so valuable. A new study in Basic and Applied Social Psychology shows how the principles behind the day could be implemented quickly and easily at universities, helping to boost female science students’ grades and reducing drop-out rates.
Sarah Herrmann and her colleagues surveyed two groups of first-year female students – 258 were studying psychology and 68 studying chemistry. The online survey came in the fifth week of the semester after their first exam. Crucially, as part of this, half of the students were shown a letter, ostensibly from a female grad student in their field, describing her university experience. The other half of the students skipped this step, and went straight to answering questions about their own background details.
Inspired by findings from prior research on the effects of role models, the researchers composed the letter with passages in which the female grad student emphasised how she’d overcome challenges, how she’d experienced feelings of not belonging (the idea being to normalise these feelings), and the value of a university science degree.
At the end of the semester, the students who’d read this letter from a role model achieved higher grades and were less likely to have dropped out. Specifically, the psych students who read the letter were 62 per cent less likely to receive a D, E or F grade or withdraw; the chemistry students were 77 per cent less likely to receive these grades or withdraw (as compared with students who didn’t read the letter).
We need more research to find out which aspects of the letter were important for these benefits, and why the letter had the effect it did. But for now the researchers said their study was the latest to show how “brief psychological interventions can exert, positive, long-term effects on academic performance”.
— The Effects of a Female Role Model on Academic Performance and Persistence of Women in STEM Courses
Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research DigestIn a rare display of bipartisanship, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that will speed the development of self-driving automobiles. On September 6, 2017, the House unanimously passed the Safely Ensuring Lives Future Deployment in Vehicle Evolution Act (SELF-DRIVE Act).
Among other things, the SELF-DRIVE Act delineates the Federal Government’s roles in overseeing safety, testing, cybersecurity, and privacy matters of self-driving cars, mandates actions from auto manufacturers, and examines IoT component standards. The bill also preempts state laws that conflict with the Act and regulations that result from it.
The U.S. Senate is currently working on a companion bill, and reconciliation of the two bills is expected to rapidly proceed.
IoT Market Should Thrive Under this Bill
Congress’ newly reinvigorated efforts to hasten the deployment of self-driving cars has been cheered by suppliers of IoT self-driving car components, including software, sensor, and semiconductor manufacturers.
For example, a recent study by a reliable market research company concluded that the world market for automotive semiconductors will grow from the 2015 level of $30.3 billion to $41 billion in 2020. Markets for self-driving auto sensors and cameras are also expected to grow exponentially.
More Regulations for Auto Manufacturers and IoT Component Suppliers
While IoT component manufacturers should do quite well under the SELF-DRIVE Act, self-driving auto manufacturers will be subject to many new regulations. IoT components used in self-driving cars may also be subject to new standards. Nonetheless, there is much in the bill that will help make the U.S. a prime market for self-driving cars, as well as an important industry location for them.
Key Provisions of the SELF-DRIVE Act
Exponential Increase in Self-Driving Car Permits
The bill will increase the number of annual self-driving car permits granted by the National Highway Safety Administration (“NHTSA”) to auto manufacturers. The current limit is 2,500; under the bill that will increase to 25,000 in the first year after passage, up to 100,000 after three years.
Manufacturers will also be granted renewal expectancy. In order to obtain permits, manufacturers will need to demonstrate certain safety standards in their self-driving cars. Manufacturers will also be required to provide NHTSA with reports about any and all crashes in which their “permitted vehicles” are involved.
Federal Preemption of Conflicting State Laws
Under the bill, NHTSA will oversee and regulate the design, construction and performance of self-driving cars; all conflicting state laws will be preempted. This will create a uniform set of regulations; exempting auto and IoT suppliers from having to comply with a patchwork of state regulations. States will retain jurisdiction over insurance, safety and emissions inspections, insurance, and registration matters.
New Safety Standards
The SELF-DRIVE Act directs the Secretary of Transportation (“SoT”) to, within two years after the bill’s passage, issue a final rule requiring self-driving auto manufacturers to submit assessment certifications to NHTSA regarding how they are addressing safety issues that arise in their vehicles.
The bill also mandates that within one year after passage, the SoT must submit a rulemaking and “safety priority plan” detailing NHTSA’s safety priorities to both houses of Congress and the public. In addition to the safety priorities, the plan and rulemaking will contain information about objectives for additional performance standards of testing self-driving cars. IoT equipment standards will likely be updated as safety and performance standards of human-machine interface, sensors, actuators, and software will be evaluated.
The subject rulemaking proceeding must be initiated 18 months after passage of the bill. The safety priority plan will be updated every two years, or more frequently as determined by the SoT.
Cybersecurity
The bill requires that all self-driving auto manufacturers develop a written cybersecurity policy that details the manufacturer’s practices for detecting and responding to cyberattacks. The policy must include:
A process for identifying, assessing, and mitigating reasonably foreseeable vulnerabilities from cyberattacks and unauthorized intrusions;
A process for taking preventative and corrective actions against vulnerabilities, including response plans, intrusion detection, and prevention systems;
Identification of a cybersecurity officer and point of contact for cybersecurity matters;
A process for limiting access to automated driving systems; and
A process for employee training and supervision for implementation and maintenance of the company’s cybersecurity policy.
Privacy
The SELF-DRIVE Act also requires self-driving auto manufacturers to develop a written privacy plan to protect sensitive information about owners, operators, and occupants of self-driving cars. This privacy plan requires manufacturers to delineate the following:
Practices concerning how pertinent information is collected, used, stored, and shared;
Choices offered to vehicle owners, operators, and occupants concerning the collection, use, storage and sharing of their information;
Data minimization, de-identification, and retention of information about the owners, occupants, and operators of their cars; and
Method(s) for providing notice to affected parties about the company’s privacy policy.
Violations of the bill’s privacy requirements will be treated as unfair or deceptive acts or practices under the Federal Trade Commission Act. As such, the Federal Trade Commission will enforce the bill’s privacy provisions.
Consumer Information Notice Requirements
The bill tasks the SoT with conducting a study on the most effective means of informing consumers of the capabilities and limitations of self-driving cars. After the study is completed, the SoT will initiate a rulemaking proceeding to require manufacturers to inform consumers about the capabilities and limitations of their cars.
Industry Council
Within six months of enactment, the SELF-DRIVE Act requires the SoT to establish within the NHTSA a “Highly Automated Vehicle Council.” The Council’s duties include gathering information, developing technical advice, and presenting best practices recommendations to the SoT regarding all manner of regulatory concerns of self-driving cars…
The Council will include representatives from industry, academia, state and local authorities, engineers, consumer and safety advocates, environmental experts, and the NHTSA.
Senate Actions
In addition to drafting a companion bill to the SELF-DRIVE Act, the U.S. Senate is in the process of conducting hearings on regulating self-driving trucks and other commercial vehicles. The most recent hearing examined the benefits of automated truck safety technology, as well as the potential impact on jobs and the economy.
Senator John Thune (R-S.D.), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation has stated that the inclusion or exclusion of trucks, buses, and other heavy duty vehicles has been a key topic of discussion in the ongoing bipartisan efforts to implement self-driving vehicle legislation.
Attention to Self-Driving Car Legislation is Critical
Congress has prioritized self-driving vehicle legislation. With broad support from heavy hitters from Silicon Valley and Detroit, a final bill could be ready for the President’s signature within a matter of months. The resulting law and the regulations promulgated as a result will surely impact the IoT industry in a big way.
IoT components will be an important part of the safety, cybersecurity, and privacy aspects of the SELF-DRIVE Act and related legislation. Marashlian & Donahue is keeping a close watch on all developments and will be providing updates to interested parties on a regular basis.Displaying a level of pomp and hype that is normally reserved for an MMO expansion or perhaps the impending visit from the Queen of England, World of Warcraft is going all-out with the release of this week’s Patch 7.3: Shadows of Argus.
Just take a look at this landing page for the patch and revel in the grand finale for the current expansion cycle. In addition to the flashy presentation, there’s a pretty good overview of what Shadows of Argus contains as well as videos and screenshots.
The patch begins its multi-stage rollout tomorrow, August 29th. If you’re feeling called to come back to the game because of it after, say, missing this entire expansion so far, the studio is prepared to make you a tempting offer. Legion’s price has been slashed down to $30 for the standard edition and $50 for the digital deluxe edition. And remember, both of those editions includes a level 100 character boost, which is normally $60 in the store.Click for New York Times story: US-backed ‘bribes’ in Afghanistan may be funding Taliban
On June 7, the day Afghanistan became America’s longest-ever war, the New York Times reported on an ongoing investigation poised to prove that private security companies “are using American money to bribe the Taliban” to fuel combat and thus enhance demand for their services. The news follows a “series of events last month that suggested all-out collusion with the insurgents,” the Times said.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a leading opponent of the war, wondered, “Is the U.S. paying for attacks on U.S. troops?â€Â
“Our troops are dying in Afghanistan, and now it turns out we may be funding their killers,” Kucinich said in a statement e-mailed to Raw Story, renewing his longstanding call for a pullout. “Our continued presence in Afghanistan is detrimental to our security.”
“The American people are paying to prop up a corrupt government that may be using our money to pay private companies to drum up business by paying the insurgents to attack our troops,” he said.
Kucinich’s motion in March to implement a swift withdrawal of US troops from the region failed by a margin of 365-65 in the House.
“In the coming weeks, Congress is expected to be asked to give another $33 billion for war efforts… I will be bringing this report to the personal attention of individual Members of Congress prior to the vote on any additional war funding,” the Ohio congressman said.
The Times interviewed a NATO official in Kabul who “believed millions of dollars were making their way to the Taliban.”
A White House spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
Robert Greenwald, an ardent war critic and director of the 2009 documentary “Rethink Afghanistan,” viewed the Times story as vindication for his message.
“Supporting a corrupt elite in a civil war does nothing to make us safer, costs the United States billions of dollars, and it’s not working,†Greenwald told Raw Story.
It “confirms what we have heard numerous times from our friends, co workers and producers in Afghanistan. The United States is effectively funding both sides of the war all too often,” he said.
The administration and large bipartisan majorities in Congress continue to support and fund 8-year-long military operations in Afghanistan, warning that a pullout could lead to a Taliban takeover and greater threats to American interests.
Richard Holbrooke, US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters Monday that the US, Japan, Britain and other countries have “committed†roughly “200 million dollars†to fund peace efforts in Afghanistan, Agence-France Presse reports. The Afghanistan Peace and Reconciliation Program aims to reintegrate Taliban fighters who have renounced violence into Afghan society.At the SAP Sapphire conference, Intel is showing off two of its next-generation products: the Intel Xeon Scalable Family and 3D XPoint DIMMs. In an official blog post accompanying the show, Intel touts its 3D XPoint as a game-changer for SAP HANA. In the same release, we also spotted the platform for 3D XPoint DIMMs, Cascade Lake (or a Skylake-SP development platform.)
SAP HANA and 3D XPoint
For those who are not familiar, SAP HANA is an in-memory analytics engine that has become extremely popular. One of the most common architectures for SAP HANA is using four (or more) socket Intel Xeon E7 series processors (e.g. the Dell PowerEdge R930 or Supermicro 804B-TR4FT we reviewed.) The reason for this is clear, each Intel Xeon E7 series CPU can handle more RAM than its E5 counterpart and the E7 series can scale beyond 4 sockets. When you are looking to do in-memory analytics on very large datasets, companies often look to get as much RAM as possible.
A major challenge with RAM is that it is volatile. As a result, if the machines ever need to reboot, data in RAM can be lost if not flushed properly. The new Intel 3D XPoint technology combines faster than NAND performance, higher write endurance (than NAND), larger capacity (than DRAM) and is non-volatile (unlike DRAM but like NAND.) In short, it is a great fit for in-memory analytics.
While we have the Intel DC P4800X, and the performance is great, where Intel is looking to these days is as augmenting RAM capacity. Specifically with persistent, high capacity storage. For the SAP HANA world, this is going to be game changing as it will allow companies to increase memory sizes in DRAM sockets. It also minimizes load times of large datasets after reboots.
A Look at the Platform
Intel also showed off a system photo of the 3D XPoint system. As you can see, the heatsinks follow a mounting pattern similar to the sockets for the Intel Xeon Phi x200 / Skylake-SP. While Intel Xeon E5 V1-V4 systems generally used hard mounting points at four corners (see the Lenovo x3550 M5 review for an example), the newer, larger sockets require six retention points including two pins and are much larger.
If you want to see more about the coming retention mechanism from the |
woman with only one mirror and absolutely no makeup, so Gruys' quest sounds doable. But here's the embarrassing truth: I have a workaround. It's called Photo Booth. And on more than one occasion it, along with a few steps back from my computer, has helped me confirm that my pants, um, do that thing we women want our pants to do.
So if someone who's already sworn off the things that lead most logically to vanity still creates workarounds, I have to wonder whether Gruys, who admits to having bought two wedding dresses, owning only one recent photo sans makeup, and thinking about her body on a regular basis, is going to pull this off.
And then there's last week's research suggesting that the female desire to be sexy ultimately steers us away from the sciences. Which has me wondering whether a year without mirrors might be at least a little self-indulgent. After all, how much do we really want to think about how we think about our own bodies?
Sure, we live in a time where we see images of ourselves constantly, and it could be useful to investigate this effect on vanity and the like. But then I read about the 13-year-old kid who recently saw the Fibonacci Sequence in a tree and used this pattern to improve solar panel efficiency, and I know this: I don't want to spend my time avoiding mirrors and thinking about the absence of my own reflection.
I want to sit beneath trees.
Updated at 2:16 p.m. Sunday, August 21: Gruys says that any photos that appear on her blog were taken prior to starting the project, and that if a current photo of her is posted on Facebook, her fiance untags her so she does not see it. As for whether she looks at any images of herself at all, she says: "Yes, I do look at photos of myself from before the project. My favorite photo is an image of me as a 4-year-old, when I was super confident and curious about the world."Following police raids of Salafist groups on Wednesday in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia, in addition to the foiling of an apparent Salafist plot to attack senior members of the regional, right-wing populist party Pro-NRW, German conservatives are demanding further action against the Islamist extremists.
Wolfgang Bosbach, a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) and the party's domestic policy expert in parliament, would like to make it easier to deport religious extremists. "It is incomprehensible why the deportation law applies only to politically motivated perpetrators of violence and not for religiously motivated fanatics," he said in an interview with the daily Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, published on Thursday.
Because many of the Salafists in question are also German citizens, he also demanded that more be done to investigate and, where necessary, prosecute extremists.
The call came a day after police arrested four Islamists who were allegedly planning an attack on Markus Beisicht, head of Pro-NRW, in Leverkusen. Two of those taken into custody were seized near Beisicht's home, where they were apparently performing reconnaissance in preparation for an assault. A third was arrested in Bonn, where police also found a firearm and explosive material. The fourth suspect was arrested in Essen. Three of the suspects hold German passports while the fourth is Albanian, according to the public prosecutor's office in Dortmund.
Noticeably Shaken
In addition to the weapons, police also found a list with eight Pro-NRW members' names marked in red, including that of Beisicht. Chief investigator Rainer Pannenbäcker refused to say if police suspected that attacks against the others on the list were imminent. But Beisicht himself said in a brief appearance before supporters on Wednesday evening that all of those on the list had been informed and placed under police protection.
In a video of that event, Beisicht seems noticeably shaken, but also pugnacious. "It is not a nice situation, certainly, to have police parked in front of your house," he said, before adding: "This shows that they are much worse than we have been presenting them. We will never capitulate to the enemies of freedom."
Beisicht became notorious in Germany last year whenPro-NRW launched an Islam caricature contest and then displayed the "winners" in front of Muslim facilities ahead of state elections last May. The events erupted into violence on two occasions, partially the result of Salafists from across Germany travelling to the region to stage counterdemonstrations. At an event in Bonn on May 5, rioting between Salafists and the police on hand to protect Pro-NRW demonstrators resulted in injuries to 29 officers. Two of them landed in the hospital with severe stab wounds.
Since then, threats against Pro-NRW from the Islamist scene have become commonplace. Not long after last May's violence, a video produced by an Islamist in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan called on Muslims to hunt down and kill Pro-NRW members.
Pursuing the Salafists
"For the most part, though, the threats have been abstract," Pro-NRW spokesman Markus Wiener, who says his name, too, is on the list found on Wednesday, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "But this is a new dimension, with weapons and explosives. We are shocked, clearly," he said. "But we will keep fighting."
News of the foiled attack on Pro-NRW broke immediately after police raided some 20 apartments belonging to members of Salafist groups as well as a group meeting place in both North Rhine-Westphalia and the state of Hesse. While no arrests were made, officers confiscated laptops, telephones, propaganda material and a small amount of cash. In addition, German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich banned three Salafist groups. The raids were unconnected to the Pro-NRW plot, officials said.
One of the groups, DawaFFM, was targeted due to its "use of hate-filled propaganda and violence-oriented agitation" to target values anchored in the German constitution. Another group was banned partially due to suspicions that it was collecting money for Islamist groups operating in Syria.
In his comments to the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, Bosbach said that the bans were "a step in the fight against Salfism." But, he added, "bans do not make radical ideology disappear."Image caption Protesters burnt vehicles during Monday's protests
The southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu has passed a new bill to allow a controversial bull-taming festival.
The vote comes after days of protests in support of the sport, known as jallikattu.
On Monday, protesters set several vehicles on fire and incidents of arson were reported across the state.
Jallikattu was banned by the Supreme Court in 2014 on animal cruelty grounds. But the government temporarily lifted the ban on Saturday.
On Sunday, two people died after being gored during one contest in the state.
On Monday, police were clearing protest sites, but thousands remained in the state's capital, Chennai (Madras).
BBC Tamil reported that protesters were refusing to leave the city's iconic Marina beach.
It added that the police had cordoned off the area, and all roads leading to the beach had been blocked. Some protesters also reportedly clashed with police officials in Madurai city.
Railway authorities also cancelled 19 passenger trains on Sunday, fearing protests on the tracks.
Meanwhile, several villages and towns in Tamil Nadu held jallikattu events on Sunday, attracting huge crowds.
Subduing angry bulls has long been practised in the state as a sport and is a key part of the harvest festival.
Image copyright AFP/Getty Images Image caption Jallikattu sees bulls released into a crowd of people who try to ride the animals
Image caption Police have been clearing protest sites
Image caption Many in Tamil Nadu are against the ban as they see jallikattu as an important part of their cultural heritage
The court had banned jallikattu on the grounds that it was cruel to animals.
Animal rights activists say the spectacle causes unnecessary stress to the bulls who are released into a crowd and forced to fend off people trying to ride them.
Many in Tamil Nadu, however, are against the ban as they see jallikattu as an important part of their cultural heritage, and also say it ensures the preservation of native breeds of bulls.
Demonstrators have been calling for the practice to be fully re-legalised.
Most ministers in the state government, including Chief Minister O Panneerselvam, as well as Tamil celebrities such as Oscar-winning composer AR Rahman, support jallikattu.
To become law the new bill must be signed by the state governor and India's president.Elsa, Anna, Rapunzel, and Kairi make up four of the new Princesses of Heart. Come theorise who the last three Princesses will be!
Details Published on September 23, 2016 @ 06:15 pm Written by Arielle
Square Enix showed off plenty of new and upcoming products for Kingdom Hearts and other game series during Tokyo Game Show 2016. It seems among all of the hype about the new trailer for Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue and the new Static Arts figures, a brand new product reveal slipped through the cracks!
Unveiled at Tokyo Game Show 2016, this 6-inch action figure features Sora in his Kingdom Hearts III attire with his brand new star-themed Keyblade, Keyblade guns, a multitude of hand parts for different action poses, and a heart-styled stand to place the figure on. Although it looks similar to the Kingdom Hearts III Sora Play Arts Kai figure, it lacks the same amount of joints that the Play Arts Kai line has.
No release date or price has been revealed for Kingdom Hearts III 6" Sora Action Figure, but we will keep you all up to date on news about it as it is released.
Thanks to forum user Sonicfan2525 for the tip!
Follow Kingdom Hearts Insider on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr for the latest updates on Kingdom Hearts Unchained X, Kingdom Hearts 3, Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue and all things Kingdom Hearts!is not the only airline that is making headlines for all the wrong reasons. United Continental Holdings, the parent company of United Airlines, is also in the spotlight for its post-merger labour troubles. Last week, pilot union leaders at the world’s largest airline asked its 12,000-odd members to hold a vote on whether to strike over the failure to reach a contract agreement through two years of post-merger negotiations.
The (ALPA), representing pilots who worked for and before the two merged in October, 2010, said something that is quite familiar to all of us by now: “While a strike is never the pilots’ preference for the path to reaching agreement, we are more than willing to use every tool at our disposal.”
The broad point is that almost every airline in the world has faced labour trouble after mergers. Australian carrier Qantas grounded its entire fleet because of a dispute with labour unions and left thousands of passengers stranded. Also, it took US Airways years after its merger with America West to get unified contracts for pilots. Similarly, Delta, whose 2008-merger with Northwest is seen by many in the industry as exemplary, is only beginning to merge much of its workforce after the National Mediation Board rejected complaints from three unions that the airline interfered in their elections.
The problem in United Continental was the reconciliation of the two seniority scales that determine who gets to fly where and how much everyone gets paid. But the similarities end there. Unlike their counterparts in – who went on strike three times in the past one year, causing a loss of over Rs 500 crore – United pilots may find the going tough even if the union members authorise them to call a strike. Federal law makes it difficult for airline unions to strike and the White House can intervene to stop any walkout to keep the US commerce moving.
Indian laws have obviously been far more benign. Also, what makes the strike unique is the sheer audacity of the pilot unions to remain defiant, even though the courts have termed the strike illegal. In fact, minutes after the Air India management filed a contempt notice in the court on Wednesday, the unions held a press conference to allege serious financial irregularities by the management.
At the heart of the problem is archaic labour laws that recognise pilots as “workmen” and allow them the same rights as industrial workers — which includes the right to go on strike. Consider the income of these “workmen”: the 1,600 Air India pilots draw a salary of Rs 800 crore every year. A commander gets as much as Rs 7-8 lakh a month, which is 15 per cent more than what pilots in private airlines earn. The perks include free air travel for the entire family six times a year. And these privileges are in perpetuity — meaning they will continue getting these even after retirement.
The latest agitation by these “workmen” involves a contention by pilots who worked for Air India before the merger that they have sole rights to fly new Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft, rather than splitting the job with former Indian Airlines pilots as the management ordered. And this has already led the ailing national carrier to drastically curtail its international flight operations, particularly to North America and Europe. The airline has already lost over Rs 190 crore.
Air India’s labour problems date back to at least 2007, when Air-India and Indian Airlines announced they would merge into Air India. But there has been little integration in an airline that is prone to nepotism and political meddling. For example, human resource, or HR, is still not a common department, resulting in disparity in pay scales, allowances and career progression. And that is at the heart of the latest dispute between Air India’s management and pilots.
On its part, the is in the process of implementing the Dharmadhikari Committee report. The committee was set up to look at the core problems of HR and ways to achieve better integration between the two factions. But the government will need to take tough decisions if the recommendations are to be implemented. For example, take the suggestion on downsizing operations, which would involve shutting down the big loss-making routes, especially internationally. That will mean cutting its substantially large staff strength, and more internal troubles.
Also, the committee has reportedly suggested that the productivity-linked incentive of the merged entity’s employees should be merged with their basic salary and such incentives be linked with the profitability of the carrier, not with operational parameters, as is the practice currently. The recommendation is hardly rocket science and is an obvious one, but given the track record, the question is will the have the courage to bite the bullet? An answer to that question will determine whether the “workmen” will continue to hold Air India to ransom.NB: The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. A shorter video interview with Nicola Sturgeon can be found here
THE ECONOMIST: First minister, you have had six seats in the just-finished Westminster parliament. Now pollsters suggest you may soon have more than 40, even a few more than that. Can you just explain to us how this extraordinary surge has happened?
MS STURGEON: Firstly I should emphasise that I take nothing for granted. I don't look at the polls and think that we are cruising to that kind of advantage. We're going to have to work really hard to persuade people to vote SNP. We've got six MPs now, or we did before Parliament dissolved. The biggest number of MPs the SNP has ever had in the House of Commons is 11, so in a sense anything above 11 is record-breaking. We want to win as many seats as possible. Why are we sitting where we are in the polls? I think since the independence referendum campaign last year there has been a sense in Scotland that the voice that the country had during that referendum campaign should continue to be heard. People don't want to go back to the days, pre-referendum, when the Westminster establishment sidelined and ignored Scotland. They want Scotland's voice to be heard. And secondly I think people want to see more progressive politics at Westminster, they want to see a challenge to the austerity consensus and they want to see MPs in the House of Commons who are going to provide that challenge.
THE ECONOMIST: On that, you've suggested that you would be willing and indeed quite keen to support a Labour-led government in Westminster. Can you just spell out for us the terms on which that would happen?
MS STURGEON: I've said firstly that the SNP would never work with the Conservatives, either formally or informally. I've also said that I think it would be unlikely that we would be in a formal coalition with Labour. But what I have also said is that if we end up in a situation after the election—and let's remember that people are still to vote—but if we end up in a situation where there are more anti-Tory MPs than Tory MPs in the House of Commons then I would want to be part of making sure that the Tories don't get to form a government. Even if they are the largest party. I've said to Ed Miliband that if the SNP and Labour combined have more seats than the Tories do and if we vote together we can prevent David Cameron from getting back into Downing Street. That would pave the way for Ed Milliband to be prime minister. Now, what I would then say is that I don't want to see a Labour government that simply implements the same policies as a Tory government would have done. So I would want to use the influence of the SNP in the House of Commons to force a more progressive style of politics and get more progressive policies.
THE ECONOMIST: Yes. So there's the policy question, but also—especially in a rather informal arrangement—the human relationship is probably important too. On that, what are Ed Miliband's biggest weaknesses, do you think?
MS STURGEON: I'm not going to get into that kind of discussion. I don't know Ed Miliband as a person particularly well. The leaders debate last week was, I think, the second time that I've met him. I'm not in a position to judge that. It's for voters to look at leaders and make their own judgements on leadership qualities or lack of qualities—and that applies to all leaders. What I've said though is that I'm willing, in order to keep the Tories out of government, to be part of that anti-Tory alliance that could pave the way for Miliband to be Prime Minister. And what I absolutely believe is that Ed Miliband will be a better prime minister if he's got the influence of a big team of SNP MPs encouraging him, perhaps forcing him, to pursue anti-austerity policies, not to renew Trident, to protect the NHS from further privatisation. That's the kind of progressive politics that I want to see at Westminster. And that's what I want to SNP to be part of.
THE ECONOMIST: But you would in any circumstance be a junior partner in that arrangement. You're not going to write the government's policy across the board. You do see Labour therefore as a progressive party; certainly as compared to the Tories.
MS STURGEON: Oh I think Labour should be a lot more progressive. I mean I don't want to see another Tory government. Tory governments are bad for Scotland. I joined the SNP when I was 16 years old because I had a lot of disgust what the Thatcher-led Tory government was doing to the country and the communities that I lived in. But I think Labour’s mistake in recent years has been to almost end up emulating the Tories, of being a carbon copy of the Tories, rather than ploughing their own progressive furrow. So the last Labour government was elected on a wave of optimism and hope that ended up imposing tuition fees, it started the process of privatising the NHS in England and of course it led the country into an illegal war in Iraq. So I think Labour could be a lot more progressive and I think the influence of a big team of SNP MPs would be to help make it more progressive
THE ECONOMIST: In terms of your Scottish agenda—still working towards greater devolution of Scotland and then eventually, you hope, an independent Scotland—how would such an arrangement, an SNP-backed Labour government, further that agenda?
MS STURGEON: Well it's no secret that the SNP wants Scotland to be an independent country. I'm not writing any front page headlines with that revelation. But independence is not the question on the ballot paper in the general election. A strong vote for the SNP in the general election is not going to lead to another independence referendum. There will only be another independence referendum if a party, presumably the SNP, has that in a manifesto for a Scottish Parliament election and then wins sufficient numbers of seats to get that legislation through. A vote in the Westminster election is a vote to give Scotland much more clout, influence and a louder voice at Westminster. And to play a part in changing Westminster politics for the better. In terms of the Scottish context, the other point I would make is that the SNP is a party of government in Scotland. We've got considerable experience in government. We had four years as a minority government so getting things done in a minority government scenario is something the SNP has lots of experience around. We know how to get things done. We were a successful, effective and stable minority of government and that is experience that we would be able to bring to bear if there is a minority government situation in the House of Commons after the election.
THE ECONOMIST: Nonetheless, I think it's fair for us to assume that an independent Scotland still is always going to be high on your policy agenda. Do you think that will come in your political lifetime?
MS STURGEON: Yeah I do believe Scotland will become independent. I will repeat the point: firstly, I don't think I'm telling you anything you don't already know: that I want Scotland to be independent. But that's only going to happen if people in Scotland vote for that in a referendum. People then ask the question, well how can we trust the SNP to play a constructive part at Westminster if ultimately you want Scotland to be independent? Just to answer that absolutely straightforwardly: for as long as Scotland is part of the Westminster system, and that's the situation just now, it really matters to people in Scotland that there are good decisions made at Westminster, that there are good policies passed at Westminster. The SNP stands for Scotland's best interests, and as long as we're part of the Westminster system then we will play a constructive and positive part at Westminster to try and get the best deal for Scotland. And in the process of doing that, as it happens, I think we'll be able to pursue and progress policies that will be good for people in other parts of the UK as well.
THE ECONOMIST: Is there any possibility that they will actually makes a second independence referendum less likely because the Scottish cause is shown to be represented well in Westminster?
MS STURGEON: You can spend a lot of time thinking tactically through all of the “what ifs” about the outcome in terms of what it means about Scottish independence. Actually, Scotland will only become independent when a majority of people, for positive reasons, decide that Scotland should become independent. So the positive case for independence has to be made, and will have to be won in a referendum, before Scotland becomes independent. This Westminster election is about how does Scotland's voice, as part of the Westminster system, get heard as loudly and as progressively as possible? And that what a vote for the SNP is about on May 7th.
THE ECONOMIST: But you have a role to play, don’t you? It was SNP action that led to the referendum last year. What do you want to do in the next parliament to make Scotland independent?
MS STURGEON: [START OF MS STURGEON’S ANSWER NOT RECORDED] During the referendum campaign, anybody who came here at all was pretty, whatever their views on the referendum, impressed by the level of public engagement. So one of the things that has changed in Scotland, which is why I think Labour's campaign in Scotland is running into so much difficulty, is because people are very well informed, they're well educated, they're perfectly capable of making their own judgements on things. So, my principal responsibility by a country mile, my most important responsibility is governing the country well, with no ulterior motive other than to govern the country well—and that's what I'll focus on doing. And if in the process of doing that people see the benefits of decision-making powers resting in the Scottish parliament rather than Westminster…
THE ECONOMIST: So independence as a by-product rather than a fundamental objective.
MS STURGEON: I'm the first minister, so my fundamental objective every day when I get out of bed is to take good decisions and run the country well, competently and with a bit of vision, ambition and all of that. So that's what I've continued to do and I think within a process in Scotland of people gaining more confidence, of questioning why we should be at the mercy of Westminster, it’s a decision we can't always control. I think that process is under way. Where it ends up and on what time scale I can't answer now, to be perfectly honest. I can’t tell you when there’ll be another independence referendum. I think there will be one and I think there will be a ‘yes’ vote. But when that's likely to be, at the moment, is a question I can't answer with any certainty.
THE ECONOMIST: On that point about a competent government, the SNP, or the Yes campaign as a whole, seemed to get its expectations about the oil price quite badly wrong during the campaign and there doesn't seem to be that much recognition of that fact. Should that give us cause to worry about the SNP’s ability as fiscal managers?
MS STURGEON: No it shouldn't. I mean, if you take the oil price very directly, interestingly Robert Chote [chairman of the Office of Budget Responsibility] went before a Scottish parliamentary committee last week (and I'm not trying to put words in his mouth; you can go and read the official record of what he said in case I'm misrepresenting him in any way unintentionally) and he was making the point about the difficulty of projecting oil revenues. When we were projecting, as we did in the referendum campaign, $110 a barrel the Department of Energy and Climate Change was projecting an oil price of I think $128 a barrel. People got their oil projections wrong because nobody foresaw what was going to happen to the oil price. The oil price will undoubtedly go up again. Oil was never, and never has been, the absolute linchpin of the economic case for independence.
THE ECONOMIST: It was quite a prominent part of it though, wasn't it?
MS STURGEON: Sure, and sometimes that was made so by others, not the SNP, or the Yes campaign. Oil is a massive advantage for the Scottish economy, but here is one of the statistics I've been using recently to illustrate the point I’m making: if you take oil revenue projections to the end of the decade and assume they don't change, and that the oil price doesn't go back up (and that's what we're looking at), by the end of the decade, oil revenues will be £3 billion lower than they are just now. But our onshore revenue as a country, and non-oil revenues, are estimated to be £15 billion higher than they are just now. So what does that tell you? Scotland's non-oil economy is strong. I think it could be stronger with new powers to incentivise and encourage a greater non-oil growth, but it also tells you that Scotland's deficit (and we're not unique in being in a deficit position) is reducing as we go towards the end of the decade.
THE ECONOMIST: But you have got the highest budget deficit, regionally, in the country.
MS STURGEON: Well, GERS [Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland] figures that came out just a few weeks ago show the decline in Scotland's deficit compared to the year before. In two out of the last four years, Scotland has been in a relatively better position in terms of the deficit than the UK. Fortunately the long term position, if you go back and look at these figures over a longer period, is that our fiscal position is broadly comparable to the rest of the UK. The point that I'm making here is that oil is important. One of the big arguments we've made, and continue to make, is that we should have stewarded that resource better in the past and we should steward it better in the future. Clearly there are no regional examples other than the one that was used many times during the referendum. But oil is not the be-all-and-end-all of the Scottish economy. Far, far from it.
THE ECONOMIST: You talked about Ed Miliband and not knowing him, but you do know the Labour Party, you have dealt with the Labour Party institutionally. What are your biggest reservations about working with them? What are your worries about the arrangements after the election?
MS STURGEON: I'm not particularly worried. We won't vote for things that we think are wrong. We won't vote for Labour policies that we think are just carbon copies of Tory policies. What we will seek to do is build alliances across the House of Commons, working with the parties like Plaid Cymru as well as with Labour. And there's a lot (and I know this from personal experience of some of the individuals I'm talking about) of people in Labour as back benchers—put the leadership to one side—that would find themselves a lot more drawn to some of the positions of the SNP on some of these big issues.
THE ECONOMIST: Can you imagine working with (on a case-by-case basis, not supporting a government) Tory MPs on a particular bill?
MS STURGEON: I don't want the Tories to be in power. If the Tories are a majority in England there's nothing we can do about that and that's the position we've been in many times over in my lifetime.
THE ECONOMIST: But joining with them to bring down a Labour government bill, for example?
MS STURGEON: No. I'm not going to work with Tory MPs. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act of course changes the whole scenario when it comes to possible minority government in the House of Commons. So if we decided to vote down a Labour policy that we thought was wrong, that doesn't mean you're voting down the Labour government. It’s actually quite a high bar to pass, under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, to trigger an election. But in that kind of scenario it means that smaller parties in a Westminster context can have a lot of influence, not to bring down a government, but to force a government to take a different direction.
THE ECONOMIST: Stewart Hosie [SNP deputy leader] has said that the SNP would require consultation on any Labour Queen’s Speech, whereas Alex Salmond has said that the SNP’s support would be unconditional. Which of those is right?
MS STURGEON: I think you're provoking us, presenting me with these two views, to make them sound as if they're further apart than they are. I’ve said as recently ago as yesterday: if we're in a position where there are more anti-Tory MPs than Tory MPs, then the first thing we've got to do is decide whether we're voting together to stop… If (and it is an “if” because I don't know whether this is going to be the outcome) but if the Tories were the largest party but didn't have the majority, the first thing to do would be to stop a Tory government from getting off the ground.
THE ECONOMIST: Without imposing conditions on any other parties?
MS STURGEON: Well I want to stop the Tories. No, after that we would seek to use our influence to make sure a minority Labour government was delivering policies we thought were in the interest of Scotland and the rest of the UK. I hesitate to go much further than that because I do think there is a point which you reach in these discussions where you start to treat the voters as if they're incidental in all of this, if you get too drawn into the minutiae of what happens afterwards.
THE ECONOMIST: Well they do deserve—it’s quite a big question—to know: will you unconditionally support the creation of a Labour government? Not necessarily its bills, I accept that, but would you unconditionally support the creation of a Labour government? That seems to be something Scottish voters deserve to know.
MS STURGEON: If we have the numbers to do it and Labour were prepared to do it we would block a Tory government. We would then seek to use our influence. I’m not going to get into exactly how, practically, that would work because some of that would depend on the numbers. It will will depend on what Labour are putting forward. But we would seek to use our influence to make sure a minority Labour government was delivering the things we thought were right for them to do.
THE ECONOMIST: You've talked a lot about the prospect of EU referendum, particularly under a possible Tory government. English voters might turn around and say: is it fair for the SNP to deny the rest of the UK a vote on whether or not Britain should remain in the EU when Scots had a say on their own possible secession from the UK?
MS STURGEON: I'm simply giving my view. I don't think there should be an in-out European referendum.
THE ECONOMIST: In any circumstances?
MS STURGEON: I don't favour an in-out referendum. I do think there are things about Europe that should change, but I think they should be pursued in a way different to how the Tories are doing it in terms of threatening a referendum. I think David Cameron is playing a very dangerous game with the referendum: pandering to the UKIP, taking the UK further and further, potentially to the exit door. So I'm just being open and honest about that. If people want to vote—if an EU referendum is the issue that means so much to them—then there are other parties that they can vote for that have that as a policy. But it’s not the policy of the SNP.
THE ECONOMIST: If the UK were to vote to leave the EU, but Scotland had not done the same, would that be a case for another referendum here?
MS STURGEON: I think if we ended up being taken out of Europe against our will then I think there would be an awful lot of people in Scotland saying that we need to look at independence again. Because we don't want to be taken out of Europe. I've put forward the proposal that before we come out of Europe in a referendum then each of the four parts of the UK should have to vote for that, not just the UK.
THE ECONOMIST: But that's not going to happen.
MS STURGEON: But why, who knows it’s not going to happen?
THE ECONOMIST: Because the referendum would only happen if the Tories were in power which we know is not going to happen…
MS STURGEON: Well I will continue to argue what I think is right. I think it would be unconscionable for any part of the UK to find itself outside of the European Union when they had voted to stay in. I think that would be an indefensible position.
THE ECONOMIST: And that is the next likely trigger for another Scottish referendum?
MS STURGEON: I don't think there should be an in-out EU referendum and if there is one, I think the circumstances and the arrangements for that referendum should guard against any part of the UK being taken out against our will. If I don't prevail on both of these things and we're in a referendum I'd be arguing, I hope, for the UK to stay in. But if we end up in the situation that I don't want us to be in, where Scotland has been taken out of the EU against its will, I think (whatever I might say about it) there would be significant numbers of people in Scotland saying, hold on a sec, we don't want that to happen.
THE ECONOMIST: You have a message which pretty much horrifies people south of the Scottish border, but nonetheless: there seems to be a strong possibility that you could be quite popular south of the border. So you have a tough message for most English voters, but it seems that you can override some of their hostility to politicians. Can you just explain to us how that's so?
MS STURGEON: I think how the message of the SNP is sometimes presented (to use your terminology not mine) is horrifying to voters. I think what we see in my email inbox, which is absolutely overflowing with messages from people in other parts of the UK after the leaders' debate, is that when people actually hear what the SNP is all about then they see a very, very different reality from what they're told.
THE ECONOMIST: What about the personal style? The leaders of our mainstream parties all poll pretty pretty badly, sometimes differently from their party. Sometimes personal style matters.
MS STURGEON: Sure. One of the things I've been told—it’s difficult for me to get a sense of this myself—is that what people liked in the leaders' debate was seeing, very visibly, a very different style of politics. I think people liked seeing, frankly, some women's voices in there as an alternative to the old-boys’-network view of Westminster that they usually get. It's one of the features of increasingly having a multi-party system that people see choices that they previously didn’t know were there—and I think that's a good thing. I accept it's only on the basis of the people who are taking the time to contact me, but a lot of people across the UK see that as a breath of fresh air.
THE ECONOMIST: No SNP candidates in England?
MS STURGEON: [Laughs] Despite the temptations and the encouragement, no.
THE ECONOMIST: I heard rumours that Berwick was being considered as a foothold.
MS STURGEON: I think we'll continue to focus on Scotland.
THE ECONOMIST: It’s the 700th anniversary of the siege of Carlisle this year...
MS STURGEON: [Laughs] Don’t tempt me.The former Cloverlanes site is being eyed as a possible self-storage facility. (Photo: File photo)
A recent request to rezone the property with the old Cloverlanes bowling alley won’t be taking place.
Instead, the Livonia Planning Commission plans to talk through what other ways the property can be zoned to fit a potential plan brought by a developer.
The commission voted Tuesday unanimously to recommend denying the rezoning request made to change the zoning from C-2 general business to M-1 light manufacturing, requested by Michigan Property Group, LLC.
Developer Ernie D’ascen |
via Flickr
Gross, 65, of Maryland, has always claimed that he only went to Cuba to bring communications equipment to the small Jewish community left in Havana. However, the Castro government said he was part of a spy network attempting to set up a secret network for Cuban Jews. Gross was serving a 15-year sentence.
President Obama chose Wednesday’s release as a springboard to announce a massive historic “normalization” of U.S.-Cuba relations. Meantime, in Cuba, President Raul Castro, who held a news conference in Havana at noon, was expected to release 53 Cuban political prisoners.
Obama particularly credited the “moral example of Pope Francis,” who actively encouraged Gross’ release. Francis, who held private meetings at the Vatican to secure the deal, praised the move, sending “his warm congratulations for the historic decision taken by the Governments of the United States of America and Cuba to establish diplomatic relations, with the aim of overcoming, in the interest of the citizens of both countries, the difficulties which have marked their recent history.”
Jewish voices that had lobbied for Gross’ freedom celebrated and praised his wife, Judy, for her tireless efforts to free the man who had become a cause celebre for many Jewish activists:
The Orthodox Union noted that Gross’ release coincides with the Torah portion recounting “the release of Joseph from his own unjust imprisonment in ancient Egypt.”
Anti-Defamation League Director Abraham H. Foxman rejoiced with Gross’ family. “For five long years, Mr. Gross’ incarceration has been used by the Cuban government for political purposes on issues that had nothing to do with him and his alleged activities.”
The Jewish Federations of North America said in a press release that all human rights activists are “uplifted” by the news. Board chairman Michael Siegal said several Jewish groups spoke “as recently as this week … publicly and privately to the very highest levels of the U.S. government” to secure Gross’ freedom.
The National Jewish Democratic Council highlighted the political overtones in its praise for the “landmark humanitarian deal” struck by the White House, an event that Greg Rosenbaum, chair of the NJDC board of directors, said felt like a Hanukkah miracle.
At one level, it was a prisoner swap. The U.S. is sending home to Cuba three men who had been convicted in 2001 as foreign agents who conspired to spy in South Florida. In return, Cuba returned back an unnamed man who reportedly worked for U.S. intelligence agencies, according to The New York Times. Gross’ release was an additional humanitarian gesture because he was reportedly in ill health.
Gross’ lawyer and family have described him as “mentally vanquished, gaunt, hobbling and missing five teeth,” according to the Jewish Daily Forward.
Obama cannot overturn the congressionally mandated trade and tourism embargo between the U.S. and the communist island, but he could undercut it by opening the embassy in Havana and removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. On Wednesday, he said Cuban human, political and economic rights are still of grave concern to the U.S., but “through a policy of engagement, we can more effectively stand up” for those values of “dignity and self-determination.”
KRE/MG END GROSSMANTennessee is one of four states, along with Arizona, Georgia and Virginia, that recently enacted laws explicitly allowing loaded guns in bars. (Eighteen other states allow weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol.) The new measures in Tennessee and the three other states come after two landmark Supreme Court rulings that citizens have an individual right — not just in connection with a well-regulated militia — to keep a loaded handgun for home defense.
Experts say these laws represent the latest wave in the country’s gun debate, as the gun lobby seeks, state by state, to expand the realm of guns in everyday life.
The rulings, which overturned handgun bans in Washington and Chicago, have strengthened the stance of gun rights advocates nationwide. More than 250 lawsuits now challenge various gun laws, and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, a Republican, called for guns to be made legal on campuses after a shooting last week at the University of Texas, Austin, arguing that armed bystanders might have stopped the gunman.
The new laws have also brought to light the status of 20 other states — New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts among them — that do not address the question, appearing by default to allow those with permits to carry guns into establishments that serve alcohol, according to the Legal Community Against Violence, a nonprofit group that promotes gun control and tracks state gun laws.
“A lot of states for a long time have not felt the need to say you could or couldn’t do it,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “There weren’t as many conceal-carry permits out there, so it wasn’t really an issue.” Now, he said, “the attitude from the gun lobby is that they should be able to take their guns wherever they want. In the last year, they’re starting to move toward needing no permit at all.”
State Representative Curry Todd, a Republican who first introduced the guns-in-bars bill here, said that carrying a gun inside a tavern was never the law’s primary intention. Rather, he said, the law lets people defend themselves while walking to and from restaurants.
Photo
“Folks were being robbed, assaulted — it was becoming an issue of personal safety,” said Mr. Todd, who added that the National Rifle Association had aided his legislative efforts. “The police aren’t going to be able to protect you. They’re going to be checking out the crime scene after you and your family’s been shot or injured or assaulted or raped.”
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Under Tennessee’s new law, gun permit holders are not supposed to drink alcohol while carrying their weapons. Mr. Ringenberg washed down his steak sandwich with a Coke.
But critics of the law say the provision is no guarantee of safety, pointing to a recent shooting in Virginia where a customer who had a permit to carry a concealed weapon shot himself in the leg while drinking beer at a restaurant.
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“Guns and alcohol don’t mix; that’s the bottom line,” said Michael Drescher, a spokesman for Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, who vetoed the bill but was overridden by the legislature.
The law allows restaurant and bar owners to prohibit people from carrying weapons inside their establishments by posting signs out front. But many restaurateurs are reluctant to discourage the patronage of gun owners, often saying privately that they do not allow guns but holding off on posting a sign.
“I’ve talked to a lot of restaurants, and probably 50 to 60 percent of them have no clue what’s going on,” said Ray Friedman, 51, who has created a Web site listing the firearms policies of area restaurants.
Previously, states like Tennessee did not allow its residents to carry concealed weapons unless they had a special permit from the local authorities. That began to shift in the mid-1990s, as the gun lobby pushed states to adopt policies that made permits for concealed weapons more accessible.
The new law passed with broad legislative support, despite opposition from the Nashville Chamber of Commerce and the Tennessee Hospitality Association.
So far, the law has been challenged only once. Filed by an anonymous waiter, the complaint contended that allowing guns into a tavern creates an unsafe work environment for servers. His complaint was denied by the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health.
“A loaded concealed weapon in a bar is a recognized hazard,” said David Randolph Smith, a lawyer who represents the waiter and is preparing to appeal the decision. “I have a right to go into a restaurant or bar and not have people armed. And of course, the waiter has a right to a safe workplace.”
Down at Bobby’s Idle Hour, however, Mike Gideon said he did not believe that guns in bars were unsafe. As he sipped a beer in the fading afternoon light, Mr. Gideon, who characterized his 19-gun collection as “serious,” said that having a few permit holders around made any public space safer and that he boycotts any business that does not allow him to carry a weapon.
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“People who have gun permits have the cleanest records around,” said Mr. Gideon, 54. “The guy that’s going to do the bad thing? He’s not worried about the law at all. The ‘No Guns’ sign just says to him, ‘Hey, buddy, smooth sailing.’ ”UPDATE 9 July 2015:
If you’re looking for a comprehension workflow solution to automate business processes on WordPress check out my new plugin Gravity Flow
Note: This post is written for developers with some knowledge of Gravity Forms.
This is the second in a series of tutorials helping developers to extend Gravity Forms.
In the first tutorial, I gave an introduction to the Gravity Forms developer platform and demonstrated how each of the tools could be used to build a simple add-on. In this second tutorial, I’m going to be delving a little deeper by using the Gravity Forms Feed Add-On Framework to demonstrate how Gravity Forms and WordPress can be extended further to build a fairly sophisticated workflow application.
There’s no shortage of use cases for a form-based approval workflow. Let’s take a look at a few to get some context for our solution:
A manager in the Human Resources department wants to create a collection forms including vacation requests for employees to complete company-wide. These forms must be approved or rejected by the employee’s department director. Pending approvals must be displayed in a personalised list for each Director. The data from approved forms will be sent to a Google Spreadsheet.
The CFO has asked you to implement a system to handle the approval of all the incoming invoices arriving each day. The receptionist is currently making a note of each bill and then sends them over to the appropriate department head for approval. Invoices over $9,999 must also have the approval of the Finance Director before the data is sent to OpenERP.
WordPress account requests before they are created and before the activation emails are sent to the users. Both Mum and Dad must approve the new accounts. A new Mum has set up a membership site documenting the first few years of her new-born for her family and friends by following a great tutorial explaining how to set up WordPress as a membership site. She wants users to activate their own accounts but she wants to approve thebefore they are created and before the activation emails are sent to the users. Both Mum and Dad must approve the new accounts.
Requirements
Flexible configuration by non-technical users; no hard-coded workflows.
Each Form will have different rules for approval and different users as approvers.
The rules for approval will depend on conditional logic for field values (e.g. invoice amount, approval status).
Notifications must be sent in response to approval and rejection and must be flexible enough to send multiple notifications each with a different conditional logic.
Notifications to approvers must contain a deep link to the form with immediate access to the approve and reject buttons.
When approval is required for a form, delay actions performed by the User Registration Add-On and the Zapier Add-On until the form has been approved by all approvers.
Pending approvals for each approver must appear in a personalised list on the WordPress Dashboard.
Approved or rejected forms cannot be edited.
Approvers can’t change their approval status once committed.
We’ll need to extend Gravity Forms in the following steps:
Create an Add-On that uses the Feed Add-On Framework. One feed will be created for each approver and will support conditional logic. Add custom Entry Meta fields to store the approval status for each approver. Add a Feed Settings tab to the Form Settings UI that will list approvers and allow admins to add new approvers to a form. Add a box on the Entry detail page to show the current approval status and approval buttons to approvers. Add a WordPress Dashboard widget and display a list of pending approvals for the currently logged in user. Integrate with the User Registration Add-On and the Zapier Add-On so that form approval triggers WordPress user account creation and the sending of data to third party services e.g. Google Sheets, Freshbooks, OpenERP… Add a notification event ‘form is approved or rejected’ to the Notifications UI.
Step 1: Extending the Feed Add-On Framework
A feed is a user-defined action that gets processed conditionally after a form has been submitted. Feeds are used in a number of Gravity Forms Add-Ons including the Paypal Add-Ons, Coupons Add-On, User Registration Add-On, MailChimp Add-On, Zapier Add-On and the AWeber Add-On to allow multiple actions to be triggered after a form has been submitted. In this case, we’re going to use feeds to assign approvers to each form. Feeds support conditional logic so approvers can be assigned to entries based on the value of a field. For example, in the case of incoming invoices our admins can configure an approval feed for the Finance Director when the invoice amount exceeds $9,999.
<?php /* Plugin Name: Gravity Forms Approvals Plugin URI: http://www.stevenhenty.com Description: Aggregate entries from multiple sites into a single installation Version: 0.1 Author: Steve Henty Author URI: http://www.stevenhenty.com License: GPL-2.0+ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright 2014 Steven Henty */ // Make sure Gravity Forms is active and already loaded. if (class_exists("GFForms")) { // The Add-On Framework is not loaded by default. // Use the following function to load the appropriate files. GFForms::include_feed_addon_framework(); class GFApprovals extends GFFeedAddOn { // The following class variables are used by the Framework. // They are defined in GFAddOn and should be overridden. // The version number is used for example during add-on upgrades. protected $_version = '0.1'; // The Framework will display an appropriate message on the plugins page if necessary protected $_min_gravityforms_version = '1.8.7'; // A short, lowercase, URL-safe unique identifier for the add-on. // This will be used for storing options, filters, actions, URLs and text-domain localization. protected $_slug = 'gravityformsapprovals'; // Relative path to the plugin from the plugins folder. protected $_path = 'gravityformsapprovals/approvals.php'; // Full path the the plugin. protected $_full_path = __FILE__; // Title of the plugin to be used on the settings page, form settings and plugins page. protected $_title = 'Gravity Forms Approvals'; // Short version of the plugin title to be used on menus and other places where a less verbose string is useful. protected $_short_title = 'Approvals'; } } new GFApprovals();
Step 2: Entry Meta
Entry Meta fields are like form fields except they don’t appear either on the front-end form or the entry editor and they can only be updated via code. This makes them ideal for storing meta data such as approval status. Users will be able to filter the entries by approver and by approval status on the entry list and we’ll be able to use the Gravity Forms API to display the personalised list of pending approvals on the WordPress Dashboard.
To configure the Entry Meta fields we just override GFAddOn::get_entry_meta() and return the configuration for the approval status of each approver and the overall approval status.
<?php /** * Entry meta data is custom data that's stored and retrieved along with the entry object. * For example, entry meta data may contain the results of a calculation made at the time of the entry submission. * * To add entry meta override the get_entry_meta() function and return an associative array with the following keys: * * label * - (string) The label for the entry meta * is_numeric * - (boolean) Used for sorting * is_default_column * - (boolean) Default columns appear in the entry list by default. Otherwise the user has to edit the columns and select the entry meta from the list. * update_entry_meta_callback * - (string | array) The function that should be called when updating this entry meta value * filter * - (array) An array containing the configuration for the filter used on the results pages, the entry list search and export entries page. * The array should contain one element: operators. e.g. 'operators' => array('is', 'isnot', '>', '<') * * * @param array $entry_meta An array of entry meta already registered with the gform_entry_meta filter. * @param int $form_id The Form ID * * @return array The filtered entry meta array. */ function get_entry_meta( $entry_meta, $form_id ) { $feeds = $this->get_feeds( $form_id ); $has_approver = false; foreach ( $feeds as $feed ) { if (! $feed['is_active'] ) { continue; } $approver = $feed['meta']['approver']; $user_info = get_user_by( 'login', $approver ); $display_name = $user_info? $user_info->display_name : $approver; $entry_meta[ 'approval_status_'. $approver ] = array( 'label' => 'Approval Status: '. $display_name, 'is_numeric' => false, 'is_default_column' => false, // this column will not be displayed by default on the entry list 'filter' => array( 'operators' => array( 'is', 'isnot' ), 'choices' => array( array( 'value' => 'pending', 'text' => 'Pending' ), array( 'value' => 'approved', 'text' => 'Approved' ), array( 'value' =>'rejected', 'text' => 'Rejected' ), ) ) ); $has_approver = true; } if ( $has_approver ) { $entry_meta['approval_status'] = array( 'label' => 'Approval Status', 'is_numeric' => false, 'update_entry_meta_callback' => array( $this, 'update_approval_status' ), 'is_default_column' => true, // this column will be displayed by default on the entry list 'filter' => array( 'operators' => array( 'is', 'isnot' ), 'choices' => array( array( 'value' => 'pending', 'text' => 'Pending' ), array( 'value' => 'approved', 'text' => 'Approved' ), array( 'value' =>'rejected', 'text' => 'Rejected' ), ) ) ); } return $entry_meta; } /** * The target of update_entry_meta_callback. * * @param string $key The entry meta key * @param array $entry The Entry Object * @param array $form The Form Object * * @return string|void */ function update_approval_status( $key, $entry, $form ) { return 'pending'; }
Notice that we register a callback for the overall approval status update event, but not for the individual approval status for each approver. This is because we don’t need to set the entry meta for the approvers when the entry is updated – we only need to set the overall approval status. We’ll assign the approvers conditionally using the the GFFeedAddOn::process_feed() in the next step.
Step 3: Feed Settings
GFFeedAddOn extends the Add-On Framework so we get everything that comes with GFAddOn except in place of the Form Settings UI we get the Feeds UI.
The Feed Settings UI is going to provide a way for admins to assign approvers conditionally to forms. So instead of overriding GFAddOn::form_settings_fields() as we did in the previous tutorial we’ll need to override GFFeedAddOn::feed_settings_fields() and return the array with the configuration of the fields.
We’ll need to override GFFeedAddOn::feed_list_columns() so our fields are added as columns to the feed list page, and GFFeedAddOn::process_feed() to handle the form submission event. The processing of the feed, in our case, just means assigning the approver to the entry. We don’t need to hardcode any conditional logic because this method will only run if the conditions are met – the logic is handled behind the scenes by the framework.
See the Settings API for further details on how to create settings pages.
<?php /** * Override the feed_settings_field() function and return the configuration for the Feed Settings. * Updating is handled by the Framework. * * @return array */ function feed_settings_fields() { $accounts = get_users(); $account_choices = array( array( 'label' => 'None', 'value' => '' ) ); foreach ( $accounts as $account ) { $account_choices[] = array( 'label' => $account->display_name, 'value' => $account->user_login ); } return array( array( 'title' => 'Approver', 'fields' => array( array( 'name' => 'description', 'label' => 'Description', 'type' => 'text', ), array( 'name' => 'approver', 'label' => 'Approver', 'type' =>'select', 'choices' => $account_choices, ), array( 'name' => 'condition', 'tooltip' => "Build the conditional logic that should be applied to this feed before it's allowed to be processed.", 'label' => 'Condition', 'type' => 'feed_condition', 'checkbox_label' => 'Enable Condition for this approver', 'instructions' => 'Require approval from this user if', ), ) ), ); } /** * Adds columns to the list of feeds. * * setting name => label * * @return array */ function feed_list_columns() { return array( 'description' => 'Description', 'approver' => 'Approver', ); } /** * Fires after form submission only if conditions are met. * * @param $feed * @param $entry * @param $form */ function process_feed( $feed, $entry, $form ) { $approver = $feed['meta']['approver']; gform_update_meta( $entry['id'], 'approval_status_'. $approver, 'pending' ); }
This will produce a list of feeds and an edit page that looks like this:
Step 4: WordPress Dashboard Widget
The personalised inbox of pending approvals will be displayed using the WordPress Dashboard API.
For this we’ll need GFAPI::get_entries() to search the entries with a couple of search criteria to ensure we only get the entries pending approval for the current user.
<?php public function init_admin() { parent::init_admin(); add_action( 'wp_dashboard_setup', array( $this, 'dashboard_setup' ) ); } //Registers the dashboard widget public function dashboard_approvals() { wp_add_dashboard_widget( 'gf_approvals_dashboard', 'Forms Pending My Approval', array( $this, 'dashboard' ) ); } /** * Displays the Dashboard UI */ public static function dashboard() { global $current_user; $search_criteria['field_filters'][] = array( 'key' => 'approval_status_'. $current_user->user_login, 'value' => 'pending' ); $search_criteria['field_filters'][] = array( 'key' => 'approval_status', 'value' => 'pending' ); $entries = GFAPI::get_entries( 0, $search_criteria ); if ( sizeof( $entries ) > 0 ) {?> <table class="widefat" cellspacing="0" style="border:0px;"> <thead> <tr> <td><i>Form</i></td> <td><i>User</i></td> <td><i>Submission Date</i></td> </tr> </thead> <tbody class="list:user user-list"> <?php foreach ( $entries as $entry ) { $form = GFAPI::get_form( $entry['form_id'] ); $user = get_user_by( 'id', (int) $entry['created_by'] );?> <tr> <td> <?php $url_all_pending = sprintf( 'admin.php?page=gf_entries&id=%d&s=pending&field_id=approval_status_%s&operator=is', $entry['form_id'], $current_user->user_login ); $url_all_pending = admin_url( $url_all_pending ); echo "<a href='{$url_all_pending}'>{$form['title']}</a>";?> </td> <td> <?php $url_all_for_user = sprintf( 'admin.php?page=gf_entries&id=%d&s=%d&field_id=created_by&operator=is', $entry['form_id'], $user->ID ); $url_all_for_user = admin_url( $url_all_for_user ); echo "<a href='{$url_all_for_user}'>{$user->display_name}</a>";?> </td> <td> <?php $url_entry = sprintf( 'admin.php?page=gf_entries&view=entry&id=%d&lid=%d', $entry['form_id'], $entry['id'] ); $url_entry = admin_url( $url_entry ); echo "<a href='{$url_entry}'>{$entry['date_created']}</a>";?> </td> </tr> <?php }?> </tbody> </table> <?php } else {?> <div> Hurray, inbox zero!. </div> <?php } }
Notice the three different links:
All entries pending the approval of the current user
All entries submitted by the requester
Direct link to the entry
Step 5: Add a custom event to the Notifications UI
Notifications in Gravity Forms are user-defined emails that can be triggered conditionally, routed to different email addresses and contain field values. By default, notifications are processed on form submission.
The Notifications UI page contains a filter called gform_notification_events which allows us to add custom events. This provides us with a way to separate notifications sent on form submission from the notifications we’ll need to send when a form is approved or rejected. So for example, in the case of the incoming invoices, we don’t want to notify the Finance Director until the invoice has been approved by the department Director. We’ll still need to write the code to handle the event and send the notifications at the appropriate time but this is a handy way to reuse some existing admin functionality in Gravity Forms.
<?php public function init_admin() { parent::init_admin(); add_filter( 'gform_notification_events', array( $this, 'add_notification_event' ) ); } function add_notification_event( $events ) { $events['form_approval'] = 'Form is approved or rejected'; return $events; }
Step 6: Integration with the User Registration and Zapier Add-Ons
The Zapier Add-On providers users with point-and-click integration of Gravity Forms with literally hundreds of different Web Services, for example Freshbooks, QuickBooks, Trello and Salesforce. In our use cases, we can use the Zapier Add-On to send form data to Google Sheets and OpenERP.
The User Registration Add-On handles the creation and updating of WordPress user accounts. It’s very flexible and allows conditional registration and will map form field to user profile fields and custom fields.
For our solution, we’ll need to make sure that the Zapier and User Registration Add-Ons don’t trigger their actions immediately on form submission so our Approvals Add-on can trigger them once the entry has been approved. The User Registration Add-On has the gform_disable_registration filter we can use but Zapier currently doesn’t have an equivalent hook so we’ll need to get a little creative and make sure its registered action hook is removed before it can be triggered.
<?php public function init_frontend() { parent::init_frontend(); add_filter( 'gform_disable_registration', array( $this, 'disable_registration' ), 10, 4 ); add_action( 'gform_after_submission', array( $this, 'after_submission' ), 9, 2 ); } function disable_registration( $is_disabled, $form, $entry, $fulfilled ) { //check status to decide if registration should be stopped if ( isset( $entry['approval_status'] ) && $entry['approval_status'] == 'approved' ) { //disable registration return false; } else { return true; } } function after_submission( $entry, $form ) { //check submitted values to decide if data should be should be stopped before sending to Zapier if ( isset( $entry['approval_status'] ) && $entry['approval_status']!= 'approved' ) { remove_action( 'gform_after_submission', array( 'GFZapier','send_form_data_to_zapier' ) ); } }
Step 7: Entry Detail Approvals Meta Box
Finally, this is the code that brings everything together. It’s the UI that approvers use to approve or reject entries. It also contains the code that triggers the notifications registered with our custom notification event, user account creation, and sending data to Zapier.
<?php public function init_admin() { parent::init_admin(); add_action( 'gform_entry_detail_sidebar_before', array( $this, 'entry_detail_approval_box' ), 10, 2 ); } function entry_detail_approval_box( $form, $entry ) { global $current_user; if (! isset( $entry['approval_status'] ) ) { return; } if ( isset( $_POST['gf_approvals_status'] ) && check_admin_referer( 'gf_approvals' ) ) { $new_status = $_POST['gf_approvals_status']; gform_update_meta( $entry['id'], 'approval_status_'. $current_user->user_login, $new_status ); $entry[ 'approval_status_'. $current_user->user_login ] = $new_status; $entry_approved = true; $entry_rejected = false; foreach ( $this->get_feeds( $form['id'] ) as $feed ) { if ( $feed['is_active'] ) { $approver = $feed['meta']['approver']; if (! empty( $entry[ 'approval_status_'. $approver ] ) ) { if ( $entry[ 'approval_status_'. $approver ]!= 'approved' ) { $entry_approved = false; } if ( $new_status =='rejected' ) { $entry_rejected = true; } } } } if ( $entry_rejected ) { gform_update_meta( $entry['id'], 'approval_status','rejected' ); $entry['approval_status'] ='rejected'; } elseif ( $entry_approved ) { gform_update_meta( $entry['id'], 'approval_status', 'approved' ); $entry['approval_status'] = 'approved'; // Integration with the User Registration Add-On if ( class_exists( 'GFUser' ) ) { GFUser::gf_create_user( $entry, $form ); } // Integration with the Zapier Add-On if ( class_exists( 'GFZapier' ) ) { GFZapier::send_form_data_to_zapier( $entry, $form ); } } $notifications_to_send = GFCommon::get_notifications_to_send( 'form_approval', $form, $entry ); foreach ( $notifications_to_send as $notification ) { GFCommon::send_notification( $notification, $form, $entry ); } } $status = 'Pending Approval'; $approve_icon = '<i class="fa fa-check" style="color:green"></i>'; $reject_icon = '<i class="fa fa-times" style="color:red"></i>'; if ( $entry['approval_status'] == 'approved' ) { $status = $approve_icon.'Approved'; } elseif ( $entry['approval_status'] =='rejected' ) { $status = $reject_icon.' Rejected'; }?> <div class="postbox"> <h3><?php echo $status?></h3> <div style="padding:10px;"> <ul> <?php $has_been_approved = false; foreach ( $this->get_feeds( $form['id'] ) as $feed ) { if ( $feed['is_active'] ) { $approver = $feed['meta']['approver']; if (! empty( $entry[ 'approval_status_'. $approver ] ) ) { $user_info = get_user_by( 'login', $approver ); $status = $entry[ 'approval_status_'. $approver ]; if ( $status!= 'pending' ) { $has_been_approved = true; } echo '<li>'. $user_info->display_name. ': '. $status. '</li>'; } } } if ( $has_been_approved ) { add_action( 'gform_entrydetail_update_button', array( $this,'remove_entrydetail_update_button' ), 10 ); }?> </ul> <div> <?php if ( isset( $entry[ 'approval_status_'. $current_user->user_login ] ) && $entry[ 'approval_status_'. $current_user->user_login ] == 'pending' ) { wp_nonce_field( 'gf_approvals' );?> <button name="gf_approvals_status" value="approved" type="submit" class="button"> <?php echo $approve_icon;?> Approve </button> <button name="gf_approvals_status" value="rejected" type="submit" class="button"> <?php echo $reject_icon;?> Reject </button> <?php }?> </div> </div> </div> <?php }
Complete Code Listing
The complete add-on is available in the Github repository for Gravity Forms Approvals.
View the complete listing: approvals.php
Download the latest version of the add-on from the WordPress.org plugins repository: Gravity Forms Approvals Add-On
Configuration
Now we’ve got Gravity Forms to support approvals we need to set up the forms and configure the business logic for each workflow. If you’re already familiar with Gravity Forms then this section is perhaps unnecessary but I’ve included it here for for completeness and for readers who are not so familiar.
Vacation Request
In the use cases described above, the HR dept needs only one approval feed per form and per department. The example vacation request form contains the following fields. Some of these fields can be set automatically by specifying the appropriate merge tags in the default value settings.
So for each form we need to add one approver per department. Each approval feed will look something like this.
Notifications are configured separately on the Notifications tab. In this case we’d need one notification for the approvers – something like this:
Incoming invoices
In the case of the incoming invoices form, we’ll need a form that looks something like this:
The approval feed for each department might like this:
We also need an additional feed for the Finance Director in the case of high value invoices.
We’ll need to configure a notification with conditional routing like the vacation request form and an additional notification for the Finance Director for forms that need her approval. Notice the conditional logic ensuring that the form has not previously been rejected by a colleague.
Next Steps
Although this add-on is very simple, it’s not intended to be used in a production environment and it hasn’t been tested in a multi-site installation. It’s intended to be used primarily as a learning tool. If you do decide to use it in a production environment, please ensure that you do sufficient testing and that security issues are taken into consideration. At minimum use SSL in the WordPress admin.
There are many ways this idea could be developed further or adapted to fit different scenarios. Here are some ideas for next steps:
Integrate the forms with internal systems
LDAP integration
Create the default notifications automatically when each feed is saved
Install the Members plugin or similar and configure appropriate permissions
Add entry meta for approval comments, timestamp and previous status
Add support for approval steps
Add a visual workflow designer
A desktop widget displaying pending approvals
If you decide to implement any of these, please do let me know.
Conclusion
With relatively little code (under 100 logical SLOC) it’s possible to turn Gravity Forms + WordPress into a sophisticated custom workflow application. Granted there are excellent dedicated solutions on the market with advanced features and visual workflow designers, so this approach is not going to be the most suitable for every situation, but if you’re aware of the possibilities it’ll help you make the right choice. Were you aware you could do this with Gravity Forms? I’m sure there are many additional use cases and adaptations for this application. If you come up with any, please let me know either in in a private message or in the comments below.
I’ll be very happy to answer any questions you have about this tutorial in the comments. Please direct all specific questions about your project to the Gravity Forms technical support team.
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Legal bits:
The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Rocketgenius.
Gravity Forms is a trademark of Rocketgenius
WordPress is a trademark of The WordPress FoundationLWN.net Weekly Edition for August 28, 2014
Bradley Kuhn is widely known for his GPL-enforcement efforts. He has spoken about them at many different conferences along the way, but his talk at LinuxCon North America in Chicago was on a different tack entirely. Instead of trying to enforce the GPL, he and others routed around a violation of the license by writing code—forking the project rather than fighting the violation.
"Sometimes it makes sense not to enforce the GPL", Kuhn said, which many may find a surprising thing for him to say. He normally talks about violations in the embedded Linux space, since they are the most "prevalent and insidious", but violations come in all shapes and sizes. This one was different than many others, which led to a different kind of resolution.
Kuhn then took a short detour to ensure that the audience was up to speed on the GPL. For the purposes of the talk, there were just a few things that the audience should be willing to agree to—at least for 45 minutes or so. The GPL requires that the source code for a covered work (the "whole work") to be released with the "complete corresponding source" (CCS) for that work. There are differences of opinion about what, exactly, goes into the whole work and he could give an entire talk on just that topic. There is limited guidance from either the laws or courts on what constitutes the whole work, but he believes that will change in his lifetime—we will see a court case that makes a judgment about the reach of "whole work".
There is a fundamental assumption in the software industry, he said, that proprietary software makes more money than free software. The veracity of the assumption is immaterial, as that is the perception which causes companies to try to keep as much of their code proprietary as they can. Developers, on the other hand, would share their code, "all things being equal".
Developers will share code when it is convenient to do so, but even sometimes when it is not so convenient. A Japanese developer once told him about early code-sharing in that country by way of floppies placed on a sushi counter when meeting for lunch. Developers are not all "fre |
the league, the magnitude of which is too great to capture adequately in one piece such as this. But hopefully, as you read this piece and watch the game again tonight on NFL Network (5.p.m. ET), you can pause and be grateful for having been able to watch this incredible rivalry play out. I know I will.
Visit NFL Game Center for more highlights and analysis from Patriots at Broncos, AFC Championship Game.
-- by Alex Gelhar. Follow Alex on Twitter @AlexGelhar.TWO MEN FROM the Republic of Ireland have been sentence for planting a bomb ahead of a PSNI Recruitment event at the Waterfoot Hotel in Derry in 2015.
Darren Poleon (43) and Brian Walsh (35), who are both from Meath, pleaded guilty earlier this year to possession of explosives with intent to endanger life or cause serious injury to property and possession of articles for use in terrorism.
Poleon and Walsh each received a sentence of five years in custody and five years on licence for possession of explosives and four years imprisonment for possession of articles for use in terrorism which will run concurrently.
Detective Chief Inspector Gillian Kearney, from PSNI’s Serious Crime Branch, said: “These two men planted a viable explosive device in the grounds of a hotel ahead of a PSNI recruitment event at the Waterfoot Hotel on 9 October. Their intention was undoubtedly to murder and seriously injure people as well as to deter people from pursuing a career in policing.
They had no regard for the safety of anyone staying in or visiting this popular hotel. I’m thankful we were able to thwart their efforts as I have no doubt that if the device had exploded people would have been killed or at the very least seriously injured.
The bomb was made from a fire extinguisher filled with 1.5kg of explosives, and was found along with a detonating system.
Poleon and Walsh were initially arrested by police in Omagh on 6 October 2015 after the Ford Focus car they were travelling in was seen being driven erratically.
When police searched the car they found a number of items including bolt cutters, walkie-talkies, a toy gun, balaclavas, gloves and two mobile phones. A sat-nav system was also recovered from the car for analysis.
The men were arrested at this time on suspicion of going equipped for burglary and possession of a firearm or imitation firearm with intent to cause fear of violence and were later bailed to return to Omagh Police Station in December.
On 9 October 2015, police attended various security alerts which included the Waterfoot Hotel, the Millfield Campus of the Belfast Metropolitan College and the Strule Arts Centre in Omagh, which were all venues for police recruitment events and recovered the device at the Waterfoot Hotel – it was these locations which linked the men to the bomb.
Kearney explained: “During our enquiries we analysed the sat-nav system recovered from the car Poleon and Walsh had been travelling in. This provided a link between the car and the three recruitment venues. The car was found to have travelled from Co Meath to the Waterfoot Hotel on 6 October, when officers believe the device was left in the grounds of the hotel, before travelling onwards to the Strule Civic Centre in Omagh were they were arrested later that night.The greatest player to have never played in the NBA? It’s a peculiar distinction. He’s a mystery, this man. Willingly, he kept his talent away from us. Those who saw him play happily share their stories in awed tones. Those who merely caught flashes treasure the brilliance all the more. And those who never saw him at all doubt and dismiss. The greatest player to have never played in the NBA. How good could he have been?
This is no streetball legend, raw and ascendant until he wasn’t. This is no college phenom, wilted by injury or destroyed by addiction. There is no tragedy here: This is a man who did prodigious work. Over 26 years and across four continents, he scored 49,737 points: more than Kareem, more than Jordan, more than anyone. Ever.
He could barely be bothered to play defense, even less so as he kept going at 43, 44, 45 years old. But that was never the point. They compare him to Bird and Dirk, and that’s not it either. He only did one thing. He only wanted to do one thing. He was extreme, burning bright: an uncompromising, all-encompassing gunner.
“Some people, they move the piano,” he explained once. “Some people, they play the piano.”
He was an unholy chucker, but they called him Mão Santa. The Holy Hand.
“That’s nothing holy,” Oscar Schmidt scoffs, inside his outlandishly appointed home. Outside is the serene, gated community of Alphaville, on the outskirts of São Paulo and so far from the never-ending skyscrapers. Inside is a giant neon fish tank and a white piano and ceramic statuettes of samurai warriors brandishing swords. “It’s practice. I’m Practiced Hand!” He looks back at the World Cup action on his massive flat-screen, where Lionel Messi is about to break Iran’s heart. “I practice too much.”
Last year, all that practice led to induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Introduced by his friend Larry Bird, Schmidt took the lectern, looking dapper in a rich navy suit and a nifty newsboy cap. And for 18 minutes, in his accented English, he rambled beautifully through his life and career. The bighearted coaches who molded him; the international competitions where he stumbled and triumphed; his beloved wife, Cristina. He called her, with gratitude, his “rebounding machine” — for years, she’d chase down his misses in the practice gym. He called her “the greatest person I ever met.” “We are together 38 years,” he said, speaking to her directly. “And I hope to be with you until I die.”
He never removed his cap that day. But sitting here, in white shorts, white sandals and — of all things — a home white New York Jets Tim Tebow jersey, he’s bareheaded. And you can see, running along the curvature of his head, underneath his thinned but still spiky hair, the unmistakable groove of a deep scar. It’s a permanent reminder of the run of health problems Schmidt has suffered in the last few years. The nonmalignant brain tumor in 2011. The malignant brain tumor in 2013. And then this year, the arrhythmia, the one thing he feared really would kill him.
He has survived it all. And as he explains, it hasn’t become some late-stage life-altering event. It didn’t change everything he believed in. It’s not a testament to his unflagging willpower. It’s just something that happened, something he’ll have to deal with until he dies. You live long enough, and terrible things start to happen. But you live long enough, and great things start to happen too.
He started when he was 13, a gangly boy in Brasília who was too tall for soccer. The local coach’s name was Laurindo Miura. Miura was from Japan, and he held idiosyncratic practices. In one, Oscar had to dribble the ball with one hand while picking stones off the floor with the other; in another, he had to climb a series of chairs and ropes. That was enough: He was in love with the game.
At 16, he was handpicked by the São Paulo club Palmeiras and tossed in a team house with seven other boys. At 17, he reached his full height — 6 feet, 8 inches. But the coaches at Palmeiras, bless their vision, didn’t leave him at center, another big man withering in the paint. They taught him to shoot with the ball not in front of his face, as he had been doing, but far above his head. It was the template for those tens of thousands of points to come: a release so quick and so high and so accurate that it could not be touched.
He bore it into himself with numbing repetition. The team practiced three times a week, but Schmidt was there before and after school. “Every day. Every week. Every month. Every year!” One thousand shots a day, from everywhere on the court. “Inside, outside, even up to the back of the basket, shooting over the board. I practiced that! Many times!” When he wasn’t shooting, he was running the Palmeiras stadium steps.
While still in his teens, Schmidt got the only call he’d ever wanted: The Brazilian national team wanted a look. He didn’t watch the NBA growing up. It was basically impossible to find on Brazilian TV. But his patriotism was always a point of pride. His father served in the navy; his grandfather had left Germany for Brazil, where he’d found a welcome home. The national team was Oscar’s only dream. And so it didn’t matter that he was still a kid. When they cut him, it was crushing. “A tragic day for me,” he says now.
At 19, there was more inauspiciousness. He suffered an ankle injury so severe that one doctor said Schmidt might never play again. Another put Schmidt in a full, immobilizing leg cast. For three months, he sat in front of his house, his leg elevated, unable to even dribble a basketball. He was out of his mind with boredom.
Then a new family moved into the neighborhood. They had a young daughter. Oscar and the girl took the same bus to school. “And I was with my books, and two big [crutches] to walk,” he recalls. “It was very hard to go to school! But she came and she helped me with the books. And then we became friends.” He holds a beat before the punch line, and his big staccato laugh — an actual ha ha ha. “And friends between man and woman doesn’t exist! So we start to date. And that was 38 years ago.”
Later, his rebounding machine comes home from a jog. While the Schmidts’ cook stirs a big pot of feijoada — the national dish of Brazilian Saturdays — Cristina plays the gracious host, offering espresso and chocolate. Schmidt finally pulls his eyes away from the screen, to watch her closely as she passes through the living room. “Beautiful,” he says.
A year after his ankle injury, he was back on the court. Not long after, he met his destiny: the starting five of the Brazilian national team. “And then,” he says, “I start to be known.”
Ron Kuntz/Reuters/Newscom
It wasn’t until 1992 that FIBA rules changed, allowing NBA players to take part in international competition. Until then, to maintain his amateur status for the national team, Schmidt could play professionally only in Europe. He started at Caserta, in the south of Italy, where discipline came naturally to him.
“Never alcohol, never coffee,” he says. “No smoking, no drugs.” No alcohol at all? “I tried it, but I don’t like it. In Italy, you can have wine at the table, but no Coca-Cola. Come on! Are you crazy? Get me my Coca-Cola, please!” But when it came to food: “I eat everything. Need to eat. Gasoline. I was [at the] top of my practice. I was at the top of my knowledge. That’s why [I got] these points.”
The numbers were gaudy. In Serie A, then the best in Europe, Schmidt was the scoring champion seven times over. In 1982, his first year in Europe, he averaged just a shade under 30 a game. By the 1990 season, he was going off for 44 a night.
Consider the childhood memories of young Kobe Bryant, then living in Italy with his dad, Joe “Jellybean” Bryant. Schmidt remembers lil’ Kobe, dribbling around at halftime, messing around under the scorer’s table. And Kobe certainly remembers Oscar. “When I was growing up over there,” Bryant says, “he was a living legend.”
Every four years, the non-Neapolitan set got a taste, too. The Olympics, and international competition in general, were Oscar Schmidt’s playthings. In the 1988 games in Seoul, he went for 41.9 points a game. In ’92 in Barcelona, it was 24.8. In ’96 in Atlanta, 27.4. He is Olympic men’s basketball’s all-time leading scorer. When I ask him about ’88, I mistakenly quote his scoring average as 40.9, and he dives in: “41! Don’t cut me nothing!”
As head coach for the Canadian national team, Steve Konchalski faced off with Schmidt repeatedly (including in ’95, when Steve Nash, then still a senior at Santa Clara, was on the squad). “Oscar wasn’t a great athlete,” Konchalski remembers. “His strength was OK. But he had supreme confidence in his game, to a degree of arrogance. And he could just shoot the heck out of the ball.”
In 1987, at the Pan American Games in Indianapolis, Schmidt and Marcel de Souza, his longtime partner in crime, pulled the Brazil squad to the gold-medal game against the heavily favored Americans. That USA team was carrying a pre-Association David Robinson, Rex Chapman, and Danny Manning — and a 34-game win streak.
At halftime, Brazil was down 68-54. So in the third quarter, Schmidt came out firing. Meanwhile, de Souza was leading the mind games. “I told [the Americans], ‘Hey, I’m an old man, I can’t guard you,’” he explained at the time. Adds Schmidt now, “We said [to the Americans], ‘Shoot now! Everybody looking at you. Shoot now!’” On the other end, Schmidt took his own advice: He splashed his way to 35 second-half points, 46 overall, and Brazil came back to win 120-115. It was the first time U.S. men’s basketball had ever been beaten at home. There were plenty of opportunities for Schmidt’s trademark double-fist-pump exultation. But the image that lingers is him on the floor, overcome, weeping with joy.
In the postgame press conference, the New York Times reported, then–U.S. men’s head coach Denny Crum “forgot … the name of Brazil’s best player. Finally, one of his players flipped through a roster and called out the name” — Oscar Schmidt.
Looking back now, Crum says, “I wasn’t that into international basketball, and I don’t even think our players knew too much about him. And then they start setting picks for him out there, I mean, at 30 feet from the basket. And he just kept throwing it in.”
Whom did Crum have guarding Oscar? “It didn’t matter! We tried three or four guys. It didn’t matter. The things that he did …” Crum is still stunned by what he saw that day. “He may be the best in the world to have never played in the NBA.”
This was the beginning of the end for U.S. basketball’s amateur status. The program would come up short at the ’88 Olympics, the ’90 Goodwill Games, ’90 World Championship, and the ’91 Pan American Games. And so the college kids were sidelined in favor of that iconic ’92 roster.
Schmidt played against the Dream Team in Barcelona. And while he put up nearly 25 points a game, he was still awed by the legends up close. “I wanted to bring my camera to the bench!” he joked in his Hall of Fame speech. It closed the loop that first opened in the second half of a basketball game in Indianapolis in 1987. “That’s the biggest fight of my career,” he says. “To provoke a Dream Team? Can you believe this?”
Ray Stubblebine/Reuters/Newscom
The NBA had called. And was summarily rebuffed. The classic 1984 draft class could have been even more legendary: The New Jersey Nets had selected Schmidt in the sixth round, but he wasn’t interested. “Sixth round? [131st] choice?” he says now, still chuckling at the perceived slight. “No, no, no. Come on.” He went to training camp. They offered him a no-cut contract. “I said, ‘No thank you.’”
He’d made some noise over the years about not wanting to take a limited role in the league. His friend Georgi Glouchkov, a Bulgarian forward and the first Eastern Bloc player in the NBA, complained to Schmidt that he couldn’t get touches. And this is Oscar Schmidt we’re talking about: If you’re not gunning, why are you even alive? Greg Dole, a former Brazilian basketball scout, recalls training with Nene before the 2002 draft. “Nene said, ‘If I get drafted in the first round, I’m gonna buy a team in Brazil and sign Oscar,’” Dole says. “‘And order him to pass the ball!’”
By the time the international rules changed, Schmidt was 35. “Too old to be a hookie,” he says, swapping his r’s for h’s in the Brazilian style.
“No question, he would have been one of the greatest.”
—Kobe Bryant
How good would he have been in the NBA? Ask Schmidt, and he’ll tell you with all the bravado of a world-class athlete. “Basket, the same. Ball, the same. Basketball, the same. In every part of the world, I didn’t see a guy that could guard me! I just need confidence. Put me in the game and don’t catch me out.” So? How good? “Top 10. For sure. Not top 10 one year. Top 10 ever! Ha ha ha.”
I put the question to Konchalski, the Canadian national team coach, and we run through the usual comparisons, mostly slow-footed white guys with killer J’s, like Bird and Nowitzki. Konchalski makes a bold claim: “Those guys could do more than Oscar. They had more all-around games. But I don’t believe neither Bird or Dirk could shoot with Oscar. They couldn’t shoot with Oscar.”
If he played now, the advanced stats community would likely pick the gunning Schmidt’s game to pieces. “You know what he is going to do,” Scottie Pippen once said. “He shoots the ball as soon as he touches it.” A modern-day J.R. Smith? Maybe. But in the late ’80s, in Schmidt’s prime, the NBA was often a one-on-one league. A world of the ’Nique-Bird shootout. Was that not a world crafted for Schmidt’s particular set of skills? You’d have to give him the ball, and you’d have to not catch him out. And then you’d watch him cook.
Konchalski’s claim is bold. But this is the kind of fanboy reverence that Mão Santa commanded. All in all, Konchalski watched him play fewer than a dozen games. That was enough. That it’s impossible to know his NBA ceiling is the point of this legend. Because now, unperturbed by pesky facts, we can just imagine the fireworks. Oscar Schmidt was the band you loved fiercely and could never convince anyone else was the greatest thing on earth. Oscar Schmidt was indie rock.
Kobe’s call? “No question,” he says, “he would have been one of the greatest.”
In ’95, after a short, unsatisfying stint in Spain, Schmidt finally came home. He spent his last few years at Flamengo, an all-sports club and a dynasty — the Yankees of Brazil. There, in his forties, he made the best money of his career. How did he manage at such an advanced age? “I don’t waste my energy,” he says. “I start to have more precision.” He smiles. “And I start to defend only in the second half.”
Originally, he planned to retire at age 44. But in what was supposed to be his last game, things got out of hand, and a couple of Schmidt’s teammates were ejected — an action Schmidt sarcastically applauded the refs for, until he was tossed too. And he couldn’t well go out like that. So he came back for another season, finally calling it quits at 45. “I think I would play until I die,” he says. “But it’s too much. Every year was harder to get in shape.”
Jay Triano, now an assistant coach with the Portland Trail Blazers, remembers running into Schmidt at the 2002 World Championship, back in Indiana. In front of the assembled young guns, many who’d never heard the name “Oscar Schmidt,” Triano challenged Mão Santa to show off the goods. “I said to him, ‘Can you still shoot?’” Triano remembers. “He said, ‘Of course!’ And he stood at the top of the key, in his suit and shirt and dress shoes. No warm-up. I gave him the ball and he made 10 in a row, and he walked out of the gym. The players stood there with their mouths open.”
Though Schmidt may have been the best basketball player in Brazilian history, he was not singularly beloved. Two major factors work against him. In the definitive soccer nation, he played the wrong sport. And in a country where roughly 50 percent of the population identifies as at least partially of African descent, he was the wrong lineage. As Dole says, “You will find that there is a significant segment for whom the conquering white hero does not resonate.” The degree of difficulty was significant. And still, Schmidt became an icon.
In 1998, he ran for senator — while still playing in the Brazilian Basketball League. “I want[ed] to be president of Brazil,” he says. “And I had a big chance. A senator to president” — he snaps his fingers — “easy.” For a while, he even ran ahead in the polls against Eduardo Suplicy, until Suplicy’s Workers Party began to coalesce around him and take Schmidt seriously as a threat.
“They don’t say I was robbing or nothing,” Schmidt recalls. “They only say good things: ‘Oscar, you’re a basketball player. Go to the court, Oscar!’ Even Lula” — beloved ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — “make a campaign against me.” (“He is like a soap,” Lula said. “It is a product of marketing. If he is elected as a soap, [he] will act as a soap.”) Schmidt lost by fewer than seven points. Suplicy is still in power.
Schmidt says he’s happy he never found his way to office. These days, he makes money giving speeches, motivational sessions for schools and corporations, which he says has clued him into some shady dealings during his campaign days. “I talk to the presidents of the companies, and many of them ask me if I got the money [during the campaign],” he says. “What money? I didn’t ask for nothing!”
“Politics,” he says, “is not a place for anybody who can lose something. Much better, living like this.” Last year a Brazilian speaking-circuit publication voted him the nation’s best. He’s got his heart set on a back-to back title. “I wanna be two-time champion, three-time champion, 10 times champion! Ha ha ha. The best! In the world!”
Nathaniel S. Butler/Getty
The scares happened in Orlando. It’s one of Schmidt’s favorite places on the planet: His son played high school basketball at Admiral Farragut Academy in St. Petersburg, and the Schmidts have been coming to Disney World annually for years. “Three times,” he laughs, ticking off the incidents. “Better I don’t go again?”
The first tumor was diagnosed in 2011; Schmidt was tipped off by severe migraines. It was a big one: eight centimeters. But it was benign. There were concerns about convulsions, which never happened. There were also worries that the tumor might come back malignant, and that did happen. After an operation in 2013, Schmidt returned to his vacation haven in Central Florida this year. “And one day I start vomiting,” he says. “And I thought I would die.”
His daughter rushed him to the hospital, where he stayed a week and was diagnosed with a life-threatening heart arrhythmia. He was moved home, where he was hospitalized for another three weeks. He underwent a five-hour ablation procedure, in which electrodes are placed inside the heart to destroy the irregular heartbeat.
He’s cycled through treatments in recent years, both experimental — perillyl alcohol inhalation, which Schmidt fears may have contributed to his heart problems — and spiritual. There was a holy man in Campinas whom Schmidt would see. “He gets all the spirits; he passes them out of you,” he says. “I’m Catholic, but, uh” — he shrugs — “it was nice.” For now, he’s taking prescribed heart medication and chemotherapy capsules, on a monthly schedule. Most likely, he’ll have to keep up the chemo for the rest of his life. “But, OK. I’m alive, no?”
It was during that last, dramatic Orlando trip that he got the call from FIBA: He was going to be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. He was driving, and, processing the news, he had to pull over. In Alphaville, I commend him on his heartfelt speech. I tell him it was inspiring. “I didn’t know it would be like that,” he says, lost in thought, clearly pleased. “First laugh a lot, then cry, yeah? Me too.”TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Libyan Interim Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni handed his resignation to parliament on Sunday after less than two weeks in the post, saying gunmen had tried to attack his family.
Libya's acting prime minister Abdallah al-Thinni speaks during a news conference in Tripoli March 12, 2014. REUTERS/Ismail Zitouny
His resignation adds to growing chaos in Libya, where the fragile government has struggled to overcome political rivalries and brigades of former rebels nearly three years after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in a NATO-backed rebellion.
In a letter sent to the General National Congress and published on the government website, Thinni said he and his family had been victim of a “cowardly attack” and he could not “accept to see any violence because of my position”.
“I have decided therefore to present my apologies as I cannot accept this temporary position,” the letter said, without giving details about the incident.
A spokesman for the prime minister’s office said no one had been injured in the attack, which he described as a “near miss” outside Thinni’s family home.
With no real national army, OPEC member Libya is struggling with its transition to democracy as the brigades of former rebels who once fought Gaddafi refuse to disarm and often challenge the state’s authority.
Thinni was appointed earlier this month as interim prime minister with a mandate for just a few weeks. It was extended by the GNC last week on condition that he formed a new government in an attempt to bring some stability.
If his resignation is accepted, the GNC must appoint another premier. The legislature, deeply unpopular with many Libyans who say it has failed to advance a transition to democracy, is deadlocked between Islamist and nationalist parties.
The GNC voted out Thinni’s predecessor, Ali Zeidan, after he failed to end a crisis with federalist rebels who had occupied three vital oil ports for months. Thinni’s government reached an agreement with them to reopen the ports.
Zeidan, who himself was briefly abducted by a militia last year, fled to Europe after he was removed from his post. He had often complained of being unable to govern because of political rivalries and pressure from militias.Donald Trump in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. AP Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Saturday kicked off a speech about his plan for his first 100 days as president by announcing intentions to sue every woman who has come forward and accused him of sexual misconduct over the past several weeks.
"Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign. Total fabrication. The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over," Trump said in a speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
At least 10 women have come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against Trump over the past several weeks. Trump has vehemently denied the allegations, which have come in the wake of the release of an explosive video that featured Trump boasting to television personality Billy Bush about groping women and kissing them without their consent.
The remarks came as Trump's campaign continues to reel from the fallout of the tape's release. The speech Saturday came as part of an attempt to rejigger the campaign in the election's final 17 days.
The majority of Trump's speech focused on his planned policies toward illegal immigration, crime, trade, the Supreme Court, and more. On his first day in office, he said, he would move to nominate a justice to replace the late Antonin Scalia, withdraw the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, suspend immigration from "terror-prone" countries, and more. He also proposed a "contract with the American voter" in an attempt to root out corruption in the federal government.
Trump also vowed, as part of an "end illegal immigration act," to build a wall along the US-Mexico border with the "full understanding" that Mexico "will be reimbursing" the US. In the past, Trump has said the US neighbor would pay for such a wall in full.
"If we follow these steps, we will once more have a government of, by and for the people," Trump said.
Polls show Trump with significant hurdles to climb in the election's final two-plus weeks. The RealClearPolitics average of recent national surveys puts him down 5.3 points to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.As Indians get stuck with Rs 2,000 notes in the first phase of the replacement of the old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, the common complaint one hears against it is that it is of no practical use. No one can use it easily for daily payments; your sabziwallah can’t certainly give you any change back after you buy your alu and tamatar.
The uncharitable will say that the new note is meant to give crooks another way of storing black wealth.
However, the underlying logic of printing the Rs 2,000 note as a prelude to demonetisation is sound. It is a limited purpose note that is not meant to be in circulation forever.
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The first purpose of the Rs 2,000 note is to quickly fill the void created by demonetisation. A Rs 2,000 note replaces four Rs 500 notes and two Rs 1,000 notes. The printing order for 3.5 billion pieces of Rs 2,000 notes (probably already completed or near completion) is meant to replace half the currency demonetised (Rs 14 lakh crore) in one shot. If money is the lifeblood of commerce, it is meant to replace the blood lost quickly. It is not meant to be hugely transacted on a daily basis.
However, it is still not too large a denomination to disable higher-value day-to-day transactions at petrol bunks, monthly provision purchases by the middle class, etc. It is meant to ease transactions for relatively higher spenders, which enables large parts of the urban economy to return to normal faster. Even the poor can use it like a credit card, making payments in advance to the same vendor that can be set off by daily purchases over a longer period of time.
The second purpose of the Rs 2,000 note is the ease with which it can be called back. It does not need to be demonetised when the government calls it back. In January 2014, the Reserve Bank of India asked people holding Rs 500 notes issued before 2005 to be returned for exchange with new notes. Whenever such notes returned to the banking system, they were withdrawn. They caused no dislocation.
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This is what will happen to the Rs 2,000 note. Once it has served its medium term purpose, which is to infuse the economy with legitimate cash quickly, it will probably be withdrawn in stages. This can be done after 2018, when the currency situation is back to normal.
The third purpose of the Rs 2,000 note is preventive. The shock delivered by the demonetisation of 8 November means that the Rs 2,000 note will never be taken for granted by black money hoarders. They know they can be whacked in one fell swoop. The Rs 2,000 note is too big to be kept in large quantities given its vulnerability and lower usability on a daily basis.
It is a currency born to die, and anyone with common sense knows it. It is not meant for hoarding.At least 170 people have been killed after a powerful earthquake hit south-west Pakistan, leaving thousands homeless. The death toll is expected to rise.
The aid agency Care International put the death toll at 500-600. Several villages were reduced to rubble. Local television pictures showed lines of bodies in white shrouds with victims' names written on them.
The earthquake struck in the early hours of the morning about 40 miles (60km) north-east of the provincial capital Quetta. There were aftershocks throughout the day including a powerful tremor at about 5.30pm local time.
"We went to a village, Wam, where we saw mass graves being dug," said Hasan Mazumdar, Care International's country director in Pakistan.
"Bodies were still arriving. I estimate that 200 died in that village alone.
"There was a big jolt while we were standing there. The mountains shook. Boulders came crashing down. The people were really scared. They never experienced anything like this. I spoke to a man in his early 30s who had lost four daughters. He was just completely heartbroken."
The earthquake of 2005 in northern Pakistan claimed about 73,000 lives. Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan, was flattened in 1935 by an earthquake that killed 30,000.
The Pakistan meteorological department put the magnitude of today's quake at 6.5. The official death toll is around 170 but reports are still coming in from remote areas.
The army has been sent in, bringing tents and blankets flown, but thousands are spending tonight in the open because their homes were destroyed or they are too frightened to go back indoors.
Sub-zero temperatures are expected. Khalil Gill, a worker with Oxfam who was in Quetta, said: "It was very cold this morning, we just ran out, no shoes, no jackets. There was a shock around 8am. This evening was the strongest, the whole town was shaking. Everything shook for about two minutes. We rushed outside. Women and children were crying. We are too frightened to go back into any buildings. We are all spending the night outside."
The former British hilltop resort of Ziarat and around eight surrounding villages were the worst hit. Hundreds of mud and timber houses destroyed, including some buried in landslides triggered by the quake.
"There is great destruction," said Ziarat's mayor, Dilawar Kakar. "Not a single house is intact."
Ziarat is a rural part of an impoverished province. The majority of houses are made of mud, so have little resistance to earth tremors. It is estimated 30,000 people have been affected by the earthquake, with around 15,000 made homeless.
Army helicopters flew in relief supplies but there was limited distribution of aid today, leaving shortages of food, water, blankets and tents.
Baluchistan is Pakistan's largest province geographically but is thinly populated. Pakistani officials said they could manage the situation and did not need international assistance so far.An American former Fifa executive cooperating with the FBI on a major corruption inquiry has admitted that he and other members of the all-powerful executive committee were bribed in return for voting for South Africa’s bid for the 2010 World Cup.
Chuck Blazer, a 70-year-old soccer chief, also admitted in the court facilitating the payment of a bribe relating to the 1998 World Cup in France.
Blazer, an eccentric power broker for American soccer for decades, and a member of the Fifa executive committee for six years until 2013, made the admissions in testimony to a New York judge in 2013 which was made public on Wednesday.
“I and others on the Fifa executive committee agreed to accept bribes in conjunction with the selection of South Africa as the host nation for the 2010 World Cup,” Blazer told the judge in a secret court session in November 2013.
Blazer, whose decision to assist the FBI appears to have been a critical breakthrough for the investigation now engulfing world football’s governing body, has been assisting federal agents since.
Formally entering a guilty plea during the hearing at New York’s eastern district court, Blazer told the judge his involvement in the acceptance bribes in connection with the South Africa bid began “in or around 2004 and continuing through 2011”. In a nod to a wider top-level conspiracy at Fifa, Blazer added: “My actions described above had common participants and results.”
South Africa won the right to stage the 2010 World Cup in 2004, after missing out on the 2006 tournament to Germany in controversial circumstances. But according to last week’s indictment from the US Department of Justice, payments continued after the bid was won.
Last week’s indictment alleges a bribe for Morocco’s failed bid was paid to Jack Warner, the president of the Concacaf, when Blazer was effectively working as his deputy.
The fallout from the US investigation into Fifa has led to an unprecedented crisis for the governance of world football, forcing the dramatic resignation on Tuesday of Fifa’s long-time president, Sepp Blatter.
Earlier on Wednesday, Reuters reported that the FBI, which along with Swiss authorities arrested numerous Fifa officials in Zurich last week on corruption charges, is investigating the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar.
FBI inquiry extends to awards of 2018 and 2022 World Cups – live updates Read more
Blazer’s guilty plea to a slew of charges including racketeering, wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering, income tax and banking offences was revealed last week, on the same day as 17 other Fifa officials and marketing executives were charged with similar crimes.
However the specifics of his court testimony, which took place behind locked doors because of the potential damage to the FBI’s investigation in the event of a leak, remained sealed. The transcript was released on Wednesday |
to a Formula 1 racing car or a turbocharged engine, but to the Large Hadron Collider. "Titan is like the particle accelerator, and the simulations and applications that we run on Titan are like the detectors that discovered the Higgs boson," Messer says. "The size or power of these machines isn't what pushes science forward. It's the people using them, who know what to look for."
If you would like to comment on this article or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.The Ethereum Computer is putting identity, funds and personal information back under the users’ control, and we think it’s going to change everything.
… and it’s going to be awesome : A tiny, preinstalled, preconfigured home server running both an optimized Ethereum node and exciting new decentralised applications, including Mist.
What’s the Ethereum Computer?
It’s the easiest entry point to the world of Ethereum, without having to struggle setting up a client, buying ether from an exchange (it will come preloaded with enough to get started) or worrying about security updates.
Think of a little box that manages your permissions and identity, with strong encryption and permission control. Inside you’ll find a web3 identity vault, a Slock gateway to your IoT, and even experimental software like an IPFS server to rent your unused hard drive space — automatically.
It’s the easier way to browse Dapps.
It’s a secure gatekeeper between the web & web3 to your home or small office IoT, communicating wirelessly with your smart objects.
And it’s also a brilliant development platform, packaging all the software needed to build Ethereum Dapps as part of a straightforward, optimized image.
Use cases
We want to put the Ethereum Computer into as many hands as possible, and bring decentralized technology to the mainstream.
Home automation, meet e-commerce
Enable your entire home to communicate with the blockchain: rent your flat, or share any Slock.it enabled smart object directly and securely.
Any object that’s using ZigBee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth LE or Wi-Fi will likely be able to interact with the Ethereum Computer. When it comes to powering up a ‘dumb’ object, it will be a case of retrofitting it using smart plugs.
Long term, we’d love to see deeper integration of our technology with white goods. If you’re wondering why it could be useful for your washing machine to talk to the Blockchain, have a look at this article. (hint: it’s about your privacy).
Try out new, exciting applications
The Ethereum Computer is a full blown implementation of the Ethereum stack, and therefore can serve any Dapp via HDMI out to your home theater.
If you’d rather use your own machine, you probably noticed current Dapps often require you to trust them with relaying your instructions correctly to the Ethereum network via their web interfaces. This is rather ironic (and dangerous!) considering Ethereum was designed with removing the need for trusted third parties in mind.
You can simply point your browser, mobile phone or tablet to the Ethereum Computer, and the 3rd party web servers will only be used to serve static HTML assets, while your precious keys will safely stay within the confines of your home.
Participate in experimental programs
The Ethereum developer community is by far the most active in the crypto space, and pushing the limits of how we relate with various commercial, financial and scientific entities.
The Ethereum Computer can be used to run an IFPS node, perhaps even receiving rewards for renting your unused hard drive space.
Develop Dapps without headache
Develop applications with Ethereum and never have to worry about installation difficulties.
We’ll sort out updates and compatibility issues between the various components of the Ethereum ‘stack’ (Whisper, EVM, Web3.js, Swarm, etc), and will push updates only when we have tested the framework top to bottom.
Of course, if you want to run your own version of the modules, that’s fine too. It’s your hardware after all.
Host the World’s Computer
Help secure the Ethereum network and get rewarded for it (once Ethereum has switched to PoS), without having to dedicate larger, more expensive and less secure equipment to that task.
Will it be hackable/open?
Absolutely. We’ll not only make the devkit images publicly available, but also all of the detailed code that went into building the ‘stack’ so you can modify/improve on the installation.
One thing we’re aiming to do is use a hardware (board+SoC) combination that is publicly available so that one could completely rebuild the Ethereum Computer from scratch if they wanted to.
Having some GPIO available will also allow anyone to connect wired objects to the Ethereum network. We want you to be able to experiment!
Will it be useful for mining?
The Ethereum Computer is a full Ethereum client and therefore perfectly capable to have its mining function enabled.
That said, it would not be a good platform to mine on while Ethereum is still using proof of work, as its form factor prevents it from having the hashing power GPUs have. The Ethereum Computer will be a perfectly appropriate platform to help secure the network, but only once Ethereum switches to proof of stake.
Availability
Sometime in 2017, although we anticipate devkits much earlier as part of an iterative development process. If you’re interested in our alpha tester program, please indicate your interest on our Slack channels.A woman says she stopped a man who had already pulled out six of her teeth because she thought he was going to pull out more.
The woman was the first victim to give evidence in the trial of Upper Hutt man Philip Lyle Hansen, who is charged with wounding four women by pulling out their teeth and with rape.
Hansen has pleaded not guilty to 11 charges of wounding with intent to injure four women by extracting their teeth with pliers or attempting to with a screwdriver, rape, wiggling their teeth or cutting their toes, and unlawful sexual connection.
The alleged crimes took place between 1988 and 2011 in various places in the Hutt Valley.
The woman said on Tuesday she had been drinking in the back of Hansen's car when he had produced a pair of pliers and an oily rag, and began removing six of her bottom teeth.
He threw the teeth out the car window.
She said she had to tell her parents she had had an accident when she saw them the next day because she could not hide what had happened.
Hansen later arranged for her to visit a dentist to have all her teeth removed.
"He was determined to have a relationship with a woman who had no teeth. He did not have any teeth himself," a Wellington District Court jury heard the woman say on a police video interview.
He did not want her to have dentures either. She said he had destroyed at least three pairs, even flushing one pair down the toilet.
The woman said he was controlling and manipulative, sexually as well as preventing her from seeing her family, having her head shaved because he did not like her hair or dressing her in short skirts with no underwear.
He had also tried to dig out her wisdom teeth when they came through after she got dentures.
She said it was oral sex Hansen was after which was why he did not want her to have teeth.
She had known Hansen in the 80's and said even now she keeps her teeth close to her.
Crown prosecutor Sally Carter told the jury she hoped they were not squeamish about going to the dentist as there was a bit of evidence about teeth.
She said the women had met Hansen mostly through the Internet.
"Bizarrely he had a fascination with their teeth or rather with them having no teeth at all," she said.
The trial is expected to take two weeks.A Perth councillor accused of having child abuse images has resigned.
Michael Jamieson, who was suspended by Conservative Party leaders when the allegations came to light, handed in his notice to council chiefs on Monday morning.
The 69-year-old, who became a councillor for the Perth City South ward in May, appeared from custody at Perth Sheriff Court, accused of having obscene images stored on his home computer.
The former music teacher tendered his resignation after being ordered to quit by leader of the Tory-led administration Ian Campbell.
Jamieson’s details have now been removed from the local authority’s website, while his Facebook page has also been taken down.
A by-election will be called for the four-member ward in the coming weeks.
Mr Campbell said: “I can confirm that I and the chief executive of Perth and Kinross Council have today received the written resignation from Mr Michael Jamieson, that I requested on Friday.
“Mr Jamieson is no longer a Perth and Kinross councillor or member of the Conservative group on Perth and Kinross Council.”
Mr Campbell said: “There will be a by-election within the statutory time limit in Perth City South ward.”
Mr Jamieson has also resigned as secretary of the Perform in Perth festival, a competition which attracts around 4,000 young musicians each year. He was suspended by the group when the allegations emerged at the weekend.
Jamieson made no plea when he appeared before Sheriff Michael Wood. He was released on bail with an interim internet ban.
The charge relates to allegations between November 2015 and March 2016, although the number of alleged images has not been disclosed.
Jamieson, who recently stood down as president of Perth Rotary Club, was elected at this summer’s local government election with 1,757 votes.
His resignation leaves the local authority with a total of 16 Tory councillors. The party leads a joint administration with four Liberal Democrats and three independents.
There are 15 SNP councillors and one from Labour.
In an online biography, Jamieson said he had a background in the entertainment industry and had campaigned against cuts to the instrumental music service. At this year’s election, he pledged to bring more businesses into the city.
A follow-up court date has still to be scheduled.Two of the six teens from Burundi who competed in the International Robotics Challenge in Washington, D.C. and who reportedly went missing on July 19, were seen entering Canada, DC police told ABC7's Suzanne Kennedy Thursday.
The other four teens appear to be okay, according to police, and are reportedly with members of their family in the United States.
DC Police released the names and photos of the teens on their Twitter page on Wednesday.
Audrey Mwamikazi, 17, Don Charu Ingabire, 16, Aristide Irambona, 18, Nice Munezero, 17, Kevin Sabumkiza, 17, and Richard Irakoze, 18, were all missing.
Burundi is a small country in east Africa.
The teens disappeared from the competition before it ended, and arrived in the country last week for a robotics competition at DAR Constitution Hall. The event was held from July 16 to July 18.
The teens were last seen at 5:30 p.m. on July 18 during the events closing ceremony, according to ABC7's Suzanne Kennedy.
More than 150 countries were represented in the competition also described as robotic Olympics. Teams went head-to-head using science, technology, math and engineering.
On July 19, a member of the group contacted a volunteer from the organization that sponsors the robotics competition informing them that the teens were missing. Metropolitan Police got involved and canvassed Constitution Hall in their search for the team.
The teens were in town temporarily for the competition and have one-year visas, according to Kennedy.
This story will be updatedIf at first you don’t succeed…
After Han Zhang, 30, first went after her husband’s manhood when he asked her for a divorce, she went after him a second time three months later.
During the first incident, Zhang reportedly crushed up sleeping pills and put them in Han Mou’s drink. When he fell asleep, she went after his private parts with some scissors and was able to flush his penis down the toilet before he woke up.
She was apparently worried that he was interested in another woman. "If he and I divorced, and that our children will have a stepmother, a terrible thing." Zhang told China News.
Somehow Mou was able to forgive her. "I still love my wife," he said. “She was 16 years old just like me, and gave me two sons.”
Zhang was released on bail and returned home to look after her husband and children.
According to the translation about what happened next, some time passed before Zhang became jealous again and used a syringe to inject a box of milk with crushed sleeping pills.
Then this happened:
“Zhang reminded of her husband's underwear…the future of his two children…her heart has become increasingly irritable…stripped pants…picked up the scissors to his remaining…all genitals cut off and threw it on the ground.”
She then apparently called for an ambulance and turned herself in to police.
[China News] [EChinaCities]Who are the 1% who are sucking up half the world’s cellular bandwidth?
It’s tempting to blame — as many headline writers have — Apple’s (AAPL) newest iPhone and its voice-activated personal assistant for the fact that 3% of mobile users now consume 70% of the world’s bandwidth, up from 40% in 2009.
After all, the iPhone 4S with Siri consumes nearly twice as much data as the iPhone 4 and nearly three times as much as the iPhone 3GS, according to a report issued Friday by Arieso, a British company that advises mobile operators in the U.S., Europe and Africa.
Even Michael Flanagan, Arieso’s chief technology officer, seems to lay the widening bandwidth gap at Siri’s door.
“I use the iPhone 4 myself and when I first heard of the iPhone 4S features I was not compelled to rush out and get one,” he told Reuters. “However, the data usage numbers I am seeing make me wonder what I am missing.”
But as Flanagan’s own study shows, it’s not the iPhone 4S that is jamming the world’s cellular airwaves.
“The hungriest 1% of all subscribers,” who consume 50% of the world’s bandwidth, according to Arieso, “were predominantly using USB dongles or 3G Modems.” Quoting from the full report:
As noted in earlier studies, 3G modems are generally noteworthy for two aspects: 1) their relatively low volumes of subscribers (compared to smartphones and other devices) and 2) their remarkably high volumes of data per subscriber. The product of these two items results in the aggregate data volume across all 3G modems and is typically competitive with (and sometimes in excess of) the aggregate data volume across all smartphones. Table 1 shows a considerable 23-to-24 times increase in the data volume per 3G modem subscriber over the iPhone 3G reference. This is achieved by making nearly one-seventh the number of data calls per subscriber.
In other words, if you need someone to blame, don’t point your finger at those crazy people talking to their iPhones. Worry about the kids with dongles streaming movies to their laptops.
You can read Arieso’s press release here. The full report is available upon request.If you've ever ridden a Citibike (or any similar bike-share bicycle) you know: those suckers are heavy. And, if you've ever ridden up anything near an incline, you know that heavy bikes absolutely suck on hills. Wouldn't it be great to just push a button instead?
Jeff Guida thinks so. This banker-turned-inventor has launched a Kickstarter project for a novel and wonderfully simplistic product. It's a little briefcase-like box that can turn any Citibike into an electric scooter. Guida calls it the ShareRoller. I call it awesome.
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I met up with Guida in the cold on Thursday to try it out, and was pleasantly surprised in few different ways. First of all, the ShareRoller is smaller than it looks in photos. When you hear "briefcase-like box," you probably actually think of a briefcase. I did, anyway.
In reality, it's about the size of a 500-sheet pack of paper and weighs just seven pounds. The vast majority of that space is for the battery which gives you a 12- to 20-mile range, depending on which model you buy.
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The next thing that surprised me was the speed. First, there's the installation. I watched in awe as Guida converted a regular old Citibike into an electric bike in approximately four seconds. By the fifth second, my ass was in the saddle. Then came the real fun. For legal reasons, the ShareRoller won't engage when you're at a standstill, so I had to pedal a couple of times before I could engage the 1.0 horsepower motor with a handlebar-mounted throttle. But, when I pushed the button, it felt like I'd been given superpowers. In a matter of moments, I was going 18 miles per hour while barely pedaling. I seriously laughed out loud at the sensation.
Riding an electric Citibike is a blast, but the biggest surprise was learning more about Guida's path to becoming an inventor. After studying electrical engineering in college, he took a job in management consulting and then finance. At a certain point, that life simply wasn't fulfilling enough. Guida wanted to make something. So he quit his job, bought a 3D printer, taught himself how to use AutoCAD, and started, well, making stuff.
Guida's first invention also involved bikes. It's a pedal attachment for the Brompton folding bike, and it became popular enough to inspire Guida to aim higher. While he was considering building an electric bike kit for a Brompton, he started to get curious about the possibilities of friction drive motors.
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"I looked at the Citibike and thought, 'Aha! This thing is perfectly set up for a friction drive system, and the mounting triangle that is used to dock the bike is a perfect place to mount a motor,'" Guida told me. "So I just started designing something."
After only two weeks—and who knows how many hours in AutoCAD—Guida had built a working prototype. Sure, his experience in electrical engineering came in handy, but pretty much everything else, including the coding it took to build the software for the microprocessor, was pretty ad hoc. Nevertheless, it all happened very quickly.
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"Years ago, I would've needed a giant engineering company and several million dollars in development research and it still would've taken two years or more," Guida said. But 3D printing has changed all that. In the coming months, Guida hopes to design a universal bracket so that the ShareRoller can be used on any bike. He has some competition there, as there are a few companies that make wheels that convert regular bikes into electric bikes, but he says the ShareRoller is more convenient.
The story almost makes me want to become an inventor—but I studied history and literature, so I'm probably better off as a keyboard jockey.
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The ShareRoller Kickstarter launches today. Guida hopes to raise $100,000 so that he can start mass manufacturing the device. Early birds can secure a ShareRoller for $995. Otherwise, it's $1,195 for the standard model and $1,495 for the extended range model.
I'll be the first to say it: That is very expensive for a bike accessory. If it'll get you to start using Citibike instead of taking the subway, however, it'll pay for itself in about a year.
I'll also be the first to say: riding an electric Citibike is much more fun than taking the subway. [Kickstarter]
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Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIFIt wasn’t long ago, our Anonymous media branch revealed that the link between the Mosquito borne virus Zika and the birth defect Microcephaly may be circumstantial only. Now, it seems, a group of physicians have declared similar.
The Argentine doctors who have banded together under the banner Physicians in the Crop-Sprayed Towns, have raised concern about the birth defects being related to the deliberately polluted water in the towns where abnormally high rates of Microcephaly are present.
The guilty party, they claim is a ‘strategic partner’ of Monsanto. Their counterpart, Japanese company Sumitomo, manufactured a chemical called Pyriproxyfen, which was introduced into the drinking water supplies in 2014. According to the physicians’’ report, Pyriproxyfen is a chemical larvicide that was produced to curtail the mosquito breeding cycle. The affects that alter the developing mosquitoes during its developmental cycle – larva, pupa, adult – mimic the birth defects now affecting unborn babies.
The inhabitance of the development of the mosquito can range from wing and genitalia defect, to disabling and killing them.
“Malformations detected in thousands of children from pregnant women living in areas where the Brazilian state added Pyriproxyfen to drinking water are not a coincidence, even though the Ministry of Health places a direct blame on the Zika virus for this damage,” the Physicians in the Crop-Sprayed Towns have commented.
Source: Physicians in the Crop-Sprayed Towns Report
Other Pyriproxyfen reports say:
According to the Pesticide Action Network Pesticide database, pesticides such as Pyriproxyfen are Endocrine disruptors and can “interfere” with animals and humans. “Exposures can cause sterility or decreased fertility, impaired development, birth defects of the reproductive tract, and metabolic disorders.”
According to sponsored WHO reports, the same chemical still has a “?” for the “Developmental or Reproductive Toxin” and “Endocrine Disruptor” categories. But they do say this:
“Some pesticides are known to cause birth defects or interfere with normal development… Many pesticides that disrupt endocrine functions also cause reproductive and developmental harm, as well as other adverse effects,” says one report.
Nothing is confirmed by the sources, as studies are yet to be conducted in an appropriate manner to rule out negative outcomes.
According to advice to veterinarians who use the substance on domestic animals to control fleas, it is stipulated that “[Pyriproxyfen] neither veterinary antiparasitic nor any agricultural pesticides are tested in human beings to determine their toxicity to humans before they are introduced in the market.” The parent site suggests pregnant women should avoid it, as “acute intoxication” may be more likely.
The State-controlled program to eradicate mosquitos in Brazil by adding Pyriproxyfen (also less commonly known as Pyroproxyfen) to the drinking water of residents, has been urged by these Physicians to conduct further studies to “rule out” their hypothesis.
This Article (Is Zika-Linked Birth Defects a Monsanto Cover Up?) is a free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author AnonWatcher and AnonHQ.com.Former U.S. Olympian admits to working as a Vegas call girl
Suzy Favor-Hamilton (seen competing in the 2004 U.S. Olympic Trials) ran for the U.S. in three Olympic Games. (Photo11: Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY Sports)
One of the most decorated female distance runners in U.S. track history admitted that she had been working as a $600 an hour escort for a service based in Las Vegas.
According to The Smoking Gun, who had been working on the expose for several months,Suzy Favor Hamilton admitted to one of their reporters that she was the woman being profiled as "Kelly" on a site called Haley Heston's Private Collection. The service deleted Favor Hamilton's photos earlier this month at her request.
Via The Smoking Gun:
"I take full responsibility for my mistakes. I'm not the victim and I'm not going that route," Favor Hamilton said. "I'm owning up to what I did. I would not blame anybody except myself." She added, "Everybody in this world makes mistakes. I made a huge mistake. Huge."
Several hours after the story broke, the 44-year-old married mother issued a direct apology on her Twitter account.
Via @favorhamilton:
"I realize I have made highly irrational choices and I take full responsibility for them. I am not a victim here and knew what I was doing. I was drawn to escorting in large part because it provided many coping mechanisms for me when I was going through a very challenging time with my marriage and my life. It provided an escape from a life that I was struggling in. It was a double life. I do not expect people to understand, but the reasons for doing this made sense to me at the time and were very much related to depression. As crazy as I know it seems, I never thought I would be exposed, therefore never hurting anybody. I have been seeking the help of a psychologist for the past few weeks and will continue to do so after I have put things together. I cannot emphasize enough how sorry I am to anyone I have hurt as a result of my actions and greatly appreciate the support from family and those closest to me. I fully intend to make amends and get back to being a good mother, wife, daughter, and friend."
Favor Hamilton competed in the women's 1500m in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 Olympic Games. A nine-time NCAA champion at Wisconsin, the Big 10 awards its "Suzy Favor Award' annually to the conference's female athlete of the year.
It was in the women's 1500 meter final at the 2000 Games in Sydney where Favor Hamilton drew attention for falling to the track (she later admitted it was intentional) after it became apparent she wasn't going to win a medal.
The Madison, Wisc. resident discussed that race and other obstacles in her life in a July feature with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
Via the Journal-Sentinel:
"Your whole life, you're told how great you are, from your coaches to your friends to your parents' friends," she told the paper. "I had to be the perfect child, in my mind. It wasn't anybody's fault. I never blame anybody. It's just the way society is. So you feel you have to be perfect. Or, at least, I did."
Favor Hamilton told the Smoking Gun that her husband Mark was aware of her escort work.
"He tried, he tried to get me to stop," she said. "He wasn't supportive of this at all."
VIDEO: Favor Hamilton running through the woods in a 2000 Nike ad
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/UJiq3oA tourist has told how he was smashed over the head with a broken bottle as he waited to get on a tour bus in Dublin city centre.
A tourist has told how he was smashed over the head with a broken bottle as he waited to get on a tour bus in Dublin city centre.
Dafydd Hughes (45) had been in the country for less than two hours when a young man threatened to "gouge" his eye out with a bottle.
The father of two suffered a head injury during the unprovoked attack.
"We had only been one hour and 50 minutes in Ireland when it happened. We were standing at a kerb waiting for a tour bus to come along," Mr Hughes said.
"A young man approached me with a bottle and said to me, 'Why are you smiling? You won't be smiling when I gouge your eye out with this bottle.'"
Mr Hughes, who lives in Cheltenham in England, said that he was concerned for the safety of his son Logan (11) and Joe (17) as well as his sister Sian and other relatives who were standing with him among a group of US and Canadian tourists at the bus stop on O'Connell Street.
He told the Irish Independent that the man appeared to be under the influence of alcohol and possibly drugs.
A struggle ensued, during which the assailant and the tourist fell to the ground. The man broke the bottle and lunged at Mr Hughes, inflicting a nasty wound to his head.
Punch
"There was blood everywhere. I was bleeding heavily from the wound in my head. My son Joe tried to help me and the man then tried to punch Joe twice," he said.
A security guard from a nearby business intervened and stopped the struggle.
The victim's sister Sian, who she is a medical doctor working in Australia, tended to the wounds inflicted on her brother's head.
"Our family had just been talking about how friendly the Irish people are when this happened," Sian said.
"I had tried to calm the man down but he was asking my brother, 'Do you want to see through just one eye?'"
As Mr Hughes was receiving treatment on the ground, a young woman who had been in the company of the attacker before the incident approached him and claimed that she was six months pregnant and "needed some money".
"I should have gone to hospital for treatment but my sister tended to my wounds," said Mr Hughes. "I was able to go ahead with the bus tour for the sake of my children.
"My sister bought me a new t-shirt and threw away my blood-soaked shirt. She put a bandage on my head later.
"When I got on the bus, all the Americans and Canadian tourists, who were shocked, gave me a big cheer," he said.
Mr Hughes said the attack did not make him change his mind that the Ireland is a very friendly place to visit.
"The gardaí were very helpful and we really appreciate that," he said.
Seven members of the family visited the Guinness Hop Store the next day and they then travelled to Donegal.
Irish IndependentAccording to the YEP, Neil Warnock is planning on snapping up Pompey duo Luke Varney and David Norris after seeing earlier plans to sign them hindered by a lack of cash.
29 year old Varney might be remembered by fans as signing for newly promoted Blackpool on loan in 2010. He impressed initially with manager Ian Holloway making no secret of his desire to sign him in the January window. Varney then suffered some bad luck and suffered an 18-match barren spell for the Tangerines. He signed for Portsmouth in the summer and was often used on the wing there.
Rumours link Sheffield Wednesday to Norris, and Middlesbrough to Luke Varney (for £375,000), but nothing concrete has come of either rumour.
Leeds might also do well to look at Pompey winger/forward Erik Huseklepp. Huseklepp (like new signing Pearce) has had some experience of financial problems. Making over 100 appearances for SK Brann, the talented Norwegian moved to Bari in 2011, making 14 appearances and impressing before being moved on to Portsmouth following relegation to Serie B. Signed for £1.9m last Summer, Huseklepp went on loan to promotion pushers Birmingham City, but after failure to return to the Premier League, Birmingham are thought to be in financial trouble of their own and will not look to secure the return of the highly rated winger/forward.
Former club Brann are rumoured to be very interested, but will probably be unable to meet the rumoured £800,000 price tag.Al Qaeda’s branch in East Africa, Shabaab, has increased its operational tempo in northern Kenya over the past few weeks. Dozens of people have been killed by both ambushes and improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in the Kenyan provinces of Garissa, Mandera, and Lamu.
In a statement released on Shabaab’s Shahada News Agency, the group’s military spokesman, Abdul Aziz Abu Musab, said that the jihadists have launched 11 attacks inside Kenya in a three week period. However, more attacks attributed to Shabaab have been reported. The majority of these incidents were perpetrated in Kenya’s Garissa County near the border with Somalia.
On May 8, seven Kenyan police officers were wounded near the town of Liboi when their vehicle hit an IED. Four days later, Shabaab targeted the town of Amuma. On May 16, four people were killed near Liboi also after striking an IED. A week later, three more police officers were killed by an IED in the same town. Just a day later, five other police officers were killed near the same area. On June 2, one person was killed when Shabaab targeted the town of Fafi. Today, four people were killed by an IED in the nearby town of Kulan.
In Mandera County, attacks have also occurred with a similar frequency. Shabaab was blamed for killing two miners in a quarry in Mandera on May 12. On May 16, Shabaab militants targeted a government official in the town of Omar Jillo, killing one and abducting two. A day later, a vehicle hit an IED near El Wak. On May 24, five police officers were killed in Mandera as part of an assassination attempt on the governor of Mandera County.
While in Lamu County, eight people, including seven police officers, were killed in an IED attack in the Baure region on May 31. Two more police officers were killed by an IED later that day responding to the earlier incident. A Kenyan military convoy was targeted yesterday in Wajir County, however, no injuries were reported.
Shabaab has long conducted military operations inside Kenya, often along the border with Somalia. Many of these cross-border raids were carried out by Shabaab’s Jaysh Ayman, which is responsible for these types of attacks. Shabaab was also behind a deadly terrorist attack on Garissa University in early 2015. The jihadists stormed the university and killed 148 people and wounded many more. In 2013, Shabaab also perpetrated the Westgate Mall siege in Nairobi.
The increased operational tempo comes as Shabaab has also ramped up its rhetoric against Kenya, which has battled Shabaab’s forces inside Somalia for years. Two weeks ago, the al Qaeda branch released a video where its spokesman, Ali Mahmoud Rage, called on Kenyan jihadists to form an army. Speaking to Kenyan graduates of a Shabaab training camp in Somalia, Rage said “You have to be the army that will conquer Kenya so that we may return to our families and relatives in a state of honor and glory.” [See FDD’s Long War Journal report, Shabaab spokesman calls on Kenyan jihadists to form an ‘army’.]
Shabaab’s attacks and propaganda against Kenya are unlikely to slow as the group continues to gain strength. Over the past year, Shabaab has regained control of some towns and rural areas in Somalia’s south that it lost during an AMISOM offensive that began in 2011. In addition, Shabaab has stepped up suicide attacks and guerrilla operations both in and around the capital of Mogadishu.
Caleb Weiss is a contributor to FDD's Long War Journal.
Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.Vast amounts of methane appear to be leaking undetected from Australia's biggest coal seam gas field, according to world-first research that undercuts claims by the gas industry.
Testing inside the Tara gas field, near Condamine on Queensland's Western Downs, found some greenhouse gas levels over three times higher than nearby districts, according to the study by researchers at Southern Cross University.
Methane, carbon dioxide and other gases appear to be leaking up through the soil and bubbling up through rivers at an astonishing rate, the researchers said.
"The concentrations here are higher than any measured in gas fields anywhere else that I can think of, including in Russia," said Damien Maher, a biochemist who helped conduct the tests. "The extent of these enriched concentrations is significant."
The study has potential national consequences because last week's energy white paper forecast a massive expansion of Australian coal seam gas drilling, and called for environmental objections to be removed to make large-scale gas extraction easier. In NSW, the Planning Assessment Commission is currently considering a proposal by AGL to drill 66 new coal seam gas wells in western Sydney.Is fossilized rock all that remains when a dinosaur decomposes?
New research from scientists at the University of Toronto and researchers in China and Taiwan provides the first evidence that proteins have been preserved within the 195-million-year-old rib of the sauropodomorph dinosaur Lufengosaurus. The study appears in the Jan. 31 issue of the journal Nature Communications.
"These dinosaur proteins are more than 100 million years older than anything previously discovered," says Professor Robert Reisz, a specialist in vertebrate paleontology in the department of biology at U of T Mississauga. "These proteins are the building blocks of animal soft tissues, and it's exciting to understand how they have been preserved."
The Canada-Taiwan research team, led by Reisz, used the synchrotron at the Taiwanese National Synchrotron Radiation Research Centre to find the substance in place, known as collagen type I, preserved within the tiny vascular canals of the rib where blood vessels and blood would be in the living dinosaur.
The collagen was found together with lots of small, spherical hematite particles. Hematite is a mineral that can be formed from the iron in hemoglobin, the oxygen-transport protein in red blood cells. The chemical bond between iron and oxygen is what gives blood cells their red colour.
Reisz and his colleagues believe that these hematite particles were derived from the original blood of the dinosaur, and that they acted as the catalyst for preserving the protein in the vascular canals of the bone. These collagen pieces are probably remnants of the blood vessels that supplied blood to the bone cells in the living dinosaur.
"Interestingly, there was no evidence of preservation of organic remains in the main mass of the bone, only in the small vascular canals that ran along the length of the rib, where hematite was also present" says Reisz.
"Our localized search, in areas of the bone that are likely to preserve remnants of the original soft tissues, is more likely to succeed than previously used methods. This approach has great future potential, because localized searches will yield important results even when the amount of organic remains is miniscule."
Previous evidence of preserved collagen date back to the Late Cretaceous Period -- more than 100 million years younger than this discovery -- but those studies extracted the organic remains by dissolving away all other parts of the fossil, without a clear understanding of the precise origins of the collagen.
This research allowed the scientists to find the collagen in place without dissolving the rest of the fossil, and it has helped them understand how the organic remains were preserved. Reisz believes that future explorations for even older proteins will be possible if this technique is used.(When I begin to write this (at about 3.00) I was planning to return to Wardown Park tomorrow. By the time I’d finished, I’d decided I might head off to Lord’s instead, which might lend support to my theory. Or not.)
Last Bank Holiday Monday found me at Wardown Park in Luton where James Middlebrook (once of Yorkshire and Essex, and lately of Northamptonshire) was capt |
Nazemariner added 23:19 - Apr 7
This is f¥(king hilarious 😂 5
KuqiCoup added 23:19 - Apr 7
What's wrong with her.
First Wenger and now Mick. How on earth does she think it'll help her sons career.
Very odd. Mick won't like that and she would have got his number off AMN you'd imagine with or without his permission.
Very strange episode. Last we'll see of the lad I think. 7
WhoisJimmyJuan added 23:24 - Apr 7
Much more of this and Ainsley Maitland Niles will retire and open up the Niles Motel....... 1
essextractorboy93 added 23:24 - Apr 7
Ainsley must feel so embarrassed. Second time this sort of thing has happened after a previous incident at Arsenal. He started off reasonably well but really lost his way throughout the season but that's not a surprise given he is only 18! 3
patrickswell added 23:27 - Apr 7
No wonder Mick's looked so rattled lately. Poison at every corner. -1
henryblue added 23:28 - Apr 7
So he's not played cos of the actions of his mum? Worth noting our results have hardly improved since his departure from the side, been a stand out player and a cut above the rest at times despite his young age. I suppose a forward thinking player with a good touch and bags of natural talent is enough for Mick to look the other way without the abuse from his mum. -10
Michael11 added 23:28 - Apr 7
Poor lad. Obviously that can't be tolerated but also seems a little unfair on him, he can't help what his interfering old bag of a Mum does and shouldn't suffer because of her actions. To be fair, I'd rather see his Mum start against Brentford on Saturday than Jonny Douglas. 12
thebeat added 23:34 - Apr 7
This makes me so happy. Id love just 2 minutes on the phone with The cowardly dinosaur. #mickout #antifootball -11
Westcountryblue added 23:39 - Apr 7
His mothers actions are appalling and highly detrimental to AMN development and reputation in the game. However, i really feel for AMN as he is much better player than Pringle et al and he desperately unlucky to not have played recently. He would been a good loanee to get next season, however i doubt that will be happening now. 2
nfinley added 23:44 - Apr 7
What a load of donkey dung coming out of mr evans comment i mean conspiracy thearies galore i mean some of the stuff people come out with on here all i have to say is be careful what you wish for 6
bluebare added 23:58 - Apr 7
I'd like to have made a similar call to mock after a 600+ round trip on Tuesday to see dopy Douglas and the gang and on a school night 1
EatonBlue added 23:59 - Apr 7
I suspect that 20,000 of us might also have wanted to give Mick a similar message after the Rotherham game. 2
topguy added 00:04 - Apr 8
Well, lets ask a question not asked, do you think MMs mobile is listed no, so she got the number off her son, why cause hes wasn't happy at the way hes being asked to play, MM knows this and if he gets a awful voicemail tough, don't ask for sympathy from me, you don't give us any and we have to pay to watch this dire rubbish, you are paid well to do this job. -5
planetblue_2011 added 00:45 - Apr 8
Thought he's been left out the team because of his last minute blunder against Bolton.
Oh well I'm sure Mick will get over it!! 1
CBMTOBWMMBG added 01:17 - Apr 8
I hope AMN stays another year and sacks his Mum. Add in Dozzell/Benyu for 10-15 games each as skilful rookies, a fit Bishop, a fit, motivated McGoldrick, Emmanuel as a proper right back and one or two signings could it all be very exciting...? 2
footyblue added 02:35 - Apr 8
must have been bad if it shocked Mr potty mouth himself 2
Daz added 03:59 - Apr 8
Windows phone. Can't even post properly on this site 0
battyblue added 05:25 - Apr 8
Can someone give me micks number i have a thing or two i would like to say to him to. 1
Hegansheroes added 06:47 - Apr 8
Anyone got MM's phone number-90% of fans would love to give him a bit of abuse -8
jas0999 added 06:54 - Apr 8
I don't think AMN will ve at the club next season! 2
Woodbridgian added 08:15 - Apr 8
Maybe she could post his number I'm sure there are plenty of others who would like to leave a message! 2
GeoffSentence added 08:27 - Apr 8
Come on Mick, make this voicemail public. I love to hear a good rant. 1Extremist who stabbed several people at last year’s march suspected of trying to organise another attack from his prison cell
Jerusalem’s gay pride parade has gone ahead under tight security after it was alleged that an ultra-Orthodox extremist who stabbed several people at last year’s march, killing a 16-year-old girl, was attempting to organise a fresh attack from his prison cell.
Israeli officials said Yishai Schlissel had been arrested in prison on suspicion of plotting with his brother, Michael, to harm march participants. Michael Schlissel, who was arrested on Wednesday, denies the allegations.
Speaking before the parade started, the Jerusalem police chief, Yoram Halevy, said: “We have disrupted and prevented an attempt to hurt people during the parade. The march will take place as planned. We will ensure that the public is able to realise its rights to free expression and protest in Israel’s democracy.”
Other members of Schlissel’s family have been barred from coming to Jerusalem. Schlissel is serving a life sentence for the murder of Shira Banki at last year’s march. He had been released from prison three weeks before that attack after serving a sentence for stabbing several people at a pride parade in 2005.
During Thursday’s march, which was the largest ever held in Jerusalem with 25,000 people taking part compared with 5,000 last year – flowers were laid at the spot where Banki was stabbed. Marchers were required to undergo security screening at the start of the event, and 2,000 police officers were on duty.
Several other people were arrested on suspicion of planning to disrupt the event, including an activist with a far-right Jewish group who reportedly posted incitement against the march.
Underlining the anxieties surrounding the event, a survivor of last year’s attack, Yarden Noy, said: “I’m scared to death but the message I want this march to relay is to not give in to terror.”
Concerns were heightened by a series of homophobic comments made by rabbis representing Israel’s religious Zionist movement. Although Israel has long prided itself on having the most liberal approach to homosexuality in the Middle East, recent remarks have thrown a spotlight on anti-gay prejudice in parts of Israeli society.
The Israeli army’s newly nominated chief rabbi, Colonel Eyal Karim, has called gay people “sick and disabled”, and another prominent rabbi, Yigal Levinstein, the head of a pre-military academy, recently described LGBT people as “deviants”.
The city’s mayor, Nir Barkat, announced he would not attend the march, in part because it “offends the [ultra-Orthodox Jewish] public and the national-religious public”.EU Court Of Justice Says Software Functionality Is Not Subject To Copyright
from the good-ruling dept
As the Advocate General states in point 57 of his Opinion, to accept that the functionality of a computer program can be protected by copyright would amount to making it possible to monopolise ideas, to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development.
Consequently, the owner of the copyright in a computer program may not prevent, by relying on the licensing agreement, the person who has obtained that licence from determining the ideas and principles which underlie all the elements of that program in the case where that person carries out acts which that licence permits him to perform and the acts of loading and running necessary for the use of the computer program, and on condition that that person does not infringe the exclusive rights of the owner in that program.
[....]
It must therefore be held that the copyright in a computer program cannot be infringed where, as in the present case, the lawful acquirer of the licence did not have access to the source code of the computer program to which that licence relates, but merely studied, observed and tested that program in order to reproduce its functionality in a second program.
We've been following the legal fight between SAS and World Programming Limited (WPL) for quite some time. If you don't recall, WPL essentially recreated some functionality of SAS's offering, not by copying the software itself or the source code, but basically by reading SAS's manuals about what its software did. The UK's High Court said this did not infringe, and the case got kicked up to the European Court of Justice (which has been pretty good on copyright issues lately). In the fall, the EU Advocates General recommended that the court make clear that software functionality issubject to copyright, and it appears that's exactly what the court has now done In a relatively short ruling, the court points out that, while software itself may be covered by copyright, "the ideas and principles which underlie any element of a computer program, including those which underlie its interfaces, are not protected by copyright." Basically, the EUCJ properly recognized the difference between protecting the idea (not copyrightable) and the expression (copyrightable). The court points out that actual code can still be covered, but the features generated out of that code is a different story:Also important in the discussion is whether or not the software maker could use a license agreement to effectively prohibit this. This is a question that courts have been dealing with for a while: can you effectively remove exceptions to copyright -- or can you effectively expand the power of copyright -- via an overly inclusive license agreement. Here, thankfully, the court rejects that idea:It's always nice to see courts getting copyright rulings right (or, at least, mostly right). It's been much rarer in the US, but it seems like the EUCJ has really been thinking a lot more carefully about copyright law lately.
Filed Under: code, eucj, european union, software copyright, uk
Companies: sas, world programming limitedI recently read a statistic that said every minute invested in planning will save you ten minutes down the road. I can personally attest that not only does a little planning ahead help with time management, but it also saves money and reduces stress. Don’t we all want more help in those areas? Um, I sure do!
No matter how busy I am, I try to set aside about an hour on Sunday afternoons to prepare for the week ahead. Since today is Sunday and I’m in the process of doing my weekly planning, I felt inspired to share the tasks that keep me organized.
Check calendar for appointments.
Make a “to do” list.
Jot down a plan for dinners.
Create a shopping list.
Take items out of the freezer to defrost.
Check the weather forecast.
Iron work clothes for the week.
When I don’t take the time to do these things on Sunday, I feel like I spend the rest of the week playing catch-up. Do you know the feeling?
While my iPhone has certainly simplified things, I still find it helpful to make lists the old-fashioned way because I find great pleasure in checking things off! Plus, there are so many cute and FREE printables online that make it easier than ever to get organized. Here is a roundup of some of my favorites:
Download Printables Here: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9
Download Printables Here: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5
Download Printables Here: 1 / 2 / 3
Download Printables Here: 1 / 2 / 3
If you don’t already do this, I encourage you to give it a try this week and let me know how it goes. Happy planning!Two food facilities in the San Fernando Valley were temporarily closed last week due to major public health hazards.
Between March 26 and April 1, those facilities had their health permits suspended for a rodent infestation and sewage discharge, according to a report from the Los Angeles County Public Health Department.
Restaurants and markets whose permits are suspended must close until another inspection determines the problems have been fixed. Closures can occur during routine and owner-initiated inspections, complaint investigations and re-inspections.
The department did not provide details about the nature of the rodent infestation, like the number of rodent droppings and where in the facility they were found.
If a food facility is closed for a cockroach, rodent or fly infestation, sewage problems or for not having any water running through the facility it loses an additional seven points on top of the four points deducted for major health violations. Any time two major health hazards, such as unsafe food temperatures, are observed, the facility loses an additional three points in its inspection score.
Here are the food facilities that were temporarily closed. Unless otherwise noted, the grades listed for the facilities were received on the same day they were closed.
• C. Frenz
Location: 7026 Reseda Blvd., Reseda, CA 91335
Closure reason: rodent infestation
Closure date: March 28
Reopen date: March 30
Grade: B (87)
• The Drunken Crab
Location: 13350 Sherman Way, North Hollywood, CA 91605
Closure reason: sewage discharge
Closure date: March 29
Reopen date: March 29
Grade: C (72); received A (90) during owner-initiated inspection April 5The United States already decided decades ago that no human deserved to be subjected to the treatment after September 11th described in the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogations. Such torture – which included sexual assault and partial drowning – was not to be employed by the United States (or any) government.
The United States suddenly restored these horrific tactics in 2001. It did so not just for known terrorists, but also for people mistakenly detained. This decision would supposedly “protect the American people.”
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Many in Washington and beyond have continued to insist that the methods employed were effective at promoting national security (and thus self-justifying), despite the report’s findings — and centuries of evidence — to the contrary.
Asking a morally wrong question
But the very debate on the “effectiveness” of immoral methods is itself immoral. Ignoring the taboo on torturing captives necessarily implies that some people are worth so little – when they might possibly pose a threat – that they do not count as humans.
The moment one asks of an immoral action “Did it work?”, the asker has rejected the humanity of those whom it was used upon. And the matter of whose humanity “counts” or is arbitrarily conditional is a major factor behind this efficacy debate’s existence at all.
When effectiveness is considered instead of the morality of abusing or killing fellow humans, such crimes can and will reoccur.
The question Americans must ask themselves and each other is not “Did it work?” – of course it did not, but that is beside the point. It was known full well at the time that they would not. And so the real question is: “Why did we illegally and deliberately decide to perpetrate ineffective war crimes, including torture, in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001?”
When one considers specifically who was subjected to these war crimes, the path to the answer inevitably turns in one direction: racial supremacy and the prioritization of White America’s safety above all else.
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Dehumanization abroad
In short, the Torture Report is really about how the United States chose once again, as official post-9/11 policy, to debate the efficacy (not the morality) of doing harm to those bodies deemed sub-human, specifically non-white bodies, in a drive to protect White America.
As it stands, the “efficacy” question itself appears to mask an inexcusably primal desire to seek revenge against the non-White communities from which the terrorists happened (that time) to have come.
The suspension of full human status – and the legal protections that go along with that – for Muslims suspected of terrorism after 9/11/01 is at the core of the CIA’s actions. Sadly, it fits into a broader pattern in American history. It is the same logic that allowed early U.S. leaders to count enslaved Black laborers as constitutionally 60% human.
Nineteen attackers and their supporting network were made to represent an entire people, whose humanity was then stripped away as official policy. Such a broad-brush response did not occur six and a half years earlier when two White Christian extremists with ties to various shadowy anti-government networks destroyed a federal building in Oklahoma City.
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The former was an attack by the “Other,” the latter was deemed an in-group attack. The fact that those received two entirely different treatments is a testament that the reaction was a matter of race. It is a primordial fear-response befitting a skirmish between prehistoric clans crossing paths, not a 21st century global superpower encountering an aggressive band of malcontents.
Such “Us vs. Them” taxonomies are dangerous. To protect the innocent lives of some, the innocent lives of so many others become purely expendable.
The argument simply boils down to asserting in stark terms: “Our lives are worth ending or abusing yours, even by mistake, just to be 100% sure ours remain safe.”
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This is about race
But perhaps this division is just a case of misguided hyper-nationalism or ultra-patriotism by the United States? Perhaps the “Us vs. Them” division is not racially, ethnically or religiously motivated, as I have suggested?
Unfortunately, that does not seem to hold up to scrutiny. For one thing, the United States has acted much more leniently toward terrorists and mass murderers who are White and/or Christian, both at home and abroad.
Instead of being summarily killed or tortured by law enforcement, White mass shooters (in Tucson, Aurora, etc.) and White anti-government bombers (Oklahoma City, Unabomber, Weather Underground, etc.) are often arrested and tried normally.
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For another, consider the current “targeted airstrikes” that keep raining down on Arab and Muslim populations, from Africa to South Asia, as encapsulated so neatly in Akbar Ahmed’s parable of “The Thistle and the Drone.” The logic of illegal torture of detainees – from the same populations – was framed in the same terms as the ongoing drones debate: “Does it work?” – instead of “Is it wrong?”
Drones instead of torture?
Indeed, it seems quite possible that drone strikes, with an extreme level of remove from the situation, have replaced torture fairly directly in the counterterrorism toolbox.
According to The Atlantic, the “CIA began moving away from capturing and detaining suspected terrorists in favor of killing them via drone strikes.” There have been around 490 targeted drone strikes, which have been mostly performed by the CIA.
President Obama is not relieved from responsibility simply because he banned (already illegal) torture, since those interrogations had already been replaced by the terminal actions of drone strikes. In fact, 90% of U.S. “targeted strikes” have occurred under the Obama Administration, not the Bush Administration.
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Finding oneself accidentally in the wrong place can lead to execution by drone. (Previously the result was extraordinary rendition and torture.)
And that victim will not even be counted as a mistake. According to a New York Times investigation in 2012, under official U.S. policy, “all military-age males in a strike zone [count] as combatants … unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
Read that last half-sentence again – and again. Their lives are devalued until they are not even dignified with the status of accidental death. Instead, they are chalked up as a win.
The bigger picture
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But this trouble made in the U.S.A. does not end with torture and drones. It also includes – closer to home – police brutality and excessive use of deadly force by law enforcement or Stand-Your-Ground vigilantes. What unites all of these tactics is that they have that “Does it work?” calculus in common when deployed by the United States. Morality is out of the picture.
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The so-called “post-9/11 environment” – so often touted as a justification for torture and other hysterical overreactions of the era – existed within a wider, darker context.
On a micro level, we hear the same justifications from police and vigilantes who use lethal force by mistake on an unarmed person: I was afraid, and therefore I am not responsible for my actions. In 51% of police shootings, that unarmed victim is Black or Latino, despite those combined groups representing just 29% of the total population.
In truth, that environment beginning in late 2001 was simply American racial and ethnic paranoia writ large, the same as it as always been.
The high toll of White supremacy
In the pursuit of extreme counterterrorism methods, and in police/vigilante shootings, U.S. leaders and their most aggressive defenders have endorsed a view that at its core insists the bodies of (White) Americans must be so priceless that everyone else’s bodies are expendable in the effort to protect the first group.
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There is no other way to explain writing off so many innocent lives because someone looked like a threat. There is no other way to explain applying a different set of rules for treatment of White attackers and non-White attackers.
Whether or not that is consciously intended, it is the effect. And it is the most reduced and unadorned version of the arguments offered to justify such policies.
Like Black Americans being gunned down without trial in an apparent effort to protect White neighborhoods, American-born Muslim “terrorist suspects” can now be assassinated overseas, by drone, without trial. The apparent justification there, too, is the quest to protect White America from attacks, real or imagined.
Land of the free, land of the afraid
While the “homeland” – as it was suddenly dubbed after 9/11 – supposedly included everyone, that was never really true. Non-White Americans continued to live in daily insecurity, often by the hands of the very police sent to serve and protect them.
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There is an obvious racial callousness in the lack of due process at work. Such policies are hardly more enlightened than paranoid, White-hooded riders of the Reconstruction-era South burning and lynching freed Black slaves. The latter were killed again and again for various imagined offenses and projected future offenses.
Such policies are, moreover, certainly not more effective at promoting safety than traditional due process and rule of law, even from real threats. By definition, it cannot be safer, if that safety clearly only extends to a very limited group of people who are overwhelmingly or exclusively White.
The dozens of innocent lives lost each year in the sweeping efforts to provide national security andneighborhood security evidently have so little value to the U.S. and local governments, weighed against the lives of the White majority, that it is easy to pull the trigger or press the launch button, just as it was easy to begin torturing again.
There is no justifying context
Many conservatives (and a few hawkish liberals) argue that the U.S. Senate’s torture report and the media are leaving out the “context” of the attacks of 9/11 and the environment that followed. But that’s just it: There is not a context justifying torture. Ever.
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“I felt threatened so I shot him mistakenly / tortured him mistakenly / droned him mistakenly” is not a rational argument to keep making over and over. Unless, that is, you first believe his life is simply worth less than yours just because of his birth identity.
And that argument, given the racial composition of the United States government and population, effectively amounts to White supremacy when implemented as official policy.
The cost of a better, freer world
“We have to protect Americans, whatever the cost, because they (the terrorists) don’t hold back,” say the defenders of torture and other War on Terror abuses.
The cost of making a better world is that bad things will sometimes happen to good people. You cannot stop every bad person and protect every good person from every conceivable, without eliminating your own freedom and quality of life and ending other people’s lives in a mistaken dragnet.
At the point where innocent men and women – human beings – from a different race become “collateral damage” and “acceptable losses” in your crusade to defend yourself, you have endorsed a racial supremacy paradigm that is no more moral than the racial paradigms of some failed state’s genocidal leader.
Yes, there may be attacks in the short term because you did not do “everything” theoretically possible to protect yourself. But you keep doing good to set a better example for the long run.
Even if individuals are committed terrorists, they should be apprehended and interrogated by normal criminal procedures whenever possible. That is how the system is supposed to work.
The same rights and rule of law must protect all lives and bodies. At home and abroad, there must be liberty and justice for all, not some, even if it means some “bad guys” slip through the cracks.
In combating the opponents of the United States, we cannot validate their propaganda. We cannot let “our adversaries” argue that they adopted the tactics from us, here in the United States.
A history that must be told
The Torture Report is arguably just the latest installment in a complex national history that is riddled with racial supremacist policies. These have been leveled against indigenous peoples, enslaved peoples and the acceptably expendable non-White masses that make up most of Earth’s population.
There will probably be no prosecutions over this report, but it is a story that needs to be told just the same, as the rest of the dark parts of U.S. history must be told.
There is no guarantee that this admission will prevent history from being repeated, but concealing it and refusing to grapple with the underlying justifications certainly does guarantee this will happen again.Introduction
The arrival of Nvidia's mobile GTX 10-series GPUs has given laptop vendors some much-needed impetus in producing new and improved systems aimed primarily at gamers. We've already seen the likes of Asus and MSI showcase their wares in the ROG G752VS and GT83VR Titan SLI, and though both machines packed a punch, we're now turning our attention to a more portable 15.6in solution in the form of the revamped Aorus X5 v6.
As the name suggests, this is the sixth-generation revision of the original Aorus X5, meaning upgraded innards and a familiar-looking chassis. A £2,100 price tag suggests that only genuine enthusiasts need apply, yet if you're looking for mobile performance in a 15.6in form factor, the X5 v6 appears to have it in abundance.
And the good news for anyone who tends to shy away from typically gaudy gaming laptops is that the Aorus design continues to appear sleeker than many of its competitors. Overall dimensions of 390mm x 272mm x 22.9mm are surprisingly svelte for a system carrying a Core i7 processor and GTX 1070 graphics, and though it isn't the lightest at 2.5kg, the X5 v6 can easily be transported between locations.
Build quality remains decent throughout, with Aorus employing a combination of aluminium and plastics, however the shell is a magnet for fingerprints and the keyboard has undergone a few upgrades that result in both plus points and negatives. In the positive column, the layout still includes a numpad on the right and dedicated macro keys on the left, and the whole board is now backed with per-key RGB illumination. Pre-loaded Aorus Fusion software lets you customise the colours and effects to your heart's content, but the keyboard does have two weak spots.
Our sample exhibited more flex than we'd expected in and around the Enter key, and it is noticeable as the entire panel can vibrate when typing quickly. The other potential distraction is the new keycap font, which in our estimation is a backward step. For me, personally, the letters appear too tall, and it's a little like watching a movie with an incorrect aspect ratio. On balance, and irrespective of the new RGB backlight, I preferred the original X5 keyboard.
The X5 has always managed to impress by squeezing a good number of connectivity options into its sub-23mm frame, and the v6 is no exception. The laptop's left edge is home to Mini DisplayPort, HDMI, a pair of audio jacks and USB 3.1 Type-C. Over on the right there's an SD card reader, two USB 3.0 ports and HDMI, while the back is lined with Killer Gigabit Ethernet, another USB 3.0 port and a connector for the external, 200W power supply. Built-in WiFi is provided by a Killer AC 1535, and both the wired and wireless connections can be used in tandem in what's called DoubleShot Pro.
On the display front Aorus continues to use the 15.6in Panasonic MEI96A2 IPS panel that featured in the original X5. It's a solid choice with a lush 2,880x,1,620 resolution, 60Hz refresh rate, excellent viewing angles and support for Nvidia's framerate-smoothing G-Sync technology. We're hearing that a 1080p, 120Hz G-Sync panel will also be an option for those favouring faster action, yet the WQHD+ model has the benefit of making everyday content appear sharper.
And it does seem as though we've turned a corner in gaming laptop visuals. For too long we've received high-powered systems outfitted with basic displays, or high-resolution machines with GPUs unable to drive games at the native resolution. That should now change as the Aorus X5 v6 has the pixel count and a potent graphics chip to match.
Underneath the hood you'll find a quad-core Intel Core i7-6820HK processor, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics, 16GB (2x8GB) of DDR4-2400 memory and storage courtesy of a 256GB Samsung M.2 NVMe SSD and a 1TB Hitachi hard disk. An awesome mix for a 15.6in gaming machine, and Aorus's decision to move away from SLI means that performance should be consistent between games.
Factory overclocks are becoming a common theme on GTX 10-series laptops, and Aorus follows suit by raising out-the-box frequencies in every place that matters. The Core i7's maximum speed is bumped from 3.6GHz to 4.0GHz, the GPU's base and boost clocks are notched-up to 1,493MHz and 1,695MHz, respectively, while graphics memory is increased to an effective 8,108MHz. We're eager to get the benchmarks flowing and what we really want to know is whether or not the X5 v6 has the oomph to drive modern games at the native 2,880x,1,620 resolution.Every pitcher has a “tell" in his delivery, something that gives away what -- or where -- he’s about to throw. Vince Coleman used to study them. Whenever, say, Coleman saw Frank Viola fan his glove, he knew that the left-hander was about to throw a changeup. When Dave Stewart came up high over his head with his glove, his next offering would be a split-finger. But when Stewart stayed below his chin he was throwing a fastball. And Coleman still remembers, clear as day all these years later, that when Dwight Gooden looked into his glove it meant that the Cy Young Award winner was about to throw a breaking ball -- but when he didn’t peek, Doc was bringing the heat.
“Pitchers’ moves are predetermined,” Coleman said. “They are creatures of habit. We had a book on them. That was our sabermetrics, our analytic numbers.”
Those giveaways also helped Coleman -- who led the major leagues in stolen bases four times and the National League six consecutive years -- get a jump on the basepaths. Doug Drabek would turn his toe in, as would Charlie Nagy, said Coleman, when they were about to throw home instead of to first base. When he was on base, all the clues Coleman needed to help him determine when it was time to steal were right there at their feet.
“There were so many different things we knew about pitchers that gave us an edge,” said Coleman, whose 753 career stolen bases still rank sixth all time.
Have today’s baserunners lost that edge? The number of stolen bases across baseball last year was historically low. In 2015, Major League Baseball players stole 2,505 bases, the lowest total since 1974 (2,488) when there were six fewer teams. Last season's per-game average of 0.52 stolen bases per team was the lowest since 1973. There were 259 fewer stolen bases in 2015 than in 2014 and a whopping 724 fewer stolen bases in 2015 than in 2012.
One American League executive said that the significant increase in information available for game preparation has played a huge role in curtailing base stealing. Video is better, data is more revealing, pitchers are more aware of their delivery time to home plate and the confluence of information has allowed teams to shrink the window of time available to steal, thus making it much harder for players to get good reads and jumps as Coleman once did. An NL executive agreed: Defense of the running game continues to evolve.
The decline in steals isn’t, however, just a result of quicker deliveries and catcher pop times. Those numbers aren’t dramatically different than they were five years ago. Players did not suddenly get slower across the board. The average success rate on steal attempts didn’t change much from 2008 to 2014, but in 2015 it was down significantly, as were the total attempts. Teams have more tools to help them understand their own tendencies and those of their opponents, and this has shown up in all facets of the game, including baserunning:
Year SB CS Success Rate 2008 0.58 0.21 73.4% 2009 0.61 0.23 72.6% 2010 0.61 0.23 72.6% 2011 0.67 0.26 72.0% 2012 0.66 0.23 74.2% 2013 0.55 0.21 72.4% 2014 0.57 0.21 73.1% 2015 0.52 0.22 70.3%
Coleman, who is now a baserunning coach with the Chicago White Sox, says sabermetrics is partly to blame. Stolen bases are not generally valued highly by advanced stats, which suggest that the consequence of an unsuccessful stolen-base attempt -- the player is not only knocked off the basepaths but also costs his team an out -- typically outweighs the benefits.
“If there’s a Billy Beane who says, ‘Well, we’ve got 27 outs, and out of the 27 outs one of them is not going to be a [failed] stolen base [attempt],' then the baserunner plays with fear,” Coleman said. “Therefore, the manager is going to pick the pitches for him. As a base stealer you can’t have that. You can’t have a manager picking pitches for you.”
The NL team executive notes that MLB teams today focus on run-scoring probabilities. What is the value of an out versus the value of gaining 90 feet? Numerous statistical studies have shown that the break-even success rate for steals (the rate at which an attempt to steal is neither helping nor hurting the team in terms of total runs scored) is about 70 percent. If you’re not reaching that benchmark, as sabermetricians would suggest, you’re wasting too many outs.
No wonder players are running scared, said Coleman. “When players came up through the minor leagues, or in Little League, or college, they had all this confidence as a hitter,” Coleman said. “They were oozing with confidence. But as soon as they got on base in the minors the first thing that a manager or coach said to them was, ‘Don’t get picked off. Don’t make the first out at third base. Don’t get doubled up on line drives.’ So, now, they get on base and are like, ‘What the hell do I do?’”
Coleman says that the instincts, rhythm and timing needed to be a successful base stealer has to come from the player -- and not his manager or the data crunchers.
As a White Sox coach, Vince Coleman imparted his wisdom to players like former Chicago infielder Micah Johnson. "You don't have to be fast to be a great baserunner," Coleman said. "You just have to be smart, alert, aggressive and [able to] anticipate." Ron Vesely/Getty Images
“It was all based in my lead or my jump, and I knew I had to go and build those instincts all by myself,” Coleman said. “I couldn't have someone do that for me. If someone else is controlling me while I’m on the bases, then I can’t be successful.”
Coleman says that players have to be taught how to take a lead and have to learn -- through countless repetitions -- how to avoid getting picked off. He also wants every player to understand how to get a jump and perform a delayed steal. The player’s speed (or lack thereof) shouldn’t matter.
“You don’t have to be fast to be a great baserunner,” Coleman said. “You just have to be smart, alert, aggressive and [able to] anticipate.”
Coleman says any player can learn how to steal a base. Success is all in the lead and the jump. He sees too many of today’s players taking false steps.
“There’s a certain position, and I wish all athletes |
then went back to serve as a coach and school board member."I know we have several students, former students now in law enforcement and a lot of those were because of Rod. They followed him into that profession. And, we lost a good one," said Nick Bowles, former teacher and coach.A man who exemplified the role of a mentor, friend, and protector of the community.Tuesday night Governor Jerry Brown released a statement saying in part, "Anne and I extend our deepest sympathies to Sergeant Lucas' family, friends and colleagues as they mourn this tragic loss. We join all Californians in honoring his dedication and service to the people of Fresno."At this point, no funeral arrangements have been released.But deputies can take comfort in knowing the legacy Lucas left behind, including a medal of honor under valor he won in 2010.Lucas was back in his hometown of Tranquillity responding to an armed robbery when he chased the suspect on foot for a mile. When he and two other deputies closed in, the robber pulled a gun.Lucas shot first, though, and saved himself and the other two deputies. His award writeup said Lucas' actions on that day showed his true character-- qualities his team will always remember. nullHalloween may be over, but the European Finance Commissioner seems intent on giving Ireland a massive fright by promoting tax convergence as a means of cracking down on the kind of aggressive tax harmonisation unveiled in the Panama Papers.
Those avoiding tax are "like vampires", Pierre Moscovici told the European Parliament’s debate on the Paradise Papers in Strasbourg this week.
"They don’t seem to fear anything except light, so it is up to us to generate that light," he said, calling for member states to adopt a Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB) in an effort get transparency on tax.
The Commission sees CCCTB - where a single set of rules would apply to companies operating within the EU to calculate their taxable profits - as a solution to the clamping down on big companies using loopholes to dodge tax.
However, CCCTB is a scary thought for the Irish economy.
The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council recently warned the government that CCCTB posed a bigger threat to the Irish economy than Brexit.
But the commission - under its French Finance Commissioner Pierre Moscovici - is now promoting CCCTB as a means of tackling tax avoidance by the large multi-nationals.
"We need convergence on our tax rules. It's a lack of common rules that allows companies to carry out this form of aggressive tax planning. This system really persists because of shortcomings in individual national member state’s legislation and a lack of common legislation," Mr Moscovici told MEPs.
Mr Moscovici’s comments will have sent shivers down the spine of the Irish government who fear that a common tax base will inevitably lead to a harmonised corporate tax rate, which some analysts say could severely damage Ireland's strong corporate tax competitiveness.
The idea of CCCTB emerged in 2011 as a draft directive, but went nowhere after member states, including the UK, refused to back it on the basis it undermined tax sovereignty.
However, it seems to have fresh impetus now as French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron announced plans to pursue digital companies to contribute to the economies where they generate much of their revenue.
Fine Gael MEP Brian Hayes accused the larger countries of hypocrisy on the issue.
"There is a lot of larger member states here using this issue as a means of coming down heavy on peripheral parts of the EU who never had an industrial revolution," he said.
He points out that corporate tax in Ireland accounts for 15% of the total tax take, compared to 8% across the OECD.
Mr Hayes is adamant that CCCTB can’t happen, given that tax is outside the remit of the Commission.
"This is a sovereign issue. There has to be unanimity on tax issues for agreement to emerge. We can’t be forced to something that is not in our national interest," Mr Hayes said.
But what if the proposal is put to member states under different voting rules?
Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said he wanted to move to qualified majority voting on decisions relating to CCCTB.
This would see the numbers stack up for countries like France and Germany.
Added to this, Ireland will also lose a key ally against CCCTB after the withdrawal of the UK from the EU.
Despite the government's move to close down the so called 'Double Irish', Mr Hayes agrees that Ireland’s previous tax treatment of US giant Apple has caused reputational damage and lost us friends in Europe, though he says much of the criticism is misunderstood.
During this week’s debate in the European Parliament, French Front National MEP Bernard Monot described the rates of tax levied on companies in Ireland and Luxembourg as "insignificant", making them "almost tantamount to being tax havens".
Sinn Féin's Matt Carthy said the Paradise Papers showed how Apple went jurisdiction shopping to avoid paying tax after the end of the 'Double Irish' and called on fellow MEPs to back a permanent committee of investigation.
He also said Ireland’s legal challenge to the commission's €13 billion state aid ruling was adding to our reputational damage.
But he agrees with Fine Gael on one thing, the Commission is over stepping the mark on CCCTB.
"Unless we as a country get our act together and address serious concerns relating to our facilitation of tax avoidance, then we are weakening our position in terms of defending our position on tax sovereignty," Mr Carthy said.
With Britain gone, Ireland may find new friends among the Baltic states such as Latvia, who are like minded on CCCTB.
Latvian MEP Krisjanis Karins told RTÉ’s European Parliament Report this week that tax will always remain a sovereign issue, as long as national governments are paying pensions and social welfare.
"Our pensions are not paid by the European Union budget, but by the national states. How we invest our social taxes is up to the member states …so until our pensions come from the European Union, tax will remain a sovereign issue," said Mr Karins, who also serves on the parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs.
So if tax is a sovereign issue, then why is the Commission persisting with CCCTB?
"There are politicians who maybe have a strong dream of a federal Europe and are concerned about competition, but tax should remain as a competitive tool that members states have. I think everyone in this house is all for fighting tax cheats but we should not confuse tax cheats with competitive systems," he added.
The Irish Government will be hoping Mr Moscovici’s dreams of CCCTB will not become a nightmare reality.Johnny Depp's money problems seem to have taken a nose dive.
The “Pirates of the Caribbean” star’s former managers filed a foreclosure action Monday requesting the actor sell five properties he owns in Los Angeles to pay back a $5 million loan the company alleges it lent him in December 2012, Deadline reported.
The Management Group (TMG) alleged it gave the “Murder on the Orient Express” star the loan to help him pay a City National Bank (CNB) loan, People reported.
JOHNNY DEPP ALLEGEDLY SHOWED UP DRUNK TO MOVIE PREMIERE, REPORTS SAY
“TMG agreed to come to the aid of its long-time client,” the complaint stated. “The idea behind this arrangement, which was designed to save Depp from a public and devastating financial collapse, was that Depp would pay TMG what TMG was required to pay CNB under the loan.”
Adam Waldman, Depp’s attorney, told People the actor would not sell his homes and called the action an “effort to intimidate Depp into dropping his lawsuit.”
In February, Depp sued TMG for $25 million, accusing the company of fraud and attempting to foreclose his main home.
“As a result of years of gross mismanagement and sometimes outright fraud, Mr. Depp lost tens of millions of dollars and has been forced to dispose of significant assets to pay for TMG’s self-dealing and gross misconduct,” the complaint stated.
“In essence, TMG treated Mr. Depp’s income as their own, available to either TMG or third parties to draw upon as desired.”
GEORGE CLOONEY EXPLAINS WHY HE’S TAKING A BREAK FROM ACTING: ‘I DON’T NEED MONEY’
Depp and the company parted ways in March 2016 after 17 years together.
TMG said it gave Depp the loan to “save him from bankruptcy,” People reported. The actor’s former managers said the five homes in question were used as “collateral for the loan, and since Depp has stopped making payments, they want to sell the houses.”
“At least at the time, Depp and his sister, personal manager, and the president of his production company, (Elisa Christi) Dembrowski, were very grateful to TMG for coming to Depp’s aid and helping him to avoid a public financial collapse,” the complaint stated.
Depp’s former managers also accused the Academy Award-nominated actor of mismanaging the $650 million he made in the last two decades.
After the actor sued TMG in February, the company filed a cross-complaint against the movie star stating Depp “lived an ultra-extravagant lifestyle that often knowingly cost [him] in excess of $2 million per month to maintain, which he simply could not afford.”
A judge ruled Depp’s spending habits were not relevant to the legal battle. A judge will determine whether to agree on the foreclosure.Fresh off Thanksgiving weekend, President Trump referred to himself as “your favorite President” while returning to one of his favorite pastimes — upbraiding the news media.
On Monday morning, the president called for an undefined “contest” to determine which TV network covers him most unfairly. He tweeted that the winner of this hypothetical contest could be awarded a trophy for “fake news.” He said CNN, the cable-news channel he complains the most about, should be included in the mix.
We should have a contest as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me). They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2017
Trump is only 10 months into his tenure and is unlikely to be most Americans’ favorite president at this point. And polls indicate that more Americans disapprove than approve of his job performance.
Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling firm based in Raleigh, N.C., responded to his “your favorite president” tweet with its own data showing that ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post are trusted more than Trump.
Who do trust more, Donald Trump or: ABC. ABC, 54/36
CBS. CBS, 54/36
NBC. NBC, 54/36
New York Times. New York Times, 54/37
CNN. CNN, 52/37
Washington Post. Washington Post, 52/37 https://t.co/XIY6vnb1i7 — PublicPolicyPolling (@ppppolls) November 27, 2017
Gallup, the Washington-based opinion poll company, found that 57 percent of Americans disapprove and 37 percent approve of Trump’s job performance as of Nov. 25.
FiveThirtyEight, a website dedicated to analyzing opinion polls, aggregated a trove of such surveys and reported similar numbers for Nov. 27 — 55.5 percent disapprove and 38.4 percent approve.
Nevertheless, any negative news or poll numbers are unlikely to stop Trump from projecting an aura of success and accomplishment, as he’s done since the peak years of his real estate career.
On the campaign trail, Trump demonstrated a penchant for touting positive polls while deriding negative polls as inaccurate.
In his Monday-morning tweets attacking the press, Trump also declared that “nobody cares” about the mainstream media, a topic he regularly tweets about. To make his case, he linked to an article by far-right Breitbart News attacking Joe Scarborough of “Morning Joe” for allegedly prerecording holiday banter for their post-Thanksgiving show.
“You care,” Scarborough replied. “Oh, how you care so much.”
Trump wrapped up his morning tweets with a few comments about the Republican tax reform bill on Capitol Hill.
The Tax Cut Bill is coming along very well, great support. With just a few changes, some mathematical, the middle class and job producers can get even more in actual dollars and savings and the pass through provision becomes simpler and really works well! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2017
Trump is scheduled to have lunch with members of the Senate Finance Committee at 12:30 p.m. Monday. If Congress passes the tax legislation and Trump signs it, the bill would be Trump’s only major legislative victory since taking office.
Read more from Yahoo News:Fridays in April and May will be non-working holidays in the latest attempt to curb energy use as a drought dries up reservoirs used to generate electricity
Venezuela has declared two months of three-day weekends in the latest attempt to curb energy use as a months-long drought dries up reservoirs used to generate electricity.
President Nicolás Maduro announced that Fridays in April and May would be non-working holidays as part of an effort to stave off electricity rationing.
“This plan for 60 days, for two months, will allow the country to get through the most difficult period with the most risk,” Maduro said on announcing the measure on Wednesday.
He also said the government would ask large users such as shopping malls and hotels to generate their own electricity for nine hours a day.
Heavy industries will be asked to cut consumption by 20%, Maduro said. The country’s industrial sector is already operating at 50% to 60% capacity, principally because of a lack of raw materials, according to the industry federation, Conindustria.
“I call on families, on young people, to join this plan with discipline, with conscience and extreme collaboration to confront this extreme situation,” Maduro said.
It was not immediately clear whether the four-day work week would apply only to public sector employees or extend to the private sector as well.
Although Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, it gets most of its energy from hydro power, deeply affected by the El Niño weather phenomenon which has caused a severe drought. The water level behind the nation’s largest hydroelectric dam has fallen close to critical levels.
On announcing the shortened workweek Maduro also called on Venezuelans to avoid turning on air conditioners and using electric clothes dryers. He also suggested women avoid blowdrying their hair or using straightening irons. “I always think a woman looks better when she just runs her fingers through her hair and lets it dry naturally,” he said.
The announced measures were met with derision among many Venezuelans, who used the hashtag #ViernesNoLaborables (Non-workingFridays) to comment.
“A country that needs to work today more than ever to be able to progress and Maduro decrees non-working Fridays,” was a typical response on Twitter.
Even supporters of the socialist government questioned the move. “I’m a Chavista but the truth is I think non-working Fridays is a very wrong measure,” wrote another user of the social network.Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s stewardship of the public schools in his state has not been without problems. During his tenure, issues facing public schools in Ohio have included the growth of a charter school sector as scandal-ridden as any in the country, funding cuts for traditional public schools while charter schools and voucher programs got more state money, a problem-plagued teacher evaluation system and the troubled administration of a new Common Core test.
Recently it came to light that the governor had buried in his 3,512-page fiscal 2018-2019 budget proposal a mandate that all new teachers applying for a license — and all working teachers applying for license renewal in Ohio — get some “on-site work experience with a local business or chamber of commerce.”
Why? Ryan Burgess, director of Kasich’s Office of Workforce Transformation, told reporters that it would help teachers get a better idea for what jobs are available to students and what skills employers need.
Well, Julie Rine is one teacher who begs to differ. She wrote and sent a letter to the governor that appeared on Plunderbund and that she gave me permission to publish. Rine has been teaching in Ohio for more than 20 years. She is now in the Minerva Local School District, teaching Honors English I, Honors English II, Honors American Literature and English III at Minerva High School. She was born in Ohio, earned a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State University and a master’s degree at Marygrove College in Michigan.
Here is her strong letter to Kasich:
[Ohio Gov. Kasich is trying to impose this misguided mandate on teachers]
Dear Governor Kasich,
Your proposal in the budget to require teachers to complete an “on-site work experience” with a local business as a condition of renewing our teaching licenses is baffling. Even the state legislators in your own party didn’t seem to see the value in it, and have indicated that they most likely will not support it. What exactly did you hope to accomplish by our spending time observing or even participating in a field outside of education? Despite a lot of press coverage, we were given few details about the thinking behind this mind-boggling mandate, but the director of your Office of Workforce Transformation indicated that this added licensing requirement was intended to “help teachers get a better idea for what jobs are available to students and what skills employers need.”
Governor, even if your proposal does not become a requirement, you don’t need to worry. Teachers know the skills that employers value, whether the job requires a college degree or not: a willingness to work hard, to ask for clarification if a job expectation is unclear, to show up on time, to demonstrate respect when speaking to others, to take initiative and go beyond basic expectations, to work just as hard whether under direct supervision or alone, to accept criticism, to work well with others, to communicate effectively in person, on the phone, or through email. Armed with these skills, a person can be trained in any job from making a pizza to governing a state. Teachers don’t need to shadow a business person to understand what skills make a good employee. We know what those skills are.
And you know what? We already teach those skills.
When we give our students rules and procedures, we are teaching them that society does not operate well in chaos, and that there are certain expectations that must be adhered to for order to exist. When we give our students due dates for assignments and maintain consequences for turning in work late, we are teaching them that deadlines matter. When we ask our students to evaluate each other’s work, we are teaching them how to be respectful when offering criticism, and how to accept that criticism with grace; we are teaching them that all of us can benefit from meaningful feedback, both the praise and the suggestions for improvement. When we assign our students projects or other collaborative work, we are giving them valuable experience in the life skills of getting along with peers, of motivating others to participate, of seeing an idea from a different perspective, and of recognizing the strengths of someone else and utilizing each person’s assets to create a quality group project.
When we post our weekly lesson plans online and ask students to check what they missed when they are absent, we are giving them tools to take initiative and be accountable for their own work. When we ask a student who says to us, “I’ll come 2nd period tomorrow to make up that quiz” to rephrase that to “I see that I missed a quiz when I was gone; when would it be convenient for you to have me make that up?” we are teaching students how to respectfully approach adults and how to show courtesy to those from whom they need something. We know what skills employers are seeking, Governor Kasich, and we are already teaching them.
We also know what jobs are available to our students post-high school. We know that without a trained skill, military experience, or a college education, the only jobs available to our young people will not pay well enough to allow them to build a life or support a family. That’s why at my school, we counsel our students and help them help them decide if they should leave our campus to attend our outstanding career-technical school to learn a specific trade or if they should stay in our building and take a college-prep course load. Every teacher from kindergarten to high school knows very well she is preparing her class for the next level, and that the end goal is for students to be ready to face the challenges of the “real world” after high school graduation.
Incidentally, it would be a lot easier to prepare our kids for life after school if we didn’t have to spend so much time preparing them for a myriad of standardized tests.
The Common Core standards are supposed to prepare our kids to be “college and career ready,” but after getting into college or beginning a career, how many times do most adults have to take a standardized test? The emphasis on testing is counterproductive to the goal of producing kids who are college and career ready, yet we spend an inordinate amount of time teaching children how to pass high-stakes tests. You might not like that, and trust me, I don’t either. But the tests lead to scores which lead to data which leads to graduation rates and school report card grades and teacher evaluation ratings.
This is a system YOU and the legislature have developed, so don’t blame us if test prep has taken over our classrooms. It’s worth noting that in spite of that, our country’s public school teachers are doing something right; our students score exceedingly well compared to other countries in areas that matter to employers, such as creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Think how well our kids could do, and much better prepared they would be for the workforce or for college, if we could focus more on these areas instead of the tests.
[Three global indexes show that U.S. public schools must be doing something right]
Governor, your proposal indicates that you think teachers are in the dark about life after high school. Frankly, we think you are in the dark about life in the classroom. Perhaps this could be remedied if you and our state legislators spent time with a teacher.
Imagine if one day each year, across the state of Ohio, across all content areas and grade levels, in small schools and big schools, wealthy districts and high-poverty districts, every single state legislator and our governor shadowed a public school teacher for an entire school day. We could practice one of the life skills we both want our students to have: learning to see a situation from another’s point of view. Ohio’s teachers would know that when our legislative leaders discuss educational policies, each one of you would have had at least a one-day experience in our public schools with the students and teachers your policies will impact.
Your proposal argues that it’s important for teachers to know what jobs await our students and what skills they will need in those jobs; I would argue that it is at least equally important for our politicians to know what our jobs are really like and how your policies affect our ability to educate our students in meaningful ways.
My spending time working in a local pizza parlor would not likely improve my ability to teach, but your spending time in a classroom could improve your ability to enact policies that would have a positive impact on teaching and learning. Will you visit our classrooms? Will you talk to us? Will you listen? We will if you will. Our classroom doors are always open.
Julie Rine
Teacher, Minerva Local SchoolsThe Israel Lands Administration is transferring properties in the Silwan neighborhood and the Old City of Jerusalem to right-wing groups Elad and Ateret Cohanim for low prices, without issuing a tender as required by law, a Haaretz investigation has found.
The state and the groups involved concealed the transactions and refused to give any information about them.
Silwan neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Michal Fattal
At the end of a lengthy legal struggle conducted by left-wing activist Dror Etkes, the court decided to have the ILA release only part of the information, to prevent the properties' identification.
Haaretz has located three of the properties the ILA reported on at the court's instruction.
The inquiry shows the ILA's list does not include dozens of properties, perhaps because they were handed over to other related organizations or subsidiaries, some of which are registered abroad.
Some of them may be tax shelters.
Haaretz has exposed transcripts of conversations held by controversial Elad leader David Beeri with then-Public Security Minister Avi Dichter during a visit to some of the properties in 2008.
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The transcripts illustrate that even if the acts were carried out by law, as the organizations keep saying, their end - increasing the Jewish population of East Jerusalem - sometimes justified unconventional means.
Elad commented that it is acting to buy properties but everything it does is legal, transparent and honest.
The ILA said it had passed on all the required information. Ateret Cohanim chose not to comment.
The full story will appear in Sunday's edition of the Haaretz English print editionThe PBE has been updated and it's another big one!updated voiceover and new sfx have been added, including a slew of new unique taunts & jokes and over 13 minutes of audio! We also have texture rebalancing forand most of his skins, updates to's texture rebalancing,up for testing, a tentative change toR's consistency, and more!Continue reading for more information!
(Warning: PBE Content is tentative and iterative - what you see may not reflect what eventually gets pushed to live servers! Manage your expectations accordingly. )
Sion Voiceover and SFX
unique taunts
"Time to cut your strings puppet!"
"One of us will finally die today!"
"I know you... I want to remember killing you"
"We've clashed a thousand times... no more!"
"Next in line, next to die!"
"I'll plant that banner in your corpse!"
"I killed you once... I'LL KILL YOU AGAIN!"
"Today... we'll see if ghosts can bleed!"
"I am not your pawn, Swain!"
"You are not my general!"
"You are weak, Swain! YOU ARE NO LEADER!"
"Even death trembles before me!"
"You will be privileged to die under my boot!"
unique jokes
"How many Jarvans must I kill?"
"You look just like your ancestor - dead!"
"Four Jarvans and you're all still failures! That is funny."
"So uh, Urgot... we can't hang out any more. I'm cool now."
"Why don't I have coverage for prosthetics?"
purchasing specific items:
"No mere spell will stop me."
"This cleaver will be red soon."
"A sword lacks heft"
"This is not the first dead king's weapon I've taken."
"Yeesssss... I like this weapon"
"It longs to kill."
"Good enough to stomp insects"
"Nothing will keep me from battle!"
"These will wade through the blood of thousands!"
"Every step will crack the earth!"
"Do you feel a shiver down your spine?"
"Ah, cold fear."
Frozen Mallet
"I'll shatter the gates of Demacia with this hammer!"
"Cold as the grip of death!"
"I'll feel their bodies grow cold."
"This will sever a thousand heads."
"Spells... ha!."
Randuin's Omen
"Protection from the bites of gnats."
"A dark omen for my enemies!"
"They will break first."
"All will burn in my wake."
"They'll beg as they burn."
"Fire... good"
"Leave no wound unanswered."
"This was made for war, as am I!"
"This is the only fortress I need!"
"This has seen many battles."
when purchasing any item!
"Rest is for the Living"
[E's indicator shows the path that minions will be knocked back]
Lumberjack Sion
[Continued] Texture Rebalance Round #2
[ NOTE: OLD is on LEFT and NEW is on RIGHT ]
Blitzcrank
Rusty Blitzcrank
Goalkeeper Blizcrank
Boom Boom Blitzcrank
Piltover Customs Blitzcrank
( has a new shader )
Definitely Not Blitzcraznk
Masquerade Evelynn
[Live vs 9/25 PBE vs Today's update]
Gangplank Ult Change
Riot GMang
"Should hit PBE at the next deploy. If you get a chance to try it, I'd love to know what you think!
To clarify, this is neither a "ult was the biggest problem" nor a "now Gangplank's in a perfect place." It was just a nice clean upgrade we thought people would like, and didn't have any big reason to hold it. :)
Hope you'll like it!"
Hexakill: Twisted Treeline up for testing!
L4T3NCY
"The Hexakill: Twisted Treeline featured game mode is now live on the PBE! Please report any bugs & feedback you might find in here for us.
The original announcement post can be found here.
Thanks PBE peeps! ^_^b"
Other
Balance Changes * Remember *: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, and sometimes radical changes. The changes you see below may be lacking context or other accompanying changes that didn't make it in - don't freak out! These are not official notes.
* Remember *: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, and sometimes radical changes. The changes you see below may be lacking context or other accompanying changes that didn't make it in - don't freak out! These areofficial notes.
Champions Akali
Twilight Shroud (W) no longer grants 10/20/30/40/50 armor or mr.
no longer grants 10/20/30/40/50 armor or mr. Twilight Shroud (W) now grants 60/70/80/90/100% burst of movement speed which decays over 1 second while in shroud.
Cannon Barrage (R) now deals equal damage over the entire area in waves instead of random spots with cannon balls.
now deals equal damage over the entire area in waves instead of random spots with cannon balls. Cannon Barrage (R) duration now 7 seconds from 6.
duration now 7 seconds from 6. Cannon Barrage (R) cooldown now 125/110/95 from 120/115/110
cooldown now 125/110/95 from 120/115/110 Cannon Barrage (R) now listed a damge per second instead of flat damage per cannon ball.
Items Randuin's Omen
Passive - Cold Steel attack speed slow increased to 15% from 10%
After his debut in the 9/25 PBE update updated voiceover and sound effects are now up on the PBE!Here's a preview video of his overof voice over lines, including several unique champion interactions, references to his old voiceover, and lines that slowly become more and more brutal!hasfor:andfor:and he has unique lineswhenalso has unique lines he will sayIf you are interested in listening to these clips individually, check out the LoL Wiki's entry for Sion's PBE voice. In addition to the new VO, he also has a new champion Select Quote:Here's an updated video preview now that his VO and SFX are implmented:As you may have noticed in the video, his E and R indicators have also been fixed!also received a few texture changes, notably to his axe, belt, and glove.In addition to, and earlier in this cycle, today's update includes texture rebalancing forThe TL;DR of texture rebalancing is Riot is aiming to update nearly all champions and skins that were released before 2013 to better fit with the current art style and the upcoming Summoner's Rift update.also received an updates to texture rebalancing from the 9/25 PBE udpate - her skin is now much more pale!Here'swith a feedback thread is now live and up for testing as of today's PBE update!Here'salso has its own unique HUD skin!There is a new "" option that toggles on and off a "dark silhouette around units".The launcher now prompts you to remove Pando Media Booster now that it is no longer in use. Miss out on previous updates from this PBE cycle? Check outfor acatch up with the links below!Pictured: The Beatles album cover that started a decades-long conspiracy theory
Forty years ago yesterday, at 11.35am, The Beatles walked across a zebra crossing in an innocuous North London street.
The photoshoot for their new Abbey Road album happened just yards from the eponymous recording studios and took ten minutes - only six frames were taken by the photographer, Iain Macmillan, who was perched on a stepladder.
It has since become one of the most iconic covers in history for two reasons - no album cover has inspired more imitations, and none has spawned such a mass of conspiracy theories.
The Beatles' world-famous Abbey Road album cover that sparked a million conspiracy theories
For Beatles obsessives with fevered imaginations, it was ultimate proof of the bizarre theory of the time - that Paul McCartney was, in fact, dead.
According to the legend, Paul had died in a car accident and been replaced by an impostor. The band, it was said, subsequently felt guilty about the deception, and so placed hidden clues on the album cover for their fans.
Thus, even today, despite the apparent rude health of McCartney, they insist that if you look closely at the images on the front and back of the album it is packed with deathly symbolism.
Beatlemania: A tribute band joined hundreds of fans in Abbey Road yesterday to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the famous photoshoot
Surrounded: A bus comes to a standstill as fans mob the Abbey Road site
What is certain is that the album denoted one death of sorts. Unbeknown to the public at the time, The Beatles were in the final throes of a bitter break-up and would never record another album.
Relations had deteriorated to such an extent that the group abandoned their original title of Everest, together with a shoot in the Himalayas, and were photographed instead walking away from the studios and everything they had once shared.
For other devotees, however, far more could be read into the image...
1. THE FUNERAL
The procession of The Beatles across the zebra crossing, say the conspiracy theorists, represents Paul's funeral.
John Lennon leads in a white suit and symbolises the preacher; Ringo Starr is the mourner, dressed in black; George Harrison, in scruffy shirt and trousers, denotes the grave-digger; Paul is wearing an old suit and is the only one who is barefoot.
He later explained that he began the shoot wearing sandals but, because it was a hot day, he kicked them off.
The theorists believed that if this was the case, the hot tarmac would be too uncomfortable. This, they argued, was a sign that Paul was the corpse.
2. THE CIGARETTE
Paul McCartney is left-handed, but here holds his cigarette in his right hand. At the time, cigarettes were commonly referred to as 'coffin nails'. This, therefore, could be seen as a message that Paul's 'coffin lid' had been nailed down and that the man in the picture was a lookalike.
Paul is also out of step with the other band members. Each of the others has his left leg forward, but Paul has his right leg forward - again marking him out as different.
3. THE REGISTRATION PLATE
The white VW Beetle in the background has the registration LMW 28IF - 28 being the age conspiracy theorists say Paul would have been IF he hadn't 'died'.
In fact, Paul was 27 when Abbey Road was released - but fortunately for the theorists, Indian mystics count a person's age from conception, not birth, in which case Paul would have indeed been 28 at the time.
Besides, the band were famously followers of the Indian guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It has also been suggested that the LMW stands for 'Linda McCartney Weeps' - referring to his new wife whom he had married earlier that year.
4. THE SPECTATORS
In the background, a small group of people dressed in white stand on one side of the road, while a lone person stands on the other.
Is this meant to be Paul, alone and different from the others?
5. THE POLICE VAN
On the right-hand side of the road is a black police van, believed to be a reference to the police who kept quiet about Paul's 'death'.
According to legend, the band's manager, Brian Epstein, bought their silence, and the presence of the Maria is meant as another subtle thank you.
6. THE LINE OF CARS
A line can be traced from the VW Beetle to the three cars in front of it. If it is drawn connecting their right wheels it runs straight through Paul's head, with theorists suggesting that means Paul sustained a head injury because of a car crash.
7. THE BLOODSTAIN
On the Australian version of the album, the cover showed what could be a bloodstain splattered on the road just behind Ringo and John, supposedly backing claims of a road accident.
8. THE CRACKED S
On the back cover there is a picture of the Abbey Road sign and above it the name Beatles has been written. There is an obvious crack running through the S - thought to suggest problems within the group.
9. THE DOTS
To the left of the name 'BEATLES' there are a series of eight dots. When joined together they form the number three.
Did this mean there were only three Beatles left?
10. IMAGE OF DEATH
If the back cover is turned 45 degrees anticlockwise a crude image of the Grim Reaper appears, from his skull to his black gown. Theorists believed it was a sign that someone in the group had died.
11. THE GIRL
Nobody knows the identity of the girl dressed in blue on the back cover. On the night of the theorists' 'car crash' it was raining heavily and Paul is said to have given a lift to a fan called Rita. It could be that this girl is her, either fleeing the scene or running to get help.
12. PAUL'S FINAL RESTING PLACE
If the writing on the wall is split into sections, it conveys the cryptic message, 'Be at Les Abbey'. In numerology the following two letters, R and O, are the 18th and 15th letters in the alphabet. By adding this together (33) and multiplying by the number of letters (2), we get 66, the year Paul is supposed to have |
them hooked up,” said Jeanni McCarty, a nurse at Foundations Family Medicine in Austin. McCarty said she has four family members affected by HIV and five relatives who have passed away from drug abuse-related problems.
Indiana officials by the end of the month will send CMS two more reports, including one that specifically examines the use of health savings-like accounts to help beneficiaries cover their costs. Pence’s successor, Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, has already asked the Trump administration to extend the program through January 2021 with a handful of tweaks — though notably absent is a request to institute a work requirement as a condition of receiving benefits.
“We don’t want to put policies and programs in place that are not member-centric,” said Jennifer Walthall, secretary of Indiana’s Family and Social Services Administration. “Increasing barriers is not the name of the game.”MLS Power Ranking Averages - Week 21
"If two teams played tomorrow, given their current injury concerns, form, and other considerations, who is likely to win on a neutral field? This list is designed to tell you who we feel is most likely to win that matchup. All things being equal, who is the best team going forward, based on what we know now?"
-Richard Farley, NBC Sports ProSoccerTalk. 3/11/14
Sites Used:
Allvoices (www.allvoices.com/users/zacwassink)
Black & Red United (www.blackandredunited.com) - (No ranking Week 14-21)
Dallas News Soccer Blog (www.soccerblog.dallasnews.com) - (No ranking Week 21)
Deseret News (www.deseretnews.com) - (No ranking Week 13-21)
ESPN (espn.go.com/sports/soccer/mls)
Fansided-MLS Multiplex (fansided.com/category/soccer/mls/mls-multiplex)
Major League Soccer (www.mlssoccer.com).
Northbank-RSL (www.northbankrsl.com) - (No ranking Weeks 9-21)
Oregon Live (www.oregonlive.com/timbers)
ProSoccerTalk (prosoccertalk.nbcsports.com) - (No ranking Week 13-21)
Reddit/MLS (www.reddit.com/r/MLS) - (No ranking Weeks 10-21)
Seattle Times Blog (blogs.seattletimes.com/soundersfc) - (No ranking Week 16-21 *writer resigned)
Soccer America (www.socceramerica.com)
Soccer by Ives (www.soccerbyives.net) - (No ranking Week 21)
Sports Illustrated (www.soccer.si.com)
UTN Sports (www.utnsports.com/category/soccer) - (No ranking Weeks 6-21)
If you know of a Power Ranking site that I have not included, please send it to me via this site or on reddit.com/r/MLS and I will consider using it.
Weekly Power Ranking Averages
Using the "Olympic" method of dropping the highest / lowest scores, and averaging the rest.
There were no Power Rankings for week 15 due to the World Cup break.
Week 21 Week 20 Week 19 Week 18 T eam
W21 Avg W20 Avg W19 Avg W18 Avg Low
High
Var
1
4
5
5
Los Angeles 1.60
4.43
6.00
6.50
3
1
2
2
1
3
3
Kansas City 1.80
1.57 2.60
4.50
3
1
2
3
3
2
2
D.C. 3.20
3.00
2.40
2.50
6
2
4
4
2
1
1
Seattle 4.00
1.71
1.00
1.00
10
3
7
5
6
8
8
Salt Lake 5.20
6.71
8.20
8.00
8
2
6
6
5
6
9
Dallas 6.40
6.57
6.40
8.25
10
3
7
7
8
4
4
Toronto 7.00
8.14
5.60
4.75
15
5
10
8
11
10
10
New York 8.80
11.29
10.20
9.25
13
6
7
9
7
9
6
Colorado 9.40
7.57
8.80
7.00
17
8
9
9
9
7
7
Vancouver 9.40
8.57
6.80
7.25
13
6
7
11
13
13
15
Philadelphia 11.20
11.71
12.40
14.25
14
7
7
12
10
11
13
Portland 11.40
9.86
11.60
13.50
15
9
6
13
11
14
16
Columbus 11.80
11.29
12.80
15.00
15
5
10
14
14
17
18
San Jose 13.40
14.14
16.80
18.00
14
8
6
15
18
18
19
Houston 15.60
17.43
17.60
18.25
17
13
4
16
15
11
11
Chivas 16.00
14.29
11.60
11.00
18
13
5
17
16
15
14
Chicago 16.60
16.00
14.60
13.75
18
12
6
18
17
16
12
New England 17.20
16.71
15.40
13.00
18
16
2
19
19
19
17
Montreal 19.00
18.86
18.60
17.75
19
19
0
Biggest Changes
Point Gaps High / Low Variance
Rise
Los Angeles: +3
New York: +3
Houston: +3
Fall
Seattle: -2
Colorado: -2
Portland: -2
Columbus: -2
La rgest
San Jose - 2.20 Houston
Smallest
Colorado - 0.0 - Vancouver
0 positions: Montreal
2 position: L.A., K.C., N.E.
4 positions: D.C., Houston
5 positions: Chivas
6 positions: Salt Lake, Portland. S.J., Chicago
7 positions: Seattle, Dallas, N.Y., Vancouver, Philadelphia
9 positions: Colorado
10 positions: Toronto, Columbus
Season Average Power Ranking
W21 W20 W19 W18 W17
T eam
W21 Avg W20 Avg W19 Avg W18 Avg W17 Avg W16 Avg W14 Avg W13 Avg 1
1
1
2
2
Seattle 3.32
3.29
3.37 3.50
3.65
3.82
3.88
4.10
2
2
2
1
1
Salt Lake
3.84
3.78
3.62
3.37
3.09
2.90
2.29
2.05
3
3
3
3
3
Kansas City 4.02
4.13
4.27
4.36
4.35
4.31
4.62
4.48
4
4
4
4
4
Vancouver 6.98
6.85
6.76
6.76
6.73
6.97
6.62
6.92
5
6
6
6
6
Los Angeles 7.00
7.27
7.42
7.50
7.55
7.45
7.65
7.52
6
5
5
5
5
Toronto 7.19
7.20
7.15
7.23
7.38
7.44
7.59
7.73
7
7
7
7
7
Dallas 7.79
7.86
7.92
8.01
7.99
7.95
7.38
7.07
8
8
8
8
8
Colorado 8.53
8.49
8.54
8.52
8.61
8.68
8.62
8.61
9
11
11
12
13
D.C. 9.84
10.17
10.54
11.00
11.50
12.00
12.19
12.76
10
10
10
10
10
Columbus 10.14
10.10
9.99
9.83
9.53
9.36
8.78
8.49
11
9
9
9
9
New England 10.44
10.05
9.75
9.44
9.23
9.23
9.37
9.70
12
12
12
11
12
New York 10.71
10.81
10.78
10.82
10.91 10.90 11.54 11.67 13
13
13
13
11
Houston 11.96
11.78
11.48
11.14
10.72
10.27
9.79
9.31
14
14
14
14
14
Portland 12.26
12.30
12.43
12.48
12.42
12.52
13.45
13.64
15
15
15
15
15
Philadelphia 12.75
12.83
12.89
12.92
12.84
12.75
12.90
12.69
16
16
16
16
16
San Jose 14.57
14.63
14.65
14.54
14.33
14.10
14.23
14.35
17
17
17
17
18
Chivas 15.10
15.06
15.10
15.30
15.54
15.60
15.29
15.04
18
18
18
18
17
Chicago 15.47
15.41
15.38
15.43
15.52
15.51
15.60
15.55
19
19
19
19
19
Montreal
17.75
17.69
17.63
17.57
17.56
17.55
17.87
17.90
Team High/Low
Best and worst placement for each team
In the weekly averages 7 teams have been ranked 1st (Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New England, Salt Lake, Seattle, Kansas City), and 3 teams have placed last (Chivas, D.C., Montreal).
In the season averages 2 teams have been ranked 1st (Salt Lake, Seattle), and 2 teams last (D.C., Montreal).
Houston has the distinction of being the only team to be ranked both first and last in the weekly rankings, with New England close behind with first and 2nd to last. D.C. has risen from last to 2nd.
Site Evaluations
I've broken the sites into 4 groups of 4 for easier publishing.
Group 1 - the "Big" sites (ESPN, SI, MLS, PST) - (weeks 16 & 17)
Group 2 - the "dead" sites (Northbank, Reddit, SBI, UTN) - (week 18)
Group 3 - Newspapers (Dallas, Deseret, *Oregon, *SA) - (*week 20)
Group 4 - Fan blogs (Allvoices, B&R, Multiplex, Seattle)
To avoid making each article longer than necessary I'll split the groups of 4 into 2 separate pieces over the next 8 weeks (or less since some sites have stopped). Each site will be evaluated based on the Week 14 PR Averages above, I'll do a post-season evaluation for the latter half of the season.
Here's my evaluation criteria.
Consistency - Publish regularly.
Bias - Teams are rated equally, not on any obvious bias.
Fairness - Teams dropping / rising significantly due to one result is not a fair representation of overall performance.
Dallas News Soccer Blog (soccerblog.dallasnews.com)
This site could have gone into the 'blogs' group, just as the Seattle Times blog could have; but to keep the groups even I picked one for each.
Pub Date WK CHI CHV COL CLB DCU FCD HOU LAG MON NER NYRB PHI POR RSL SJE SEA SKC TFC VAN 03/13/14 2 (1) 18 14 16 11 19 12 5 6 17 15 8 10 4 1 13 2 3 9 7 03/18/14 3 (2) 16 13 15 11 19 10 3 5 18 17 14 6 12 1 9 4 8 2 7 03/25/14 4 (3) 15 12 13 6 19 7 3 5 18 17 14 11 16 1 10 4 8 2 9 04/02/14 4 16 11 13 2 19 5 7 3 17 10 14 12 18 1 13 9 6 8 4 04/08/14 5 18 12 10 6 14 3 8 2 19 13 16 11 17 1 15 9 5 4 7 04/16/14 6 17 13 5 8 14 6 11 2 19 10 16 12 18 1 15 4 3 7 9 04/22/14 7 17 11 6 8 12 5 13 2 19 10 15 14 18 1 16 4 3 7 9 05/03/14 8 19 14 6 12 10 7 16 3 17 9 11 15 18 2 13 1 4 8 5 05/06/14 9 19 16 4 13 11 9 12 5 17 7 8 18 15 2 14 1 3 10 6 05/14/14 10 17 14 7 16 10 8 11 5 18 4 12 19 15 1 13 3 2 9 6 05/20/14 11 14 12 7 17 11 10 9 6 18 3 13 19 16 1 15 2 4 8 5 05/27/14 12 16 11 5 15 10 9 13 4 18 3 17 19 14 1 12 2 8 7 6 06/06/14 13 14 15 4 13 9 12 16 3 19 2 17 18 11 5 10 1 8 7 6 n/a 14
Average
16.62 12.92 8.55 10.62 13.62 7.92 9.77 3.92 18.00 9.23 13.46 14.15 14.77 1.46 12.92 3.54 5.00 6.77 6.62 All Site Average
15.54
13.86
9.11
6.42
15.68
5.25
7.80
6.97
17.82
13.76
12.67
10.14
12.92
2.05
15.24
5.32
4.28
6.43
8.20
+/-
+1.08
-0.94
-0.56
+4.20
-2.06
+2.67
+1.97
-3.05
+0.18
-4.53
+0.79
+4.01
+1.85
-0.59
-2.32
-1.78
+0.72
+0.34
-1.58
Consistency: One date missed (in this period, missed wk 14-19 in all) due to World Cup coverage.
Bias: 7 teams with a variance over 2; highest was +4.20 and closest to average was +0.18.
Fairness: I exclude weeks 1-5 due to both teams and raters getting settled. The largest jumps after Wk5 were Colorado (5 pos. Wk6), Seattle (5 pos. Wk 6), That's only two jumps of 5 or more. Colorado's 5 pt drop was due to losing 3-1 at home vs Chivas.
Seattle's rise is after a 3-2 win in Dallas.
Like many other sites Dallas News has quite a few large variances. as such they would average in terms of bias. Fairness of ranking they have the least large jumps of any site evaluated so far, and while both could be a bit extreme, they are explainable.
Deseret News (deseretnews.com )
Deseret News published bi-weekly.
Pub. Date WK CHI CUSA COL CLB DCU FCD HOU LAG MON NER NYRB PHI POR RSL SJE SEA SKC TFC VAN n/a 1
03/20/14 2 12 9 17 6 18 15 1 14 16 19 8 5 13 3 10 11 7 2 4 n/a 3
04/02/14 4 14 11 12 3 19 4 5 16 18 10 15 9 13 1 17 8 2 7 6 n/a 5
04/15/14 6 13 12 6 4 11 3 16 10 19 14 17 9 15 2 18 1 5 7 8 n/a 7
04/30/14 8 15 18 6 5 9 3 16 14 12 8 11 13 19 2 17 1 7 10 4 n/a 9
n/a 10
n/a 11
05/29/14 12 16 18 7 9 8 10 13 6 19 3 11 17 12 2 14 1 4 15 5 n/a 13
n/a 14
Average
14 13.6 9.6 5.4 13 7 10.2 12 16.8 10.8 12.4 10.6 14.4 2 15.2 4.4 5 8.2 5.4 All Site Average
15.54
13.86
9.11
6.42
15.68
5.25
7.80
6.97
17.82
13.76
12.67
10.14
12.92
2.05
15.24
5.32
4.28
6.43
8.20
+/-
-1.54
-0.26
+0.49
-1.02
-2.68
1.75
2.40
+5.03
-1.02
-2.96
-0.27
+0.46
+1.48
-0.05
-0.04
-0.92
+0.72
+1.77
-2.80
Consistency: At first look it would appear that many dates were missed, but as this is a bi-weekly list only 2 dates were skipped (however no list has been published since Wk. 12).
Bias: 5 teams with a variance above 2; the highest was +5.03, closest to average was +0.04.
Fairness: With only 5 dates to evaluate, and a two weeks between ratings larger jumps are much more likely, and can generally be explained.
Deseret News had one team with a rather high variance, but so few scores to average that may be inaccurate; and they do have two of the closest variances to average of all sites. I give them a bit of recognition for not being more biased toward their local team, being only -0.05 off the average.Police are investigating the deaths of four newborn babies who died within 90 minutes of each other in an intensive care ward in South Korea.
The babies all went into cardiac arrest while lying in incubators at Seoul's Ewha Womans University Medical Centre.
Staff performed CPR but efforts to revive the babies were unsuccessful, a hospital official said.
Family members told local media they were concerned about the health of the infants before they died on Saturday.
They said the babies all had bloated stomachs and difficulty breathing. Hospital staff say they do not know what caused the cardiac arrests but told police they did "not seem to have originated from a contagious cause."
Officials said the four babies had already died by the time police arrived at the hospital, which is in the Mok-dong area of western Seoul.
The 12 remaining babies who were in the intensive care unit at the time of the incident have either been discharged or transferred to other hospitals.
Police have been searching the hospital. They said autopsies are expected to be conducted on Monday to determine the babies' cause of death.
South Korea has spent about $70bn (£53bn) trying to boost the country's birth rate over the past decade, handing out baby bonuses, improving paternity leave and paying for infertility treatment.Fault Lines investigates the legacy of flawed forensics at the FBI and how it continues to affect many lives today.
Hundreds of innocent men and women may be languishing in prisons across the US because of bad forensic methods at the FBI.
At the centre of the problem is microscopic hair analysis. Between 1973 and 1999, the forensic testimony of an FBI agent about hairs found at a crime scene was a crucial piece of evidence leading to a person's conviction.
However in 2012, after three high-profile exonerations in hair-related cases, the FBI began an internal review of how its agents had undertaken hair analysis.
In a damning assessment it found that the testimony of its staff was scientifically invalid 95 percent of the time.
With hundreds of potentially innocent people living behind bars - how will the criminal justice system and the FBI respond?
Fault Lines investigates the legacy of bad forensic science and the many lives it continues to affect today.
Source: Al JazeeraAs an artist, Young Thug thrives in between spaces. His chic, fresh-off-the-runway looks flirt with androgyny. Entire sequences of his raps unspool as nonsequiturs forcing listeners to extract meaning from bars of source code. Even the assorted ad-libs in his songs maximize the slightest pocket of air, exploding and retracting back through crevices in his unpredictable flows. He is constantly balancing opposing forces: masculine and feminine, light and dark, playful and humorless, pirouetting on a razor’s edge at all times. Modeling alongside Frank Ocean for Calvin Klein in July, he was as plainspoken about fluidity as he’s ever been. “In my world, of course, it don’t matter: You could be a gangster with a dress or you could be a gangster with baggy pants,” he said in his campaign video. “I feel like there’s no such thing as gender.” It’s this freedom, this refusal to define or label himself, and this progressive spirit that makes everything he does so daring and so mystifying. When industry mogul Lyor Cohen argued with Thug about being more accessible to listeners and more purposeful in thought and action on CNBC’s “Follow the Leader,” his response was simple: “I don’t want everybody just to know, like, ‘Oh, we know.’” The remove is everything to him. When he says or does something, he’s usually daring you to figure out why.
Existing on incomprehensible terms has made Thug recherché to the casual rap fan, which is why his debut album turned retail mixtape, Barter 6, remains his greatest pivot of all. It’s cohesive, understated, and about as accessible as Thug gets, an ingenious turn from oddball rap archetype to intuitive master craftsman. Every release after it lives in its shadow: aimless hard drive dumps attempting to combat a massive data breach that leaked hundreds of Thug songs online last May.
In the months since he eulogized his Slime Season trilogy (“All good things must come to an end, this is the birth of something new”), Thug teased snippets of new songs with captions that just read “JEFFERY.” Not long after, Cohen announced an official name change: No, My Name is Jeffery. A trailer for the mixtape found Thug in an interrogation room explaining to cops who he was. He wasn’t a young thug anymore. “I feel like I had a long-term relationship with Young Thug, and I’m kind of picky, so I felt like I didn’t want to be in front of a Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey,” he explained at the Jeffery listening party. “I didn’t want my kids to grow up and call me Thug because in real-life terms Thug is thug.” It’s impossible not to interpret that as some sort of response to the current racial climate, where the word “thug” is used as a racist dog whistle; it’s his most obvious statement in ages. Jeffery is the first Young Thug release that considers identity. But the rapper is rarely ever literal in verse; he always opts to show, not tell.
Though just as carefully sequenced and well-executed, Jeffery isn’t as tranquil, distant, or harmonious as Barter 6, which had cleansing, almost spiritual properties. Young Thug doesn’t often attempt the same thing twice, but this is perhaps his most chameleonic outing to date. The songs here are all named for his “idols”: Kanye West, former Fugee Wyclef Jean, pound-for-pound boxing king Floyd Mayweather, producer Swizz Beatz, Future, Rihanna, Gucci Mane, Webbie (of “Independent” fame), and Harambe. A careless listener might mistake them for actual song subjects. But these are all just misdirections. Outside of revealing small context clues about his origins as a stylist, and sometimes hinting at his mode or setting (like on “Future Swag”), this isn’t actually about any of those people. “Jeffery is all about Jeffery,” he explained at the listening party. “It ain’t even about Young Thug. Ain’t no Young Thug songs on there.” These are Jeffery songs, and from the sound of things, Jeffery’s greatest influence is his fiancé, Jerrika.
The songs on Jeffery are brimming with romantic subtext—Skyping a lover while she’s overseas, doing things together (“bae drink your lean with me, bae fall asleep with me”), and simply being head over heels for her (“she know she got a nigga bad”). In the opening verse of “Guwop,” he digs everything she says, everything she does, and even the way she looks at him. At one point on “Harambe,” he straight up belts out, “I just want to have a baby by you, girl!” The mixtape swoons and swells, heart fluttering, as Thug waxes poetic about his baby. This is the primary thread woven through the tape, which isn’t so much a love story as a sex tape with loving inscriptions.
Romance is at Jeffery’s core, but it’s driven by dynamic vocal performances others wouldn’t dare attempt—the pleading, bloodhound-ish yowl on “RiRi,” the breathless sprinter’s wheeze on “Harambe,” which explodes into a full-bodied Louis Armstrong impression, and the slinky yips on “Swizz Beatz.” The raps are delivered as mutters, shouts, and gasps, and flows are administered decisively and effectively. His wordplay is nimble and sharp, often using clever associations to create vivid imagery (“I picked my diamonds out a honey tree,” on “RiRi”; “I just got a family pack of Jimmy Choos” and “I got six brand new foreigns on my wrist/I got six Forgiatos on my fist,” on “Floyd Mayweather”). He has longstanding working relationships with every guest but one, and that repetition-built muscle memory shows in the results. He effortlessly passes the baton back and forth with Gunna and mentor Gucci Mane on “Floyd Mayweather,” picking up wherever the last trailed off. Duke, a standout guest on the Barter 6 cut “Dome,” smartly follows Thug’s lead on “Webbie.” The sole newcomer, Wyclef Jean, soothingly coos “Jeffery” over Thug’s shoulder on “Kanye West,” and it’s the optimal complement. There isn’t a word or note out of place.
Despite his growing reputation as a flamboyant eccentric who lives outside the boundaries of traditional songcraft making quirky “post-verbal” rap defying convention, Thug understands the modern pop song construction better than anyone: anything and everything can be a hook. Finding hooks keeps the mind stimulated and euphoric, creating something John Seabrook calls the “bliss point” in his book, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory. What separates Young Thug songs at their peak from other pop confections is how seamlessly the transitions occur, where they materialize, and what he’s using them to do. He doesn’t want to numb the brain; He wants to super-charge its synapses. Changes happen every few bars, they turn sharply, and they make big dramatic gestures. Take “Future Swag,” which uses repetition, rapidly alternating rhythms, and ad-libs to remain constantly mobile, shifting and morphing six times in the first minute. Or “Swizz Beatz,” where he creates his own echo, repeating phrases within verses (“with me, with me”; “‘bout it, ‘bout it”; “turn up for the”) and within the chorus itself (“love”) while creating alternate hooks with melody. Micro-hooks are hidden inside of hooks and it’s all brain candy.
For nearly 42 minutes, Jeffery explores spacing, lines, form, texture, and beauty—all of which are exhibited in the mixtape’s mesmerizing artwork. The Atlanta rapper seemed to breathe life into the ideas first articulated at the Calvin Klein shoot with the cover, posed in a ruffling dress styled by Alessandro Trincone. While some people’s brains shut down at simply the sight of a man in a dress, the cover exhibits some of Thug’s strongest artistic traits: His eye for composition and stylishness, and his knack for testing limits and hurdling norms. Jeffery embodies these attributes in essence and detail. It’s rangy and stunning, an exciting new curve in the fascinating Young Thug arc.Alex Rodriguez never misses a chance to express his passion for baseball. The New York Yankees slugger grew up playing the game he loves but has seen the sport lose its hold on the younger generation.
But despite the NFL and NBA’s growing popularity in the US, A-Rod is confident that the national pastime will one day regain its spot as the No. 1 sport.
"When I grew up, baseball was the No. 1 sport," Rodriguez said, via NJ.com. "I’m making a prediction that in the next 5-10 years we’re going to become No. 1 again. I really feel that way. Already [MLB commissioner Rob Manfred] has made some incredible movement forward."
Article continues below...
Baseball has a group of young talent that could captivate the younger generation. Players like Bryce Harper, Mike Trout and Carlos Correa are the next crop of superstars that Major League Baseball hopes can compete with the NFL and NBA’s young stars for fans’ attention.
When asked who is baseball’s version of LeBron James, A-Rod was at a loss.
"Look, I don’t know that answer," Rodriguez said. "Our game has become a lot more regional, which financially is a plus, but as far as marketing, not so much. It’s something we have to work towards. I think the collection of young players, from Bryce Harper, Andrew McCutchen, to Mike Trout, all of them together, can maybe make up LeBron. I can’t just think of one guy."Professional mixed martial arts is illegal in New York, yet MMA fans continue to pay admission to see unregulated amateur fights taking place throughout the state, an I-Team investigation has found. Chief Investigative Reporter Jonathan Dienst reports. (Published Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2015)
Professional mixed martial arts is illegal in New York, yet MMA fans continue to pay admission to see unregulated amateur fights taking place throughout the state, an I-Team investigation has found.
It’s a legal loophole with potentially dangerous consequences. New York law bans professional MMA, but amateur events are allowed and remain unregulated. That means safety measures that exist in other states for amateur fighters, like specialized doctors, medical suspension for serious injuries and disease testing, are absent in New York.
According to an I-Team survey, there are more than 40 states that regulate amateur MMA.
It’s a safety concern that amateur fighter John Giordano says leaves fighters in New York vulnerable.
“It’s like the doctors have no idea and the refs have no idea what they’re doing,” Giordano told NBC New York.
New York native and Ultimate Fighting Championship middleweight champion Chris Weidman says it is overdue for New York to legalize MMA and regulate the sport at both the amateur and professional levels.
“There’s a lot of bad things that can happen if it’s not monitored correctly,” says Weidman.
Weidman is so concerned about unregulated amateur MMA that he advises aspiring fighters who train at his Garden City Long Island gym to not compete in New York because it is not safe.
"They’re not getting paid, there’s no doctor checking them out before,” says Weidman.
Professional MMA fights in all other states are regulated. There are health screenings and medical professionals on hand at the fights. Because he is a professional fighter competing in other states, Weidman says, “I get CAT scans, MRIs, making sure everything’s good.”
Investigative Unprotected Computers Make Major Entities Vulnerable to Hacks
MMA's New Jersey Athletic Control Board Chief Physician Sheryl Wulkan says that “Combat sports have an inherent danger in and of themselves. We’re trying to minimize risks.”
Dr. Wulkan has found that some fighters banned in New Jersey for health reasons go to New York to compete. “We found that they were in fact fighting with Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, and in one case, HIV,” says Wulkan. She has also found fighters in New York competing with brain injuries, heart conditions, and retinal tears."
These risks persist at events where fans are paying for seats, but it is against the law for the fighters to get paid. Some promoters request physical forms, but there is no state requirement or certification.
Investigative Fallout Continues Over Viral Abuse Videos at NJ Montessori School
“It’s hugely important to have these records verified" both for the sake of the individual who is fighting and the opponent's sake, said Wulkan.
Assemblywoman Deborah Glick is opposed to any bill recognizing MMA as a sport. She wants it banned entirely.
"Just because New Jersey has been stupid enough to authorize this, as have many other states, does that mean you have to?” she asks. “I think it’s a terrible idea and there is nothing that’s going to change my mind, which was made up purely by viewing the activity.”
MMA advocates and opponents have spent millions of dollars trying to sway New York politicians. On one side, the parent company of Ultimate Fighting Championship wants all fights legalized so it can run professional events at Madison Square Garden and other New York arenas. Supporters say this will provide jobs and generate revenue.
The opposition is led by “Unite Here,” a union group that wants to limit Ultimate Fighting Championship’s growth, in part because the company’s owner runs non-union hotels in Las Vegas.
While the political fight in Albany continues, health concerns for amateurs remain in the shadows. Former Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver previously blocked a bill regulating MMA. “This is still a sport whose sole purpose is to maim your opponent,” says Silver.
Investigative Woman Panhandling With Newborn Arrested
But with more amateur fighters competing, and more fans paying to go to amateur events, Silver says it could be time to reconsider. “I would consider banning it or I would at least consider serious regulation,” he says.
New York’s Athletic Commission currently regulates boxing and professional wrestling events, but the commission has no authority over MMA. Some MMA promoters, like Jason Ingleston of Standing 8 Entertainment, hope to change that. “I’ll be the first to admit it’s like the Wild West,” says Ingleston.
A recent show in Lake George featuring both professional wrestling and MMA underscored the difference between how the sports are treated by state officials. Athletic Commission inspectors were there to oversee the wrestling theatrics, but they ignored the cage fights taking place just steps away. The inspectors had no legal authority over them.
Investigative YouTube Sells Ads on Videos That Teach how to Hack Webcams
Weidman hopes that lawmakers will realize the lack of regulation of amateur MMA is dangerous and will takes steps |
Gompad, Soyam Dharma, led about 50 women and men to Gorkha camp, eight kms away, pleading with the security personnel to release Lakshmi’s daughter. The men at the Gorkha camp feigned ignorance and asked them to check in Konta, which is 20 kms away. Since it would be impossible to get there before sunset, the villagers from Gompad stayed in Gorkha.
Early next morning, on the way to Konta, they ran into the panchayat secretary who had been summoned by the police with a message: they had the body of a woman from Gompad and they wanted him to help them identify her.
Fearing this could be her daughter, Lakshmi was stricken with grief. The long hours of walk the previous day and the trauma she had gone through had drained her physically and emotionally. She could not walk further.
After an agonising wait, around 4 pm, the body arrived in an auto accompanied by a policeman. It was wrapped in a tarpaulin sheet. Just the sight of the bare toes sticking out of the plastic cover was enough for Lakshmi to know it was her daughter's corpse.
With the auto that had brought the body refusing to travel to Gompad, the villagers carried back Hidme’s body for the rest of the 15 kms, reaching home in the early hours of June 15.
It was only after the daylight broke that they removed the cover and saw the cuts on Hidme's body. The villagers then contacted Soni Sori, the activist and leader of the Aam Aadmi Party. She advised them to bury the decomposing body until a petition could be filed seeking a postmortem of the body.
Lakshmi feels her struggle has partially paid with the High Court order. “Nothing can bring my daughter back to life,” she said, fighting her tears. But she feels the court will vindicate her claims that her daughter Hidme was brutally raped, tortured and murdered, demolishing the police version of an encounter. If she is able to get justice for her daughter, that will to some extent let her move on in life, she said.
Hidme's parents.
The case in the court
While many feel vindicated by the court orders, activist Himanshu Kumar remains sceptical. Kumar ran an NGO called Vanvasi Chetna Ashram in Dantewada until he was forced to leave in 2010 after he protested against Salwa Judum, a civil milita supported by the state.
He recalled another case of alleged encounter killings that took place in Singaram village in January 2009. Nearly 13 bodies were exhumed and a postmortem was conducted. The reports were submitted but the files are still lying somewhere in the court. Seven years from now, people are still waiting for justice, he said.
However, if people read about encounter deaths or the arrests of Adivasis and pause to consider whether the claims made by the police are actually genuine, then the outrage has served at least some purpose, Kumar added.
Activist and leader of the Aam Aadmi Party, Soni Sori, shared Kumar’s scepticism. She and her party members were barred from travelling to Gompad. They spent two-and-half days in Konta, where a mob attacked them, calling them Maoist supporters. The police did not take any steps to quell the mob and the sub-divisional magistrate of Konta urged them to return.
Sori felt that the police and the government would try their best to subvert justice in the case.
The unanswered questions
As the body was reportedly exhumed for post-mortem on Saturday, large questions loomed: Will the postmortem reveal that Hidme did not die in an encounter but was murdered? Will it prove whether Hidme was raped? Was she tortured before she succumbed to death?
What the postmortem will certainly not be able to prove is whether Hidme was a Maoist.
On their part, through a poster pinned on the trees in the forest surrounding Gompad, the Maoists have declared that Hidme was an ordinary Adivasi woman and not one of their cadres.
Her mother claimed Hidme was never a Maoist. The eldest of five daughters, Hidme was a cheerful and talkative girl, her friend Nagmani said, recollecting their times together.
The villagers, including her friends, were not able to cite any particular reason for such a brutal assault, but neither did they express much surprise.
Many in the village had been arrested, rounded up, detained and beaten merely on the suspicion of being Maoists, they said.
Twenty year-old Madkam Budra recounted how he was picked up from his field in December 2015, detained in Bhejji camp for five days, sent to Sukma thana for two months, before he was let off. In Bhejji, he was once hung upside down and beaten with a stick at his waist, he alleged. In Sukma, he was made to wash clothes of the jawans, wash utensils, sweep the camp until they decided to release him, he claimed.
Old feuds
Himanshu Kumar offered a possible reason for why Hidme had been targetted. She may have been mistakenly identified for one of the 12 petitioners who filed a criminal writ petition in the Gompad massacre of 2009, he speculated.
In October 2009, 16 men, women and children – nine from Gompad and seven others from the neighbouring villages of Velpocha, Nalkathong, Bandarpadar – had been brutally attacked and murdered by Salwa Judum activists. The case had recently come up for hearing in the Supreme Court. “The state for reasons known well will want none of them to appear before the court on June 29,” said Kumar.
In Gompad, villagers said an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty has loomed in their village after the 2009 massacre. A young woman said she barely stepped out of the village. She was about eight when the carnage happened. She lost her mother, father and sister. Dark memories surfaced as she sat on a cot, staring at the empty space, narrating what she remembered.
Could the recent raid on the village be part of this long-running feud that had split the area's Adivasi community?
Hidme’s mother Lakshmi claimed she knew at least five of the men who had barged into her home on June 13. According to her, they were Podiam Judev, Madvi Erra, Madvi Raju, Kurram Santosh and Muddaraj.
Erra and Raju are from Gompad. The others were from nearby villages.
Muddiraj of Mosalmadgu village had been with the Judum since 2005.
Raju had run away with a girl the elders in the village did not approve of.
The other three were former members of the village-level Maoist political committee called the sangham and had surrendered to the police last year.
Lakshmi claimed that Santosh, while he was still with the sangham, had come to visit the family and had asked them to let Hidme join the Maoists. Lakshmi had refused, stating that she needed Hidme to help her at home.
She said she was shocked to find the men who worked with the Maoists were now part of the police force.
Flawed strategy
One of the key strategies deployed by Bastar police in its anti-Maoist operations has been the wooing of Maoist cadres. Many of them have surrendered to the police, attracted by jobs offered by the government. However, with few other jobs available, a large number of them have been placed in the District Reserve Group, a special unit made up of Adivasi constabulary. Drawn from the villages, these men are well versed with the terrain and language, as well as familiar with people who have been associated with the Maoist movement.
Activists fear the newly-recruited District Reserve Group men, keen to secure professional rewards, and eager to impress their seniors, target even those who had long given up their arms and association with the Maoists and were leading a quiet life as farmers in the villages.
This strategy might be working to the extent that it had ratched up the body count of so-called Maoists, while ensuring there are minimal casualties to the security forces.
But in the long-term, this strategy is nothing short of counter-productive, as it creates fresh resentments in the village, keeping a long-drawn conflict alive.Thank You We will send your list shortly
The truth about fruits.
Whatever happened to an apple day keeps the doctor away?
The real source of concern with fruit is processing.
Picking most fruit before they're ripe robs them of nutrients they would've normally had. The fruit is still alive as its being transported in the back of that refigerated truck. Lacking any soil or artificial energy source, the fruit turns to its own reserves - the nutritional reserves that you expect to have when you buy produce.
Apples Cherry Tomatoes Grapes Strawberries Peaches
Genetically engineered crops have led to an increase in overall pesticide use, by 404 million pounds from the time they were introduced in 1996 through 2011.
Where does this leave us?
The record shows that caveman ate fruits. Period. The argument may arise that fruits made up only a portion of most cavemen's diets and this is true - most cavemen lived in areas where fruit was seasonal. Some cavemen, however, lived in areas around the equator that were extremely conducive to growing fruit. Naturally, in such locations fruit would make up a larger part of a cavemen's diet.We have Apples out of season and Avocados from Peru. What gets overlooked far too often is the fact that the fruit you'll find on the shelf of your grocery store these days is a far cry from what it looked like back in the day of cavemen.The old phrase still holds true - sort of. Sure, the fruits (aka paleo fruits) you choose to eat are an important part of adhering to the Paleo diet and getting the most nutritional value possible. The other side of the coin, is something that's completely out of your control: Through selective breeding, fruits are now sweeter, larger, and more aesthetically pleasing. It's gotten to the point that quite of a few of commonly purchased fruits can no longer survive on their own; they need an artificial environment and plenty human vigilance. Besides being unnerving to the few who still carry a rosy image of how our food is really grown, this on it's own doesn't necessarily imply a defiency in nutritional value.We expect our fruits to look like they were just picked off the tree - even if the tree they were picked off of is half way across the country. To be sure, a certain expectation of aesthetic is a huge motivator for the processing to continue as it is. Fruits are now picked before they're fully ripe and refigerated in a truck ripening as they go on the way to their destination.All of this is without going into the actual chemicals that are part of fruit processing. Babble lists the most chemically treated fruits There's a neverending arms race going on between farmers and the insects and weeds that threaten their crops. Unfortunately for us, this means more and stronger pesticides every year. To quote Charles Benbrook, a research professor at the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University:Don't be so quick to bet the house on local farming either - they use pesticides as well. In fact, in many cases, local farming can be more hazardous when it comes to pesticides. Local farmers will claim to use 'organic pesticides' which holds very little water once you look past the trendy name. In actuality, these 'organic pesticides' are used by local farmes and non-local farmers alike. Since they're weaker than their synthetic counterparts, they're used far more intensively. All of this is not meant to scare you out of eating fruits. All of our food ends up being processed in one way or another, this doesn't mean that they're not nutritious. The real lesson to take away is to know as much as possible about what you're eating which will then allow you to make informed decisions on what's going to be for dinner tonight.In this case and in many cases regarding the Paleo diet and paleo fruits, you end up exactly where you started. When in doubt, remember the foundations of your diet: to eat natural food with the least amount of processing possible. Your body is your compass: what is healthiest for you? Too often people get caught up in bickering over "this food, that food" arguments in regards to whether they were available to cavemen or not. Cavemen didn't have the access to food we have now - if they had, they'd surely be doing the exact same thing they were doing before: eating as healthy as possible with what's available.James Fisher Subsea (JF Subsea), part of James Fisher and Sons plc, provided expertise for a project to locate, identify and dispose of deep-sea unexploded ordnance (UXO) at Nordergründe offshore wind farm located 16 kilometers off the North Sea coast of Germany.
Offshore wind farm development and management specialists wpd offshore solutions approached JF Subsea to use its excavation techniques to survey the precarious area and remove all unexploded munitions. The UXOs, which had been released by Central Powers and Allied forces during WWI, had delayed planned construction works and was at risk of costing the developer millions as a result.
Of the 224 targets identified, 72 were deemed to be UXOs and had to be detonated with minimal impact to sea life. JF Subsea’s project manager, Max Clements, said, “Due to the project’s potentially dangerous complexities- such as rough tide, heavily buried ordnance and inclement weather- the team was prepped to be ready at a moment’s notice whenever a suitable weather window opened up.”
“As with all UXO operations safety was of the upmost priority and from the planning stages we ensured we had project specific equipment, world-class expertise and encompassing method statements in place. These measures ensured the teams were safe, the UXO’s were removed efficiently and the client received a world class service,” Clements added.
Due to the complex and unpredictable nature of the project, JF Subsea said it had to work within narrow weather windows and often in shallow waters with rough tides. Target location, ROVs, detonation specialists and bespoke UXO support vessels were all used as part of a turnkey solution, ensuring the precise and efficient delivery of the project.
Two vessels were deployed for the duration on the project, with specialist divers used to locate and remove the UXOs during the day and ROVs dispatched to detect and excavate through the night. This dual-pronged approach sped up the clearance process and reduced the delay to the client’s start date.
“Offshore wind turbine sites are often plagued with UXOs and are a continual problem we come up against during construction. Due to the expertise JF Subsea showed throughout the excavation process we will most likely be using their services again,” said Jan Patrick Daniel, offshore project manager at wpd.A favorite question among certification candidates is the one about the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: How much money will I make after I finish this certification? There are several factors that determine salary, of course, but a good certification can be a strong argument for someone seeking a raise or bonus. And certain high-paying jobs may require certification as a prerequisite to being hired. We like to ask the money question, too, so we’re making it a bigger part of what we do.
Welcome to the second in our new series of surveys, begun this year in March, that are aimed at smaller targets. We’ll still bring out the big bullseye at the end of each year for our annual Salary Survey. In between, however, we’ll take a more focused look at organizations and companies that offer certifications. We’re calling these new smaller surveys Salary Survey PLUS.
For the August quarterly edition of Certification Magazine, we’re taking a look at the certifications offered by San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems, Inc., one of the largest technology companies in the world. If you hold one or more Cisco certifications, then please pull up a chair. This will only take a minute.
Thanks to everyone who participated in our Cisco Salary Survey! Watch for the results in the next quarterly edition of Certification Magazine.The server is now open!
Enjoy DFO in the world of Arad once again!
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We will be performing a scheduled maintenance, Oct 6, 2015, starting at 07:00(UTC), 00:00 (PDT). Maintenance is expected to last approximately six hours.
Maintenance notes
< Contents & Events >
- Act 6. Dies Irae: Priest 2nd Awakening
- Priest Premium Event
- Dragon Road Event
- Seria's Greeting (welcome back) Event
- DFO Flowing with Milk & Honey revisited
< Sales >
- Priest exclusive avatars
- Petit Friends: Priest
- Item of the Month
For more details, please refer to the upcoming event page.
< Changes/fixes >
- Damage dealt on Interdimensional objects now properly shown
- Damage boosts for Hollow Amulet fixed as intended
- Interdimensional Weapon Rental specification adjusted (+7 reinforcement & +5 refine ⇒ +10 reinforcement & +5 refine)
and the event extended till Oct 27 (Conquer the Interdimensional Space Event to be ended Oct 20 as planned)
- 1st and 2nd Awakening Clearance Ticket granting improper SP value for some classes fixed
- Awakened One bead skill enchanting rate increased for some skills
- Minor text issues fixed
- Loading Screen Contest reward given
- Wallpaper Download Event reward given
- Priest teaser trailer sharing/tagging event reward given
- Blind Deal Day-14 box random disappearance error compensation (The same box to be given to everyone only once per account by *Blitz Gift after Oct. 6 maintenance till Oct. 12 09:00 (UTC)
*Blitz Gift
- Clickable icon appearing to get the compensation on HUD during the period.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
- Dungeon Fighter Online Support Team –Monday morning, Microsoft announced it was purchasing Swedish game development studio Mojang AB, makers of the staggeringly popular multi-platform video game Minecraft, for $2.4 billion. It’s a massive deal, with huge implications. Talk of the deal had been swirling for a week, and the rumored acquisition was a genuine surprise to the games and tech industry; Bloomberg stated that the purchase would be the biggest deal Microsoft has made since CEO Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer as the company’s top executive three years ago.
But the mainstream press struggled to fathom why one of the biggest names in tech would want Mojang, at least for such an enormous price. In keeping with a reporting trend that follows any major happening in the games industry, there was a layer of incredulity to the proceedings.
There shouldn’t have been.
Mojang is a tiny studio with one of the greatest video game success stories in the business. The unlikeliest of hits, Minecraft was created by a single person, the programmer Markus “Notch” Presson, and has blocky, low-fi visuals that a big studio would never greenlight. Presumably in largely part because of these attributes, the wider business world acted puzzled when rumors of Mojang’s acquisition surfaced. This reaction would have been appropriate five years ago, when Minecraft first appeared. Now it’s just silly.
Minecraft is one of the biggest games in the world. You can play it on any platform—Playstation and Xbox, smartphones and tablets, Macs and PCs. It’s not obscure—ask any child old enough to use some type of controller, and they very likely know of, or have played, the game—and its appeal is universal. Minecraft gives players worlds that are a blank canvas for them to make whatever they can imagine using an endless supply of digital building blocks.
There are a number of reasons why Microsoft would want to buy the company that makes Minecraft. Some of them have to do with games—Microsoft’s Xbox One has been lagging behind the Playstation 4 in sales since launch, and owning Minecraft means having a legion of young fans who don’t necessarily have a console allegiance. Other reasons have nothing to do with video games. In fact, that perspective may prove shortsighted. As Stephen Totilo, editor-in-chief of Kotaku, states in a recent PBS Newshour piece, the Microsoft/Mojang story is about much more than games:
“You’re not really seeing headlines about big mergers of traditional video game companies. What you’re seeing is an Amazon or before them a Google trying to buy Twitch, which is a service where you watch people play video games. You see Facebook spending on buying Oculus, which is about virtual reality. Yes, it could be about video games. But it can also be about medicine, and teleconferencing, and education. Similarly, if you think about Minecraft, it too — it is not just a video game. As I was saying, it’s virtual building blocks. It’s something that people can use for education, productivity and creativity. So I think what we’re not seeing is no so much an interest just in purely acquiring a video game or a video game studio, but acquiring a technology that could be used for games, but could be used for a lot of other broader applications as well.”
What’s more, there’s all manner of precedent for this sort of thing. Video games are often ground zero for any number of wider trends or issues in tech and entertainment, and now that the people responsible for Minecraft suddenly seem to be worth two billion dollars, the mad dash to break down what might be going on here seems to implicitly acknowledge a shortcoming: we missed something. And it happens all the time.
Crowdfunded projects are now frustratingly ubiquitous, regularly making thousands of dollars for bizarre frivolities, but the first Kickstarter to make a million dollars in 24 hours wasn’t a movie or gadget or trolling stunt—it was a game by beloved developer Tim Schafer that displayed the staggering potential of fan crowdfunding, even if no one took note until Rob Thomas decided to make a Veronica Mars movie. Digital distribution and the decline of physical media? Video games began wrestling with that in earnest with the introduction of developer Valve’s Steam platform in 2003. Cumbersome Digital Rights Management encroaching on your ability to enjoy music and movies? The games world is chock full of case studies on why it does not work, as well as being an area that’s actively pushed for DRM-free media. In late August, when Amazon purchased Twitch, a service mostly used for streaming and interacting with live gameplay and commentary, The New York Times kind of scratched its head and said ‘kids these days.’ Twitch sold for a billion dollars, and the overwhelming response to the news was ‘oh wait, watching people play games is a thing?‘
To put it in clearer terms: it is not a coincidence that Minecraft is immensely popular on Twitch. There is a pattern here.
Despite the fact that they are a $21 billion industry with a diverse audience, video games continue to be sequestered away from mainstream news reports. It’s a puzzling phenomenon, and the ignorance of mainstream news outlets really starts to show when something game-related makes a billion dollars and everyone scrambles to understand why. Video games aren’t a curiosity, but we treat them as such whenever news comparable to the rumored Microsoft/Mojang deal finds its way to headlines, seemingly out of nowhere. Games are a huge part of how we spend our entertainment dollars and leisure time. We should probably treat them as such.The belief that technology can always overcome natural limits just took a big hit this week when Royal Dutch Shell PLC decided to shut down its pilot oil shale project in western Colorado after 31 years of experimentation. The ostensible reason is that the company has opportunities elsewhere. Shell says it wants to shift resources away from the intransigent rock and move it to profitable opportunities.
That sounds logical. But, it might have sounded logical in any of the last 10 years as oil prices rose to historic heights while oil shale projects languished. Even today the average daily price of crude oil hovers near its historic highs set in 2011 and again in 2012.
The prize for anyone who profitably unlocks these deposits is huge, an estimated 800 billion barrels of recoverable resources. So why isn't oil shale yielding to the mighty combination of deep pockets, sophisticated technology and high prices?
A clue comes from one sentence in coverage in The Denver Post: "Full-scale production would probably have required building a dedicated power plant." In simple terms, it takes energy to get energy. Shell's process requires copious amounts of electricity to heat the rock in place through boreholes in order to release the waxy hydrocarbons embedded in it. In this pilot project, the subterranean rock was heated for three years before liquids were captured and brought to the surface for further processing.
(Oil shale is a promotional term. Oil shale is neither shale, nor does it contain oil. It is better characterized as organic marlstone. It contains kerogen, a waxy, long-chain hydrocarbon that must be extensively processed to make it into a synthetic form of crude oil. Oil shale is often confused with oil taken from deep shale formations such as the Bakken in North Dakota, oil properly called "tight oil.")
Related article: Big Oil Moves North Despite Climate Woes
The ratio of energy outputs to inputs for oil shale is estimated to be about 2 to 1, according to a study by Cleveland Cutler who has long examined energy return on energy invested. Shell claimed a ratio of around 3 to 1 (though that claim no longer appears on the project site). That seems good until you realize that we are currently running the world on crude which has a ratio around 20 to 1.
Furthermore, the need for water to cool power plants associated with oil shale extraction and for processing the extracted liquids is considerable. And, water is increasingly difficult to secure in an area that has seen growing demand combined with more than a decade of drought.
Proponents of oil shale claimed in 1981 that it would be economical to process if oil were to reach $38 per barrel and stay there. The threshold price kept escalating along with the price of oil all the way up to $80 in a 2008 study by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
And, yet here we are. Brent Crude, the de facto world benchmark, hovers around $108 dollars. The average daily price for the past three years has remained above $100. In the face of these consistent record high prices, Shell is abandoning oil shale development. And, Shell isn't the only one. Another international major, Chevron Corp., pulled out of its project last year.
There are others who soldier on in the oil shale deposits, and they may eventually find ways to produce a synthetic crude from this rock at a profit. But 30 years of failure suggests that such a development remains far off. And, in a world that is trying to wean itself from fossil fuels because of climate change and the risks of depletion, time may run out.
Related article: Brazil Pre-Salt Reflects Changing Face of Energy Investment
The path of oil shale is reminiscent of atomic fusion research. Twenty-five years ago, fusion was supposed to be just 25 years in the future. Earlier in the same decade, oil shale was touted as the future of oil. Today, fusion remains the energy source of the future (just as oil shale does), and researchers at the world's main fusion research facility, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), say that fusion will perhaps be ready for commercial use by mid-century.
To be fair, the challenges for fusion researchers are daunting. For example, they must build and run a device that operates at interior temperatures of 150 million degrees centigrade--which is 10 times hotter than the core of the sun. And, they must do it safely and in a way that produces more energy than the device consumes.
But, because the challenges are so daunting, it may turn out that fusion will always remain the energy of the future. We already know how to fuse two atoms. And, we know how to process oil shale to produce synthetic oil.
But, we don't know how to do either of these things at an energy or financial profit sufficient enough to make them practical for widespread deployment. There is a strong possibility that we may not learn how to succeed with either in a time frame that matters to anyone living today.
That means we must get on with other technologies, energy projects and energy policies that have a more realistic possibility of addressing our energy needs and the climate change caused by our current energy regime.
By. Kurt CobbMassey University IPv6-enabled Massey University has enabled IPv6 on its border and core campus routers. Its central network services, including DNS, external email and NTP are also enabled. Massey’s main website is IPv6-enabled and remote login to some servers and network equipment also support IPv6 for systems administration and networking staff. The university is currently peering using IPv6 with KAREN and the Auckland, Wellington and Palmerston North Internet Exchanges. The University continues to enable and enhance IPv6 capability in its various network applications. www.massey.ac.nz
WorldxChange trialing consumer service Auckland-based ISP WorldxChange Communications have been dual stacked for 5 years. Recently the company has been running a consumer trial and are well prepared for when consumers have ready access to cost effective, IPv6 compliant CPE. www.wxc.co.nz
Inspire Net makes IPv6 available Palmerston North-based ISP Inspire Net has been experimenting with IPv6 since 2008. It has had native IPv6 transit since late-2009, and is currently testing IPv6 on a wide range of services. If any cus tomers of Inspire Net wish to experiment with IPv6 then this is possible on a range of Inspire Net’s products including ADSL, wireless and fibre broadband services; DNS and webhosting; and colocation and transit services. ipv6.inspire.net.nz
KAREN’s IPv6 backbone KAREN, New Zealand’s R&E network, is an IPv6 native network and has provided IPv6 as a standard service offering to its Members since 2006. KAREN Members are leading the pack in planning and implementing IPv6 capability in New Zealand. 15 of KAREN’s 17 international peers support native IPv6 providing unparalleled native access to IPv6 R&E networks around the world. www.karen.net.nz
Braintrust provides IPv6 consulting & training Auckland-based firm Braintrust specialises in developing and maintaining IT and Telecommunications infrastructure, including IPv6 and legacy network engineering, architecture, and training. www.braintrust.co.nz
Juniper kit supports IPv6 Juniper Networks has phased in support for IPv6 in it’s products since 2000. Today Juniper offers networking and security products that support the deployment of IPv6 networks by both enterprises and service providers. These are in use in networks in New Zealand including KAREN and several service provider environments. See www.juniper.net/ipv6 for further information.
Prophecy Networks supports global IPv6 deployment Wellington-based Prophecy Networks believes that the deployment of IPv6 is essential to the ongoing success of ICT within New Zealand and around the world. Prophecy has ongoing participation in industry IPv6 forums, with staff members holding key positions within those organisations. Prophecy Networks has proven skills in the areas of IPv6 Network Design, IPv6 Security and Training which make the adoption of IPv6 as painless as possible for ICT professionals. www.prophecy.net.nz
Cisco supports IPv6 adoption Cisco has been involved in developing standards and products for IPv6 since its inception more than a decade ago, and have provided products & services to a wide range of New Zealand customers, across all market segments, to assist with their IPv6 adoption strategies. www.cisco.com/go/ipv6
FX offers native support New Zealand Internet Backbone Provider FX Networks offers native IPv6 support for its customers at no extra charge. It is a full production service with parallel dual stack support for both IPv4 and IPv6. FX also supports IPv6 transport on it’s private IP enterprise WAN service and is the only provider in New Zealand currently certified by the global IPv6 Forum as “active”. www.fx.net.nz
Voco has experience and is fully independent Voco provides IPv6 consultancy services such as IPv6 readiness reports, IPv6 address plan design, and IPv6 migration plans. It has recent IPv6 experience for engagements in medium to large organisations.
Voco is fully independent, and provides Strategic Consulting, Architecture, and Programme Management services. www.voco.co.nz
Catalyst IT offers full-service IPv6 Wellington-based open source developer Catalyst IT provides IPv6 hosting, consulting, development and testing services. They specialise in systems integration with IPv6 capability. http://catalyst.net.nz
Dimension Data helping with IPv6 transition New Zealand network integrator Dimension Data assists enterprise clients through the journey to IPv6 with assessment, design and implementation services. Dimension Data also delivers managed WAN services to government agencies known as one.govt. This service is delivered (in conjunction with FX Networks) with native IPv6 support – using dual stack – as part of the standard configuration. www.dimensiondata.com
Tauranga City Council enables IPv6 IPv6 has been enabled on 15 websites hosted at Tauranga City Council (TCC). Changes to equipment on the Council’s internal LAN are also being made to enable IPV6. Some internal networks across the organisation have been enabled for IPv6, and dual-stack technology is being used to enable both IPv4 and IPv6 use. A number of internal servers and client devices are now communicating via IPv6, and a teredo relay and 6to4 relay ensure users using these two transition technologies are well served when accessing TCC IPV6 addresses. A fully deployed IPv6 solution is expected to be complete, across all TCC networks, by Feb 2012. www.tauranga.govt.nz
Gen-i maintains IPv6 testing lab Gen-i has developed an IPv6 testing lab for its clients and is in the process of enabling the IPv6 capability within its network product suite – including Gen-i Internet and WAN Services. This leverages the architectural and operational knowledge gained from Telecom who have run a native IPv6 international Internet peering and transit network over the last two years. www.gen-i.co.nz
IPv6 at University of Auckland The University of Auckland IT Services team has partially deployed IPv6, in collaboration with the Science Faculty and the Computer Science Department. It has IPv6 connectivity via KAREN and its commercial ISP. Computer Science is fully dual-stacked; IPv6 has been used in undergraduate laboratory assignments and for post-graduate projects. The University is preparing for wider use of IPv6 across the campus as IPv4 exhaustion nears. www.cs.auckland.ac.nz
WAND measure IPv6 Waikato University’s WAND group recently added IPv6 to their AMP measuring system, which has nodes around the country on commercial and research sector networks. They measure Latency, Loss, Hops and MTU. Most of the nodes with IP v6 connectivity at this point are those attached to the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network (KAREN). erg.wand.net.nz
Snap future-proofs with IPv6 South Island-based Snap Internet provides native IPv6 connectivity for all its customers, at no additional cost. Its network is fully IPv6-enabled, with the IPv6 service running alongside Snap’s normal IPv4 connectivity. In a further move to ensure easy migration to IPv6, Snap is selling AVM Fritz! Boxes, which are fully enabled for IPv6, and pre-configured by Snap. The organisation is also fully certified by the global IPv6 Forum. www.snap.net.nz
DIA launches IPv6 website Government Technology Services, a business group of the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), has launched an IPv6 website as a proof of concept to demonstrate how NZ government websites can be made accessible to the IPv6 Internet. As part of this proof of concept Government Technology Services has set up an IPv6 address schema and established a dual-stack proof of concept government IPv6 website. It will also be auditing its own network for IPv6 readiness. The DIA has now enabled.govt.nz DNS to be fully IPv6 ready for Agencies to utilise. www.ipv6.govt.nz
Internet New Zealand adopts – inside and out Internet New Zealand is a key advocate for the adoption of IPv6 and is leading by example, having enabled IPv6 on its internal network in 2009. InternetNZ’s network is dual-stacked and its website is also accessible via IPv6. www.internetnz.net.nz
IPv6 – who’s doing it in New Zealand? The implementation of IPv6 in New Zealand is accelerating across business, industry and government. Featured here is a selection of go-forward organisations that have already deployed this most critical of technologies. To be included please email [email protected] with details of your IPv6 implementation and your logo.
Unleash sets IPv6 in motion New Zealand data centre and Internet services firm Unleash provides native, wholesale and business grade IPv6 transit nationwide, as well as operating both 6to4 and Teredo relays on its network. Unleash also provides consulting services on a wide range of IPv6 deployment topics including transition technologies such as LSN, Dual Stack and DS-Lite. www.unleash.co.nz
Allied Telesis hardware supports IPv6 Allied Telesis New Zealand delivers IP/Ethernet network solutions, creating standards-based IP networks that connect voice, video and data services. Allied Telesis has been supporting IPv6 in its switches and routers since 1999. Its products are IPv6 Ready phase 2 certified and the company continues to advance its IPv6 solution, ensuring it meets the growing demand for next generation networking. www.alliedtelesis.com
Kordia offer IPv6 Internet services Kordia, who provides National and International WAN and Internet services, offers IPv6 for its Internet services, and its Ethernet WAN services support IPv6 natively. Kordia is in the process of upgrading its IP WAN services to support full IPv6 private WAN connectivity. www.kordia.co.nz
TelstraClear is IPv6 capable TelstraClear has national core network and international links that are IPv6 capable and are currently used commercially for IPv6 networking. Core-to-edge rollout is in progress with completion scheduled for early 2012 and support of IPv6 consumer, business and wholesale products planned to follow on thereafter. www.telstraclear.co.nz
Clearfield is ready Auckland software and IT consultancy Clearfield Software adopted IPv6 in June 2010 across its entire network. www.clearfield.com
Auldhouse provides IPv6 training IT training firm Auldhouse offers a portfolio of IPv6 training courses, targeted at technical and executive audiences. For more information and to register please refer to the link below: www.auldhouse.co.nz
NZICT promotes IPv6 adoption NZICT, which represents ICT and Hi-Tech companies in New Zealand, believes that the adoption of IPv6 is one of the key challenges and opportunities facing the industry |
individuals targeted by security agencies. Just last month dozens of Taiwanese citizens working in Kenya and Malaysia were deported to China, and there have also been cross-border abductions by Chinese authorities of Chinese dissidents in Thailand and booksellers in Hong Kong who sold books critical of China.
Autocratic regimes are also trying to undermine global election norms by stacking international monitoring delegations with what are quaintly called “zombie” monitors who sign off on fraudulent elections. For example, such pseudo-monitors were used to legitimize deeply flawed election processes in Zimbabwe, Azerbaijan, and Venezuela in 2013.
Another arena of soft power competition is cyberspace. Popular sentiment has long held that authoritarian regimes were technologically challenged dinosaurs that could not keep up with online activity and would inevitably be weeded out by the information age. But these regimes are proving much more adaptable than expected. According to a recent statement of the World Movement for Democracy, a global civil society network, authoritarian regimes have prioritized control of cyberspace, developed methods to exert that control, and martialed the resources needed to back their initiatives. National level Internet controls are now deeply entrenched, and authoritarian states are becoming more assertive internationally and regionally, promoting cyber security policies that emphasize concepts of state security at the expense of human rights. They have access to the most sophisticated tools to conduct digital attacks and espionage, to exert digital control over their own populations, and to combat dissent originating beyond their borders.
In sum, the authoritarians are no longer content just to contain democracy. They’re now trying to roll it back, and the West has been caught off-guard. This is not the first time that democracy has been put on the defensive and that its prospects have appeared to be bleak. In 1976, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in a special bicentennial edition of The Public Interest that “Democracy is where the world was, not where the world is going.” He said that in the aftermath of the US defeat in Vietnam, the suspension of democracy in India (he had just been the US ambassador there), the fall of many democracies in Latin America, and the rise of “third-world nationalism” and anti-Americanism in the Non-Aligned Movement and other international fora.
Yet as we now know, this bleak moment coincided with what Samuel Huntington was later to identify as the start of the Third Wave of Democratization, which he said in his book by that name was triggered by the fall of the military dictatorship in Portugal on April 25, 1974. The Carnation Revolution, as it was called, was soon followed by Franco’s death and the transition in Spain, the spread of democracy across Latin America, the People’s Power Revolution in the Philippines, and the great revolutions of 1989 in Central Europe that signaled the end of the Cold War. This was the historic “third wave,” which was the greatest expansion of democracy in world history.
Is such a counter-intuitive reversal of negative trends possible today? Obviously this is something we can’t know. The current crisis of democracy may be more serious than the setbacks that occurred in the 1970s because US leadership and influence have declined more dramatically. Still, there are a number of reasons not to despair and perhaps even to be cautiously hopeful.
The first is that while the Freedom House annual survey, as mentioned earlier, charts a decline in freedom in many countries, it does not show a decline in the number of electoral democracies in the world, which has held roughly steady at 125, the post- third wave peak level. This is one of the reasons that political scientists like Larry Diamond speak of a “democracy recession” today and not a democracy depression or a “third reverse wave.”
Second, there have been a number of surprising advances for democracy. These include the successful presidential election in Nigeria last year, which surprised many people who feared that a stolen election, which they expected, would trigger a deadly civil war. Another key election was the upset victory in Argentina last November of the liberal reformer Mauricio Macri, which The New York Times called “a stunner that is likely to set in motion a transformational era at home and in the region.” The defeat the following month in Venezuela of the Chavista party in parliamentary elections was also a major setback for illiberal populism in Latin America.
In addition, the National League for Democracy’s victory in Burma’s elections last November, led by Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, was a major step forward. Likewise, the constitutional agreement and democratic election in Tunisia, a process led by the National Dialogue Quartet composed of four civil society organizations that won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts, was also a remarkable achievement. Tunisia is now the first democracy in the Arab Middle East. Other positive developments included the surprising defeat in Sri Lanka in 2015 of the extreme Buddhist Nationalists in both presidential and parliamentary elections, and the successful elections in some smaller African countries like Burkina Faso and Cote D’Ivoire.
A third reason for cautious optimism is that the world’s resurgent autocrats do not sit securely on their thrones. Their repeated warnings about the danger of foreign-instigated “colored revolutions” is actually an implicit admission that what they fear most is the test of a real election that they might lose, knowing that the trigger for a colored revolution would be an attempt to reverse an unacceptable result. Putin’s regime in Russia recently adopted a slate of new draconian laws targeting the upcoming parliamentary elections in September. These laws impose harsher restrictions on monitors, and potentially popular opposition candidates like Alexei Navalny will be prohibited from running. In addition, Putin’s formation of a new praetorian guard of 400,000 military personnel under the command of his former personal body guard Viktor Zolotov, a move directed at heading off possible mass protests, is a further sign of regime insecurity. Vladimir Kara-Murza, a political dissident who continues to be active despite an attempt on his life last May, recently asked: “Does this really look like the behavior of a government that has, as it claims, ’89 percent’ popular support?”
Chinese President Xi also appears insecure in his power. He has greatly tightened political controls, making China more repressive today that at any time since the death of Mao. Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution in China, a period that is remembered by many as a time of chaos, mass violence (over one million people were killed and tens of millions were tortured and humiliated), and ideological madness. It has been called a “spiritual holocaust.” Yet Xi has promoted a cult of Mao and campaigned against “historical nihilism,” which is how he terms a critical assessment of Mao’s rule, for fear that public discussion of the Mao-led catastrophe might damage the legitimacy of the Communist Party. Xi has been the target of an open letter calling upon him to resign and a sharp remonstrance appearing on the website of the party’s own enforcement arm warning that his cult of personality has gone too far. Andy Nathan, who in the past has said that China’s party dictatorship has resilience, now writes that Xi’s regime “behaves as if it faces an existential threat.”
The Castro regime in Cuba also has reason to worry. In the past it has based its legitimacy on standing up to the United States and “imperialism.” These ideological props no longer work after the normalization of relations with the United States, and the developments in Argentina and Venezuela make the Cuban dictatorship look increasingly anachronistic. The Castro regime has also increased repression—a sign that it, too, feels vulnerable and insecure. According to opposition leader Manuel Cuesta Morua, 100,000 Cubans have left the Communist Party since 2012.
A fourth reason for cautious optimism is that the world’s poorest people have made unprecedented economic, health, and education advances during the last quarter of a century, a phenomenon documented by the Georgetown University development scholar Steven Radelet in his new book The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World. According to Radelet, one billion people have been lifted out of poverty since the early 1990s, reducing by half the number of extremely poor people in the world. The child mortality rate has also shrunk drastically, from 10 percent in 1990 to less than 5 percent today (it was 22 percent in 1960). Life expectancy has increased significantly, average incomes have almost doubled, and there have been enormous gains in education, especially for girls, 80 percent of whom now complete primary schools compared to only one-half in 1980. Radelet gives much of the credit for these gains to the expansion of democracy and the rule of law. These factors, in my view, also help account for the sustainability of those gains as measured by Freedom House and for the electoral breakthroughs, since people are much more likely to insist upon respect for their rights as citizens as social, educational, and economic standards rise.
The last reason for hope that I want to point to is the energy and resilience of civil society, not just in fragile new democracies and semi-open autocracies but also in backsliding and increasingly repressive authoritarian countries as well. In Africa they include bloggers in Ethiopia, youth activists and trade unionists in Zimbabwe, investigative journalists in Angola, and human rights defenders and peace activists in Burundi and the Congo, where leaders are dangerously trying to steal or block elections. In Russia, where democratic leaders like Boris Nemtsov have been murdered, activists continue to work fearlessly to expose elite corruption, defend human rights, and offer independent news and information to counter the regime’s steady drumbeat of nationalist propaganda. In China, despite the harsh political crackdown, a Freedom House study reports that more people are joining rights-defense activities, information is spreading despite censorship, the fear of repression is waning, and the disillusionment with party corruption is growing. These examples are just the tip of a massive iceberg of civic activism that exists in all regions of the world and that may at this very moment be preparing the way for new democratic breakthroughs in the future.
We cannot know if a new democratic wave will occur in the foreseeable future. But there are three fundamental things that need to be done to renew democratic progress and momentum. The first is to acknowledge—and try to reverse—the authoritarian resurgence. Congress has awarded NED special funding to develop and implement a strategic plan to address some of the negative trends noted previously, and the Endowment is beginning to carry out that plan, even as the plan continues to be refined as conditions warrant. There is an important role in this effort for private foundations and organizations, both in the US and abroad, and the NED looks forward to working with others and deepening collaboration.
The US government—both the Administration and Congress—must also do more to integrate political support for civil society and democratic freedoms into its regular bi-lateral and multilateral diplomacy, to strenuously defend democratic norms in international and regional rules-based bodies, and to strengthen US capacity in the area of information and international broadcasting. It was a regrettable error to abolish the United States Information Agency (USIA) 15 years ago, but some of the damage can be repaired if Congress passes legislation that is now before it to reform and strengthen US public diplomacy as well as the surrogate radios like RFE/RL that provide alternative news to populations targeted by authoritarian media operations.
The second priority is to restore US leadership in the defense of the liberal world order that is essential for democratic progress, economic growth, and political stability in the world. Such leadership will require a new vision of political and economic cooperation in a globalized world. But that will not be enough. It will also require a new international realism based on the recognition that diplomacy will be ineffective if it is not backed up by power and credible military deterrence. The new realism should also recognize that while engagement with dictatorial regimes is necessary, the US should never conflate a regime that rules without popular consent with the people of a country, or fall into the mirror-image trap of thinking that dictators act according to the same moral and strategic calculus as democratically-elected leaders. Nor should US leaders assume that engagement by itself will produce liberal change if it is not accompanied by significant and sustained human rights pressure and conditionality. No one today proposes that the United States should remake the world in its own image. But that doesn’t mean that the US shouldn’t support people who share our values and need our help.
Finally, it has become increasingly clear that the US must rebalance the need to promote global trade with the need to protect American manufacturing jobs, particularly against imports from non-democratic and low-wage countries. Bill Galston rightly pointed out recently in The Wall Street Journal that we need to make more “aggressive use of anti-dumping provisions in existing trade provisions.”
The third priority is to restore our country’s sense of purpose in the world and to reaffirm America’s founding values that have done so much to inspire and influence the growth of democracy in the world. When Abraham Lincoln stopped at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on his inaugural journey to Washington in February 1861, he remarked that he had “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” the sentiments involving the equality and unalienable rights of all human beings. He said that he had often inquired of himself “what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together,” and he concluded that it was “that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, for the world, for all future time.”
That is the source of America’s greatness, and that greatness will not be restored just by loudly proclaiming that America needs to be great again, especially when that call is accompanied by a rejection of the idea that democratic values are universal and that US ideals and interests are served by trying to advance them beyond the established democracies of the West.
As a matter of fact, with the democratic West absorbed as it is today in its own problems, the effort to advance democracy is being led not by the West but by the global democracy movement—the people and organizations on the ground in one country after another in the global south and post-communist world who are fighting to defend their rights and human dignity. It is there—more than in the West today—that one hears the language of democratic solidarity and universal human rights. It is my hope that by linking young Americans and Europeans with young activists and others fighting for fundamental rights and freedoms in the non-Western countries of the world, this might spark a revival of democratic commitment in the Western countries where democracy, after many trials, first took root.
It is ironic that the United States and other Western countries should need democratic inspiration from the very people they should be helping. But that will encourage humility, a virtue that will be needed in abundance as we try to respond effectively to the immense challenges that lie ahead in a dangerous and complex world.
Carl Gershman is the President of the National Endowment for Democracy. This article is based on the John B. Hurford Memorial Lecture delivered in New York to the Foreign Policy Association on May 17, 2016.Germany has seen an immense drop in the arrival of asylum seekers, with the total number in 2016 down to less than a third of the 890,000 who arrived in 2015, according to the interior minister.
Thomas de Maiziere said on Wednesday that about 280,000 new asylum seekers arrived in 2016, while an estimated 80,000 people either left voluntarily or were deported.
The minister said authorities hoped the number of those who leave or are deported will increase.
Arrivals declined sharply with the closure of the Balkan refugee route in March and the subsequent agreement between the European Union and Turkey to stem the flow across the Aegean Sea to Greece.
Asylum applications have lagged well behind arrivals and many people who came to Germany in 2015 applied only last year.
Wednesday's figures showed that 745,545 formal asylum applications were made last year - 268,869 more than in 2015.
Those included 268,866 applications from Syrians, 127,892 from Afghans and 97,162 from Iraqis, the biggest single groups by far.
The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, which has been beefed up in the course of Europe's refugee crisis, decided last year on more than 695,000 asylum applications, more than twice as many as in 2015.
Nearly 60 percent of applicants were granted either full refugee status or a lesser form of protection.
Deportations and returns
The agency has also cut the average time required for an asylum decision to under three months, and introduced a nationwide database to combine identity records for all asylum seekers.
De Maiziere said that about 55,000 failed asylum seekers returned home voluntarily last year, compared with the previous year's 35,000. Another 25,000 were forcibly deported.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, who faces a national election later this year and still draws criticism for her welcoming approach to refugees and migrants in 2015, has promised a "national effort" to ensure that people who are not entitled to stay go home.
READ MORE: Stranded and sick, refugees endure harsh Serbian winter
The number of returns is still too low, de Maiziere said, adding that talks are under way with state authorities - who are responsible for returns - to push it up.
De Maiziere rejected the suggestion that the drop in new arrivals was the result of Europe's efforts to prevent people reaching the continent, but acknowledged that Germany was working to ensure that refugees stay in their home region.
Trapped in cold
Closed borders across Europe have left refugees and migrants trapped in difficult humanitarian conditions in the Balkans, Greece and elsewhere.
Rights groups have expressed concern about the fate of refugees and migrants as a wave of cold weather grips the region.
In Serbia, hundreds of refugees and migrants were living in abandoned buildings behind the train and bus station in the city centre.
Temperatures have dipped as low as minus 20 degrees Celsius, while access to humanitarian aid has been limited by a ban imposed by the government.
READ MORE: 2016 - The year the world stopped caring about refugees
"In some cases, not only have authorities failed to provide humane conditions, they have also tried to prevent humanitarian organisations from aiding those in need," said Human Rights Watch in a statement last week.
In camps across mainland Greece and Greek islands, refugees and migrants have struggled as temperatures have sunk as low as minus 18 degrees in recent days.
In Moria, a camp on the island of Lesbos, more than 4,500 people who live in tents are among those hit the hardest by the snowy weather.Video
Even as it has grown into a new type of digital money worth billions of dollars, Bitcoin has always retained an air of mystery.
Central to its cachet has been the mythic status of the system’s creator. Its developer went by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, but that is all that Bitcoin’s adopters seemed to know — or wanted to know. After all, Bitcoin was a project dedicated in part to making it easier to avoid the all-seeing gaze of the government and corporate America.
But the inventor of the virtual currency may not be quite the international man of mystery that some aficionados imagined him to be. Could he in fact be a model-train fanatic living with his mother in a modest house in Southern California?
That, at least, was what Newsweek, with a newly revived print version, reported on Thursday. But the man the magazine claimed to be behind the Bitcoin curtain has a similar name — Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto — which raised questions about why he had not been discovered sooner. Many digital currency aficionados said they doubted the veracity of the report.
The Mr. Nakamoto identified in the article denied involvement in Bitcoin on Thursday after a car chase involving a crowd of reporters. He told The Associated Press that he had not heard of the virtual currency until his son told him about being contacted by a reporter three weeks ago.
On Thursday evening, an online Bitcoin forum account long believed to belong to the real Satoshi Nakamoto posted a one-sentence denial that he was the man identified in California. It was the account’s first activity in more than three years.
If the identification is wrong, it would not be the first time that a reporter had incorrectly determined the identity of Bitcoin’s creator.
Yet even if the report proves correct, virtual currency proponents at Bitcoin conferences in Texas and Barbados said that identifying Mr. Nakamoto would be a violation of the privacy the currency was intended to protect.
Whatever the conclusion, the furor on Thursday laid bare just how far Bitcoin had moved beyond its humble origins five years ago — and just how much it still relied on the mystique of those beginnings.
“In reality, a lot of people didn’t want to know,” said Arianna Simpson, a Bitcoin entrepreneur. “Not knowing and thinking that maybe it had been a community project, again, I think was very well tied to the essence of Bitcoin. To have it exposed in this way I don’t think does anybody a particular service.”
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For Mr. Nakamoto, Newsweek’s outing was clearly an unwelcome event. On Thursday, a team of journalists was camped outside his house in Temple City, Calif. When a reporter knocked on his front door, an older woman answered, but Mr. Nakamoto quickly came to shut the door, shouting, “No, no, no,” as he did.
If Mr. Nakamoto, 64, is Bitcoin’s creator, he is thought to own hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the digital money. Because Bitcoin are generally stored on computer hard drives, many Bitcoin users say that Mr. Nakamoto has been made into a target for criminals who might look to steal his coins.
The magazine’s report comes at a turning point for the Bitcoin industry. Last week, the virtual currency world was rattled by the collapse of Mt. Gox, once the dominant exchange for buying and selling Bitcoin. The company filed for bankruptcy in Japan last Friday, claiming to have lost about 750,000 customer coins, or nearly $500 million. The bankruptcy sent users scrambling to figure out where their money had gone, and it prompted renewed calls from lawmakers and others to increase government oversight of an industry that has no official regulator.
The Newsweek article did not do any immediate damage to the currency itself. The price of a Bitcoin dipped a bit early on Thursday, but it recovered most of the losses, trading at around $650 by evening.
Still, Bitcoin watchers said that the creator’s supposed anonymity had played a vital role in the growth of a virtual currency that has become a potent symbol for privacy advocates and critics of government power.
“Having this level of mystery allowed people to project their optimism and their hopes onto the currency,” said Richard Peterson, the chief executive of MarketPsych, a research company that has studied virtual currencies. “If it’s true and people start to believe it, it undermines that mystique.”
What is known for sure about the creator of Bitcoin is that the person or group of people going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a paper on an obscure mailing list in the fall of 2008 describing a new type of digital money. Bitcoin, as the creator called it, would be run according to a set of rules that would be downloaded on all the computers that joined in. One of the rules determined that only 21 million Bitcoins would ever be created, through a process known as mining.
In the months after the system went live, Satoshi Nakamoto emailed with his fellow collaborators but never gave any private details, and he refused to talk on the phone or meet in person. The only information came from a programming website, where a profile described him as a 38-year-old man in Japan.
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Mike Hearn, who became involved with Bitcoin a few months after it was created, said that initially, Bitcoin was too small and insignificant for the identity of its creator to be a concern. But as it grew, Mr. Hearn went back and looked at his emails with Satoshi Nakamoto and found that they had been sent through an encryption service that obscured their origin.
Previous investigations by journalists have suggested that Satoshi Nakamoto might have been, variously, a young British banker, a Finnish programmer and an American law professor. But in each case, the people under suspicion have denied being Bitcoin’s creator.
In the absence of any hard evidence, many Bitcoin users have built Satoshi Nakamoto into a sort of hero, imagining him as a selfless genius who created a system that would allow for greater economic freedom.
The Mr. Nakamoto in Southern California confirms at least a part of that story. He is a physicist who graduated from California State Polytechnic University. A neighbor, Andrew Kent, said Mr. Nakamoto was “quiet and easygoing” and “clearly smart.”
But given the sophistication of the original Bitcoin idea, some experts have doubted it could be the creation of one person, even a genius. At a conference on cryptography in Barbados on Thursday, many attendees discussed the evidence, or lack of evidence, linking Mr. Nakamoto with Bitcoin.
“My personal opinion, I don’t think this is the right person,” said Stefano Zanero, assistant professor at the computer engineering department of Politecnico di Milano in Italy. “It just doesn’t add up, and quite honestly, I think that there were a lot of assumptions.”
Social networks, meanwhile, compared the polished writing of Bitcoin’s creator with online writings apparently posted by Mr. Nakamoto, some of which were written in imperfect English.
“I think it is very clear the writings are not made by the same person,” Roger Ver, a Bitcoin enthusiast and investor, said in an email. “I hope the real Satoshi is never found.”
The real Satoshi Nakamoto could prove his or her identity fairly easily by making changes to an original Bitcoin account or by providing the security code that was attached to emails shared with a small group of Bitcoin’s earliest programmers.
Proving someone is not Satoshi Nakamoto, however, is tougher.
In Texas, at a Bitcoin conference that began on Wednesday, Brian Page, the director of communication for a company called Bitshares, said that initially, he was shocked by the apparent unmasking, but then he reflected.
“I have no idea if it’s the guy or not, but it doesn’t matter,” he said. “He created something historic but it doesn’t matter if he is found. Bitcoin is launched and it’s not under his control or anyone’s control.”
Quentin Hardy and Jenna Wortham contributed reporting.Through the brand’s history, Jun Takahashi has guided Undercover through several main stylistic periods. In recent collections he has gone away from the techy minimal look of ‘Less but Better’ and towards the styling found in this collection. In this Fall/Winter lookbook I see references to Jun’s past work from the skinny scab-esque jeans to some of the mod references that were present in the ‘Neoboy & Poptones’ collection. While this is far from my favorite collection from UC, it definitely has some hit pieces in the 45 looks presented. The looks walk a delicate balance between traditional English tailored wear and the youthful rebellion of British Punk with a sprinkling of 80’s sci-fi.
Photos via Fashionsnap, you can see the whole collection HERE.
More looks after the jump.BY THE NUMBERSThe number of intoxicated people held in Saskatoon police cells in each of the last five years: The number of intoxicated people held in Saskatoon police cells in each of the last five years: 2016: 1,814 2015: 1,578 2014: 1,752 2013: 1,879 2012: 2,019 The number of Saskatoon police referrals to The Lighthouse stabilization unit, which opened in 2013: 2016: 239 2015: 325 2014: 404 2013: 192 2012: 0
The number of intoxicated suspects detained in Saskatoon police cells jumped in 2016 as police referrals to The Lighthouse stabilization unit fell.
Statistics presented at Wednesday’s board of police commissioners meeting suggest a connection between the detention of intoxicated people in police cells and the decline in those admitted to The Lighthouse.
The number of intoxicated people held in Saskatoon police jail cells rose to 1,814 last year, the highest since 2013, when The Lighthouse stabilization unit first opened.
“As we’ve seen, there’s been progress made, but challenges remain,” Mayor Charlie Clark said.
The provincial government changed its formula for funding eligibility in late 2015, which resulted in The Lighthouse closing the stabilization unit during daylight hours in February 2016. That appears to have resulted in fewer police referrals to the unit: that number fell to 239 in 2016, the lowest in three years after a peak of 404 referrals in 2014.
Police referrals to the Saskatoon Health Region’s brief detoxification unit also dropped to their lowest point in three years, to 411, down from 761 in 2014.
“The brief detoxification unit, with its access to addictions treatment services, is a highly desirable alternative to holding intoxicated persons in a police service cell when possible to do so,” notes a report presented at Wednesday’s meeting.
However, the report adds, the detox unit is “too full, too early in the day” for police to use it as an alternative to police cells as often as they would like. Police see The Lighthouse stabilization unit and the brief detox unit as “preferred” destinations where addicted people can get the help they need as opposed to a police holding cell.
The community support officers program, which was launched in 2012 and often deals with intoxicated people on the street, continued to experience a steady rise in individuals served. That number rose to 2,382 in 2016 from 1,246 in 2013, its first full year of operation, the report says.
Clark said he intends to meet with the provincial ministers of justice and social services to discuss the findings in the report.
“Fortunately, they’ve shown some interest in a dialogue,” he said.
The provincial Ministry of Social Services introduced stricter rules in November 2015 that limited who was eligible for funding for The Lighthouse stabilization unit.
The Lighthouse discontinued operation of its daytime stabilization unit in February 2016 and started turning away clients in September.
ptank@postmedia.com
twitter.com/thinktankSKParents in one Virginia neighborhood were outraged on Sunday after their annual Easter egg hunt tradition was upset by white supremacists who had secretly hidden eggs with racist messages for the children to find.
West End parents Brandon and Jackie Smith told WRIC that they discovered the offensive eggs while having an Easter Egg hunt with their 3-year-old son on Sunday afternoon.
"My husband noticed the last Easter egg and I knew it wasn't one that we put out," Jackie Smith recalled. "We opened it and it's got the white supremacist stuff in it.”
Other neighbors also found hate-filled eggs in their yard with messages that said "Diversity = White Genocide" and “Mass immigration and forced assimilation of non-whites into our lands is genocide."
The notes pointed to the websites WhiteManMarch.com and WhiteGenocideProject.com, a reference to a so-called "worldwide" protest in March that reportedly ended with a very small turnout.
“We don't want other kids around here who can read being like, 'Hey mommy what's the million man white march or what's the genocide project?' Most of us don't want to explain genocide to our 6-year-olds,” Jackie Smith explained.
Brandon Smith said it was "disturbing" to think that his child could find racist messages so close to home.
"It’s something he may find and have questions about that not necessarily at his age," he remarked. "I want to explain to him. That there are people in this world who don't think everyone is equal."
Police in Henrico have launched an investigation to see if anyone associated with the websites is responsible for planting the eggs.
"You can hit the whole world with the Internet, stay out of my yard," Jackie Smith warned.
The Southern Poverty Law Center's David Neiwert pointed out that the idea for putting racist messages in Easter eggs originated with White Man's March founder Kyle Hunt, who insisted that he was not targeting children.
"[T]hat overlooks the fact that Easter eggs are in fact targeted to children," Neiwert observed.CLOSE District Attorney Dave Sunday speaks about why people must focus on the heroin epidemic in York County. He said 80 percent of crime in the county is connected to drug activity. York Daily Record
Stock image of drugs. (Photo: stock image)
Sixteen deaths in York County in the first 19 days of November are believed to be the result of heroin or fentanyl overdoses, with four coming over this past weekend alone.
This is more than twice the rate of such overdoses seen in the area in September and October.
The spike prompted a stark warning Monday from the York County Coroner's Office "with the hope that it will save lives, especially over this holiday season."
The spate of recent deaths should not be blamed on a "bad batch" of heroin, according to the warning. Breaking into all caps for this section, the warning stresses, "... there is absolutely NO GOOD BATCH of heroin/fentanyl – ANY AMOUNT, NO MATTER HOW LARGE OR SMALL, CAN AND WILL KILL THE USER, NO MATTER THE SUPPOSED TOLERANCE OF THE USER."
It notes that cocaine users should know that heroin and/or fentanyl has been detected in the blood tests of "known cocaine users in our area."
The office advises people who know addicts to:
Stay engaged and as close to them as possible.
Equip yourself with Naloxone.
Call York Adams Drug and Alcohol Commission at 1-866-769-7822 for assistance
Call Not One More at 717-424-8890 or 717-850-6350 for further assistance and family support.
Coroner Pam Gay wasn't expecting overdose numbers to increase near Thanksgiving but said her office does worry about substance abuse ticking upward.
"I think during the holidays people tend to celebrate," Gay said. "I don't think people realize that when they're using other substances... that can trigger a response or somebody in recovery, it can trigger them to use."
More: Christmas Emergency Fund to help fight opioid crisis (editorial)
More: 'It's turned into a success story,' says graduate of York County Drug Treatment Court
The cause of death in such cases is not confirmed until toxicology tests are complete.
There were six suspected cases in the first three weeks of September and seven in October.
Almost all drug deaths in York County tend to be attributed to heroin and fentanyl.
So far this year, only 9 of 115 confirmed drug deaths, about 8 percent, were from something other than an opioid, Gay said.
There have been 91 confirmed heroin-related deaths this year with another 32 suspected, Gay said. That vastly exceeds the 76 heroin-related deaths in York County last year and equals the total drug deaths for all of last year.
Message out in hopes of saving lives
Of particular concern, Gay said of the recent uptick, is people dying while in treatment, part of a recovery community or thought to be clean.
"It's not unusual for a family member or even a parole officer or a recovery house owner to tell us, 'Hey, I just tested him and it was negative,'" Gay said.
Her office has been hearing about what she calls "false negatives," or a urine drug screening coming back negative for someone who might actively be using fentanyl.
Read: 4 death scenarios show why York Co. needs a morgue (column)
"Sadly, later toxicology testing done by the Coroner's Office during autopsy has shown fentanyl..., which confirms that the individual was actually using at the time of their death," the coroner's news release states.
Fentanyl is an opioid similar to heroin but far more powerful.
"I wanted people to be more cautious," Gay said. "The user figures out ways to get around the system. As much as you want to be trusting and believe in your loved one, you have to be on the lookout for the things they're doing."
CLOSE After leaving rehab in 2012, Forrest Yingling moved back to York and overcame his addiction to heroin. Jason Plotkin, York Daily Record
Read or Share this story: https://www.ydr.com/story/news/crime/2017/11/20/warning-deadly-november-heroin-suspected-16-deaths-19-days-york-county-epidemic-overdose-coroner/882427001/Woods closed with a 2-under 69 -- at one point going 41 holes without a bogey on a Congressional course that was tougher than when it held the U.S. Open last year -- and won for the third time this year. It was the 74th win of his career, moving him past Jack Nicklaus into second place on the PGA Tour, eight short of Sam Snead's record.
Not bad for a guy who only five months ago walked off the course at Doral with another injury to his left Achilles tendon.
"I remember there was a time when people were saying I could never win again," Woods said.
He stayed at No. 4 in the world, but a couple of other rankings indicate how he is trending. Woods moved to the top of the PGA Tour money list and the FedEx Cup standings for the first time since September 2009.
And this win puts him in a position to reclaim No. 1 over the final two majors of the year. The ranking is based on points over two years. If it were a vote, Van Pelt knows how he would cast his ballot.
"I think he's the only guy to win three tournaments on tour this year, is that correct?" he said. "On three different golf courses. And he was leading the U.S. Open after two days. So I'd say that he's playing the best golf in the world right now."
Van Pelt made him work for it.
Three times, Woods took the outright lead in the final round. Each time, Van Pelt made a birdie of his own to catch him. The tournament was decided on the last three holes, and it featured a surprising turn of events.
Van Pelt had Woods on the ropes on the par-5 16th by ripping a 345-yard tee shot and having only a 6-iron into the green. Woods hit a spectator in the left rough with his tee shot, laid up, and then attacked a back flag only to see the ball tumble over the green and down an 8-foot slope. It looked as if it might be a two-shot swing for Van Pelt, or at least the lead going to the 17th.
That's when Van Pelt answered with unforced errors of his own. His 6-iron was slightly heavy and didn't quite reach the bunker, meaning he had to plant his feet in the sand and grip the wedge on the shaft for his third shot.
He moved it only a few yards, still in the collar of the rough, and chipped about 12 feet by the hole. Woods' chip up the slope rolled 15 feet by, and he missed the par putt.
Van Pelt also missed his par putt, and they walked away from that mess still tied for the lead.
"It was difficult from the standpoint I had my legs in the bunker, and if I hit that chip a little too hard it |
's ancestral past, ill-suited to life in civilized society, and that therefore 'natural born criminals' could be identified by the presence of the anatomical signs of primitiveness he termed'stigmata'. But, contrary to Gould, Lombroso was no monomaniac and also believed that criminal behavior could arise in 'normal' men.
Lombroso carried out several anthropometric surveys of the heads and bodies of criminals and noncriminals, including a sample of 383 crania from dead convicts. He claimed that, as a group, criminals evidenced many features he considered primitive, including smaller brains, thicker skulls, simpler cranial sutures, larger jaws, preeminence of the face over the cranium, a low and narrow forehead, long arms, and large ears. Lombroso also examined African tribes in the Upper Nile region finding so many of these allegedly primitive traits that he concluded criminality would be considered normal behavior among them.
While Gould delights in lampooning such early evolutionary thinking, he fails to tell his readers that though Lombrosos description of the individual trees was distorted by the prejudicial lens of his time, he correctly saw the forest. Lombroso was the first to understand how Darwin's theory of evolution provides a biological understanding for why some people are more prone to criminality than are others, how certain physical indicators allow us to predict criminality, and to recognize the critical role of the forebrain in inhibiting violent and antisocial behavior.
The reader of The Mismeasure of Man will search in vain for even a dismissing reference to any of the following recent studies of the biological correlates of criminal behavior. Raine (1993) reviewed several studies that used the state-of-the-art techniques of Computerized Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) to study the brains of violent and sexual offenders. He tentatively concluded that frontal lobe dysfunction was associated with violent behavior including rape. Moreover, given the relation between brain size and IQ (Rushton & Ankney, 1996; see above), Lombroso's finding of a smaller brain in criminals relative to non-criminals is likely correct. Numerous American studies from those of H. H. Goddard in 1917 to the present, including The Bell Curve's 12 year longitudinal study of over 12,000 youth (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994), have established the predictive relationship between IQ and crime.
Nor does Gould feel compelled to let his readers know that Lombroso's ideas have received considerable support from recent work in behavioral genetics, a science that barely existed when Lombroso conducted his pioneering work. The same 1993 review by Raine (neither cited nor mentioned by Gould) describes 10 twin studies of adult crime based on official convictions. These studies yielded 13 analyses that together gave a concordance rate for criminal behavior of 52% for 202 monozygotic twins and only 21% for 345 dizygotic twins.
American, Danish, and Swedish studies of children who were adopted in infancy provide a means of testing the genetic theory of criminal behavior against the environmental theory. These studies support the findings of the twin studies and Lombroso's theory of 'natural born criminals'. Adopted children were at greater risk for criminal convictions if their biological parents had been convicted of a crime than if their adoptive parents had been. In a Danish study of some 14,000 adoptees, boys who had neither adoptive nor biological criminal parents, themselves had a 14% rate of criminal conviction. If the adoptive, but not biological parents were criminals, boys still had a conviction rate of only 15%. But if the biological but not adoptive parents were criminal, the rate increased to 20%. And, if both biological and adoptive parents were criminal, the rate increased to 25% (Mednick et al., 1984).
Studies that use self-reports of criminal behavior tell the same story as do studies of official arrest records. In one massive study, Rowe (1986) sampled almost all the eighth to twelfth graders in the Ohio Public Schools and found that MZ twins were roughly twice as alike in their self-report delinquency as were DZ twins, yielding a heritability of about 50%. Another recent study (Rushton, 1996) of 274 adult twin pairs used retrospective self-reports about destroying property, fighting, carrying and using a weapon, and struggling with the police and found a 50% heritability for such violent behaviors. Questionnaire studies of related traits such as altruism, aggression, and empathy in adults also typically show a 50% heritability (Rushton et al. 1986). Within the same family (that is, where socioeconomic status is identical), studies show it is the less intelligent and the more aggressive siblings who are more prone to delinquency.
Nor is Lombroso's concept of stigmata as far out as Gould would have you believe. In fact, the theory of bodily markers of abnormal behavior is making a comeback, albeit from an environmentalist as well as a genetic perspective. During gestation, an insult to the fetus (such as a drug in the mothers body) that disturbs brain development, may simultaneously produce a minor physical anomaly (termed an MPA) on the external body surface. For example, during the course of pregnancy, the ears start low on the neck of the fetus and gradually drift into their standard positions. An insult to development can prematurely stop this upward migration of the ears and result in low-set ears -- an observable MPA. Thus, the number of MPAs serves as a rough index of (perhaps hidden) central nervous system anomalies. For children raised in unstable families, Raine (1993) found that the number of MPAs at age 12 year was related to violent behaviors at age 21. More generally, Raines review found that antisocial children often appear markedly less attractive than normal children. In one sample of over 11,000 criminals and 7,000 controls, 60% of criminals but only 20% of controls had facial deformities, as judged by expert plastic surgeons.
Finally, consider the striking racial differences in criminal behavior. These differences are consistent across time, national boundaries, and political-economic system, which argues strongly for their having some genetic component. For example, as far back as records go, in the U.S., Orientals have been underrepresented and Blacks overrepresented in crime statistics relative to Whites. This pattern is not specific to the U.S. but is repeated around the world. Analyses of INTERPOL Yearbooks throughout the 1980s show that African and Caribbean countries have double the rate for violent crime of European countries and three times the rate of the countries in the Pacific Rim. The combined figures for murder, rape, and serious assault per 100,000 population for 1984 and 1986 were Africans -- 142, Europeans -- 74, and Asians -- 43. For 1989-90, the pattern was unchanged: Africans -- 240, Europeans -- 75, and Asians -- 32 (Rushton, 1990, 1995a).
It is unfortunate that Gould does not even cite, let alone attempt to refute any of these studies. Even if all of them are in some way biased and all my reasoning flawed, Gould owes it to those who rely upon his work to explain how this is so. More unfortunate is that by dismissing out of hand the hypothesis of the inclination to criminal behavior by some sneering remarks on the early work of the long-dead Lombroso and ignoring the latest research, Gould is actively obstructing scientists from finding the biogenetic treatments and environmental intervention strategies that could spare both future victims and delinquents (who, in their own way, are victims of their genes and their environments). It is thus Gould who is -- in Lombosos words -- the delinquent man.
Between-Group Heritabilities: What Gould Doesnt Want You to Know
Gould ( 1996, pp. 186-187, 369-370) continues to disparage the possibility of generalizing within-group findings to the causes of between-group differences. When environmentalists use nutrition as an explanation of both within-group and between-group differences this is (sensibly) not disputed. But when the exact same inference is made for heritabilities to explain both within-group and between-group differences, Gould argues it is inappropriate. But, if poor nutrition is shown to have an effect 'within' Whites and Blacks, it is sensible to suppose that nutrition has an effect on differences 'between' Whites and Blacks. If so for environmental generalization, why not for genetic generalization?
What Gould especially fails to mention is the striking and critically important finding that 'genetic weights on IQ subtests predict racial differences'. Although the White/Black IQ gap averages 15 points, the difference 'is more pronounced on subtests that are highly heritable within races than it is on less heritable tests' (Jensen, 1985, Rushton, 1989b). This observation is important because it provides a test of differential predictions. Environmental theory predicts that racial differences will be greater on more culturally or environmentally influenced tests whereas genetic theory predicts they will be greater on more heritable tests. Because higher heritabilities are stronger indicators of underlying genetic substrates than are lower heritabilities, the data support the genetic hypothesis, not Gould.
It is in fact an important 'empirical' question whether heritabilities for Blacks are the same as, or different from, those for Whites. Reason alone tells us that as environments become more benign and more equal, genetic sources of variation will become larger. For example, over the last 50 years, as environmental barriers to health and educational attainment have fallen, the variance in health and educational attainment accounted for by genetic factors has increased (Scriver, 1984; Heath et al., 1985). In animal studies, low heritabilities for body size variables are typically interpreted as showing the suppressant effect of the environment on natural growth (e.g. Larsson, 1993). The relevant question thus becomes: 'Are IQ heritabilities for Blacks lower than those for Whites?' Most of the evidence favors the view of equal heritabilities across the three major races. There is, however, some evidence of lower heritabilities in Blacks which would support the hypothesis of a more damaging environment. For example, Rushton and Osborne (1995) studied cranial capacity in several hundred Black and White twins and found a range of higher heritabilities (depending on corrections for age and body size) for Whites than for Blacks (47% to 56% vs 12% to 31%). The differences, however, were not statistically significant. These are, however, precisely the kinds of analyses Gould should be conducting if he wants to make a scientific, rather than a political argument about heritability!
Most transracial adoption studies also provide evidence for the heritability of racial differences in IQ. Studies of Korean and Vietnamese children adopted into White American and white Belgian homes have been conducted (Clark & Hanisee, 1982; Frydman & Lynn, 1989; Winick et al., 1975). As babies, many adoptees had been hospitalized for malnutrition. Nontheless, they went on to develop IQs 10 or more points higher than their adoptive national norms. By contrast, Black and Mixed-Race (Black/White) children adopted into White middle class families typically perform at a lower level than similarly adopted White children. For example, in the well known Minnesota Adoption Study, by age 17, adopted children with two White biological parents had an average IQ of 106, adopted children with one White and one Black biological parent had an average IQ of 99 and adopted children with two Black biological parents had an average IQ of 89 (Weinberg, Scarr & Waldman, 1992).
The only adoption studies Gould refers to (p. 370) are those showing IQ gains of very young Black children adopted into affluent and intellectual homes (presumably based on an earlier account of the Minnesota study when the children were only 7 years old) and a study of prepubertal mixed-race German children fathered by Black soldiers compared with those fathered by White soldiers which found 'no difference'. But these apparent exceptions may 'prove the rule'. In general, behavior genetic studies show that as people age, trait heritability increases while environmentality decreases. Differences not apparent before puberty often emerge by age 17.
Evolutionary Selection: What Gould Doesnt Want You To Know
Given that Gould doesnt believe that either brain size or intelligence differ by race and sex it is not surprising that he offers no evolutionary explanations for the origins of these differences. Gould (p. 399) acknowledges the accumulating evidence in favor of the 'Out of Africa' model of human origins. It holds that Homo sapiens arose in Africa 200,000 years ago, exited Africa with an African/non-African split about 110,000 years ago, and migrated east with a European/East Asian split about 40,000 years ago (Stringer & Andrews, 1988). But, Gould refuses to acknowledge any relationship between this evolutionary sequence and the parallel rankings of major racial groups in behavioral traits. Nor does he tell his readers that evolutionary selection pressures were different in the hot savanna where Africans evolved than in the cold Arctic where East Asians evolved.
Rushton (1995b) and others have proposed that the farther north the populations migrated, out of Africa, the more they encountered the cognitively demanding problems of gathering and storing food, gaining shelter, making clothes, and raising children during prolonged winters. Consequently, as the original African populations evolved into present-day Europeans and East Asians, they did so by moving in the direction of larger brains and greater intelligence, but also towards slower rates of maturation, lower levels of sex hormone, and concomitant reductions in sexual potency and aggressiveness, and increases in family stability and social conformity.
Such an evolutionary scenario fits the data from Rushtons (1995b) review of the international literature on race differences which found that on more than 60 variables Orientals and Africans consistently averaged at opposite ends of a continuum with Europeans averaging intermediately. For example, the rate of dizygotic twinning based on a double ovulation is less than 4 per 1,000 births among East Asians, 8 among Europeans, and 16 or greater among Africans. Multiple birthing is known to be heritable through the race of the mother. No known environmental factor can explain why Africans average the smallest brains and the highest twinning rates, East Asians average the largest brains and the lowest twinning rates, and Europeans average intermediately in both. Clearly, there is a need for a genetic-evolutionary explanation.
In fact, Vincent Sarich, who helped initiate the research program on biochemical taxonomy from which the 'Out of Africa' model developed (Sarich & Wilson, 1967), argues that Gould got his evolutionary ideas about race completely upside down. As Sarich (1995, p.86) pointed out, "it is the Out of Africa model, not that of regional continuity, which makes racial differences more functionally significant. It does so because the amount of time involved in the raciation process is much smaller, while, obviously, the degree of racial differentiation is the same -- large. The shorter the period of time required to produce a given amount of morphological difference, the more selectively important the differences become." Sarich (1982, 1995) has labelled the argument that natural selection would result in geographically separated populations evolving the exact same brain size 'behavioral creationism'. Although Gould is comfortable talking about the evolution of different body types in humans, he often writes as though he believes that societies, cultures, and mental differences spring into being full-blown, as if from the brow of Zeus or the hand of God.
With respect to the evolution of sex differences in brain size, Ankney (1992, 1995) hypothesized that differing roles of men and women during human evolution produced a sexual divergence in brain size and in abilities. Men roamed from the home base to hunt, which would select for targeting ability and navigational skills; women were relatively sedentary. Such additional abilities would have selected for relatively larger brains in men as it may require more brain tissue to process spatial information. Lynn (1994b) has also proposed that men evolved larger (more costly) brains because they enhance their probability of becoming socially dominant and thus more reproductively successful; female reproductive success is much less dependent on social status.
Conclusion: Case Closed
Others have speculated on the extent to which Gould's political outlook has colored his scientific work (Davis, 1986; Dennett, 1995, Ruse, 1993). In Darwins Dangerous Idea, Dennett (1995) brilliantly documents how Gould has been systematically misleading his readers for decades, attempting to smuggle anti-Darwinian mechanisms into evolutionary theory with a lot of clever talk of "spandrels" "punctuated equilibrium", and "dialectical processes". Gould notwithstanding, Darwinian adaptation is the way evolution works and the mechanism on which working evolutionary scientists base their research programs.
Gould himself tells us (1996, p. 19) that he originally considered titling his book Great Is Our Sin from Charles Darwin's remark: "If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin." Gould avers that the scientific study of human differences in mental ability is nothing but an apology for elitist European enslavement and oppression of the rest of the world -- so it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen. This has become the Apostle's Creed of the Adversary Culture. (Do not blame criminals from poor backgrounds, they are but helpless victims of a wicked system; affirmative action and multiculturalism must be invoked to exorcise the demons of capitalist oppression, racism, and sexism). In Goulds (1996) benediction, he keeps the faith of "political correctness", while grudgingly confessing that many see it as "leftist fascism" (his words, p. 424).
In his preface, Gould describes his background and how it has affected his work. All his grandparents were Eastern European Jews whose entry into America, he believes, Goddard "would have so severely restricted" (p. 38). Thus the book is dedicated to "Grammy and Papa Joe, who came, struggled, and prospered, Mr. Goddard notwithstanding". Gould's father fought for the leftist International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War (p. 39). He himself actively campaigned against racial oppression in the U.S.A. and in England (p. 38). I for one admire Gould for having the candor to divulge this background. No doubt personal experience affects all scholarship (including mine). However, even the most deeply held values cannot justify witholding evidence, engaging in character assassination, and repeating unfounded charges despite published refutations.
No doubt we are all prisoners of our background as well as slaves to our genes, but facts remain facts. Brain size and IQ are correlated. Men do average larger and heavier brains than do women. Asians and Europeans do average larger and heavier brains than do Africans. Higher SES groups do average larger and heavier brains than do lower SES groups.
Perhaps more than any scientist in recent memory, Gould has wielded his influence not only as a professor of science at Harvard but also through the pages of the New York Review of Books and through broadcasts on educational television, to seriously and intentionally misrepresent the science and politics of IQ. By his own standard, Gould has consigned himself to the innermost circle of hell. But science, fortunately, is not religion or politics. Gould need only own up to the facts and end his career of relentless special pleading. The second edition of The Mismeasure of Man does not measure up to Goulds own standard of "honest assesment and best judgment of evidence for empirical truth".
J. PHILIPPE RUSHTON
Department of Psychology
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5C2
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TABLE 1S. J. Goulds Corrected Final Tabulation of Morton's assessment of racial differences in cranial capacity
Buy this book today!By Keith Woodford*
In recent weeks [here and here] I have been analysing the GHD data that underpins the MIE recommendations for the meat industry.
Those analyses confirm to me that MIE has missed the big picture.
The key MIE recommendation has been that companies must amalgamate, with the most important merger being between the two big co-operatives Silver Fern Farms and Alliance.
However, Alliance has been consistent in their position, both before and since the MIE report, that the numbers needed to support an amalgamation do not stack up.
Alliance has taken considerable criticism from parts of the farming community for their lack of interest in joining Silver Fern Farms. Chairman Murray Taggart has been the front man and has had to bear the brunt of this.
There are many sheep farmers who are struggling, and it is human nature to blame everyone else, even when financial logic says otherwise.
Silver Fern Farms interest
From where I sit, an amalgamation between Alliance and Silver Fern Farms has never been a realistic option.
Quite simply, the fundamental weakness of Silver Fern Farms would, in all likelihood, have dragged down the combined financial entity.
Essentially, the Silver Fern Farms problems go back to the first few years of the 21st century when Silver Fern Farms bought out North Island based Richmond Meats. After that, Silver Fern Farms never got its debt back under control.
Since then it has been experiencing a declining share of the sheep meat market.
That decline has been despite its pre-eminent position as the nation’s largest meat processing and marketing company. That failure in itself tells a lot about the challenges of amalgamations.
Silver Fern Farms has itself been explicit that they now need $100 million of extra capital, although the reality is that they need much more than this.
The problem is that there is no ‘white knight’ out there who is going to come up with free cash.
If some entity does come up with significant cash, then that entity will be taking control. In that case, Silver Fern Farms will no longer be a co-operative.
The meat processing industry interest
All of the other companies understand the inherent weakness of the Silver Fern Farms position.
Everyone in the commercial industry knows that something now has to happen.
Accordingly, everyone is now waiting to see what opportunities this creates. Each company will be looking at which Silver Fern Farms assets would complement their own assets
There will also be some nervousness in these other companies as to what might eventuate.
None of them wants to see a cashed up overseas entity take control at Silver Fern Farms. That would only increase the competition for livestock. Inevitably there would then be company casualties.
The national interest
If a new overseas entity were to buy all of Silver |
want to listen. Let me turn off my cell phone.” (Digital citizenship)
15. “I have so many things to do today. I’m going to make a list so I don’t forget anything.” (Organization)
16. “That woman looks like she’s going to drop those packages. Let’s ask if she needs help.” (Kindness)
17. “Apologies…that was my fault. Hope you forgive me.” (Forgiveness)
18. “I’m driving and need to keep my eyes on the road. Please turn off my phone for me.” (Driving safety)
19. “I love watching the Oscars, but let’s not focus on their dress designers but their talent. How do you think Sandra Bullock prepared for her role in space.” (Valuing quality over materialism)
20. “She’s my friend and doesn’t want me to tell anyone. I’m honoring her request.” (Friendship. Loyalty)
21. “I’m getting upset and need to take a time out. Let’s talk in a few minutes.” (Anger management)
22. “Great question-I don’t that answer. But I’ll try to find it for you.” (Admitting shortcomings)
23. “They do look different than us, but they have the same feelings. Let’s think about how we’re the same.” (Prejudice)
24. “Didn’t she just move here? Let’s go introduce ourselves and ask her to sit with us.” (Courtesy. Kindness)
25. “If it’s not respectful I’m not sending it.” (Digital citizenship)
26. “But is that true for all elderly people? Aunt Harriet remembers everything and she’s 87. Let’s think of more examples.” (Stopping prejudice and bias)
27. “Every month I’m going to set a new goal. You’re going to help remind me to stick to it!” (Goal-setting)
28. “We hear so much about the “bad” stuff–let’s look through the paper and find the good things people are doing for each other. We could start ‘Good News’ reports.” (Optimism, attitude)
29. “I need to take care of myself and eat healthier.” (Self-care)
30. “I’m going to walk around the block. Want to come? It always helps me relax.” (Self-care)
31. “I taped ‘No’ on a card on the phone to remind me to not to take on so much. I’m prioritizing my family!” (Priorities)
32. “I’ve got to catch my words-I’m becoming too negative.” (Attitude. Optimism)
33. “Let’s set ‘unplugged times’ for our family. What about from 6 to 8 pm?” (Prioritizing family).
34. “I do like it, but I’m going to wait until it’s on sale.” (Frugality, delaying gratification).
35. “I always try to save half of my paycheck.” (Money management)
36. “Those children lost everything in that fire. Let’s go through our closets and find gently used clothes and toys to bring them.” (charity)
37. “I’d love to eat that now, but I’m going to wait until after dinner.” (Self-control)
38. “I know it sounds fun, but I need to finish my job. My motto is, “Work first, then play.” (Responsibility)
39. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m driving so I can’t drink.” (Drinking behavior)
40. “My favorite thing to do is read! Let’s go to the library sale and find books to bring on our vacation.” (Instilling a love of reading).
41. “Let’s stay open-minded and give Daniel a turn. We didn’t hear his side.” (Non-judgmental)
42. “That’s not fair. We agreed on the rules so let stick to them.” (Fairness).
43. “I know we wanted to win, but we didn’t. They were better than us, so let’s go congratulate them.” (Sportsmanship)
44. “I need to go write a thank you to Peter before I forget. He put a lot of thought into that present and I want to make sure he knows how much I appreciate it.” (Gratitude)
45. “Thanks, but you don’t need to give me any money. I did it because I wanted to help.” (Charitableness)
46. “I’m going to stop talking about dress sizes and jumping on the scale, and start thinking about eating healthier instead.” (Self-image)
47. “I’ve got to get to the polls before they close. Voting is something I take very seriously.” (Citizenship)
48. “Let’s stop and think about how she feels. She looks sad-let’s get in her shoes for a minute.” (Empathy)
49. “I’m not just going to stand by when someone could get hurt. I’m asking if he wants help.” (Responsibility. No by standing!”)
50. “Everyone can make a difference. Let’s think of something we can do.” (Personal responsibility. Empowerment)
What can you say to a child today to be the example he or she can use for tomorrow?
Beware, the children are copying!
Follow me on twitter @MicheleBorba
UnSelfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All About Me World is now in audio, e-book, and hardcopy after a decade of researching and writing. It has over 300 ways parents and educators can increase our children’s empathy capacities from toddler to teen, describes the latest science that proves we can make a difference and stories in my journey to find those answers. (Just a hint: the best ideas were ones children around the world shared with me. They were always simple, right on, and matched the science!) Here’s to a generation of UnSelfies!!!"His slogans are not that different from [those of] the far right in Europe and in France: fear of the wave of immigration, stigmatization of Islam, questioning of representative democracy [...]," said Hollande. The president also mocked Trump's hypocrisy when "denouncing the elites," describing the real estate mogul as "the most obvious incarnation" of those elites.
Hollande was candid about the presumptive Republican nominee, something that happens very rarely in international politics. It just isn't done that a democratic head of state or government expresses a political view on another democracy's upcoming election. But Trump is unusual.
"Those who claim that Donald Trump cannot be the next president of the United States are the same who claimed that Brexit would never be voted in," Hollande said in an interview with French daily Les Échos.
French President François Hollande is urging Democrats in the US to "get Hillary Clinton elected," and says that a Donald Trump presidency could "complicate relations" between Europe and Washington. And he has a warning for the world: the Brexit referendum won unexpectedly, and that means Trump can too.
Read more
French President François Hollande is urging Democrats in the US to "get Hillary Clinton elected," and says that a Donald Trump presidency could "complicate relations" between Europe and Washington. And he has a warning for the world: the Brexit referendum won unexpectedly, and that means Trump can too.
"Those who claim that Donald Trump cannot be the next president of the United States are the same who claimed that Brexit would never be voted in," Hollande said in aninterview with French daily Les Échos.
Hollande was candid about the presumptive Republican nominee, something that happens very rarely in international politics. It just isn't done that a democratic head of state or government expresses a political view on another democracy's upcoming election. But Trump is unusual.
Hollande, a Socialist, likened his policies to the fear-mongering tactics of far-right movements in the EU.
"His slogans are not that different from [those of] the far right in Europe and in France: fear of the wave of immigration, stigmatization of Islam, questioning of representative democracy [...]," said Hollande. The president also mocked Trump's hypocrisy when "denouncing the elites," describing the real estate mogul as "the most obvious incarnation" of those elites.
When asked by the interviewer if a Trump presidency could be "dangerous," Hollande answered in the affirmative, and said that Trump's election could make US-EU relations thorny. "The best thing that Democrats can do is to get Hillary Clinton elected," he said.
Hollande also warned against any complacency ahead of the 2016 US presidential elections, drawing a parallel with the June 23 referendum that resulted in a majority of UK voters choosing to leave the EU. The result of the Brexit vote shocked many in Europe and in the UK — including some voters who appeared to struggle with buyer's remorse in the cold light of day.
Bernie Sanders made a similar parallel in an opinion piece in The Times, likening Trump's policies to the message of those backing the "Leave" movement. "We do not need change based on the demagogy, bigotry and anti-immigrant sentiment that punctuated so much of the Leave campaign's rhetoric — and is central to Donald J. Trump's message," he wrote.
The latest polls show Clinton and Trump almost neck and neck in the race, with an estimated 42 percent of the vote for Clinton, and 40 for Trump.
While this is the first time the French president speaks out against Trump, France's prime minister took his gloves off in May, when he called the Republican candidate "a bad man."
The French are not the only ones to mince their words when it comes to the prospect of President Trump. In early March, German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel called Trump "a threat to peace and social cohesion, but also to economic development." Outgoing UK Prime Minister David Cameron — who announced he would step down following the referendum — once labeled Trump's plans to ban Muslims from entering the US as "divisive, stupid and wrong."
Follow VICE News on Twitter : @vicenews
This article originally appeared in VICE News' French edition.Here's what you need to know...
The snatch-grip high pull, performed correctly, can begin improving your physique in only two workouts. This explosive lift hits all the "power look" muscles at once: mid-back, rhomboids, rear delts and traps. It also builds the posterior chain.
One Lift to Rule Them All
I've devoted my life to building muscle – on myself and on others – for 17 years. And in all those years I've only encountered one exercise that can make a visual difference in a physique within two workouts. That's right, you'll start to look more brutal and more powerful in as few as two sessions.
That movement is the snatch-grip high pull, and I believe it can give anyone a "3D" look and make them stretch out a T-shirt.
Power-Look Muscles
The high pull hits your mid-back, rhomboids, and rear delts. And nothing will build boulder traps like high pulls! As a bonus, the high pull will hit the whole posterior chain: hamstrings, glutes, and lower back.
I'm telling you, my delts and traps have always been my best body parts, but snatch-grip high pulls have given them a totally different look. They've widened my delts and added thickness to my traps.
Snatch-Grip High Pull Technique
Using a wide snatch grip on the bar, yank the bar up and keep it close to your body. Your elbows should be higher than the bar and aimed 45 degrees back.
I can't emphasize strongly enough that this movement should be done explosively. Pretend you have just walked into the room and the weight is on top of your puppy dog. Pull with violence! Blast it off!
Let the bar fall quickly back to the starting position, too. Don't try to lower it slowly. Again, remember that this is an explosive Olympic lift variation.
Keep in mind, though, that this is not just an upright row done with body English! Pay particular attention to the arm angle in the video.
Important Notes
Even though it's an explosive movement, the most important portion of the high pull is the starting position. A proper starting position can actually make as much as a 40-pound difference in your lift. It's crucial that you pull the shoulder blades together and then "roll" the chest up as high as possible. That will turn the whole upper back into a solid base from which to explode. And while the upper back is tight as can be, the arms should remain as loose as possible: Tight back + loose arms = highest power transfer possible.
Lift the bar toward your neck. To do so, use a powerful posterior chain pull to create a lot of momentum at the start of the movement. Once the lower back is approaching full extension, aggressively pull the bar toward your neck – up and towards you – keeping the elbows higher than the bar.
I only make reference to the neck to help you understand that you need to keep the bar close to your body. Don't pay attention to the actual height. While a lift must reach at least nipple line to qualify as a high pull, focusing on the end position instead of the powerful launch will undoubtedly lead to using your arms to pull instead of using the lower body power to drive the weight up.
How Many Reps?
I've used higher-rep sets of O-lifts and their variations in the past with female clients, but with men I don't go above 6 reps. Most of the time, "high reps" with the Olympic lifts equals 4 or 5.
Why higher reps with women and not men? In my experience, women can maintain the same level of intensity and quality for a greater number of reps. Men simply suffer technique breakdown when they exceed 6 reps.
From the Hang or From Blocks?
Both methods have their advantages. I prefer the hang strictly for muscle-building purposes and body composition changes, especially if you can get into a rhythm and refrain from stopping between reps. That way, the muscles stay under load for the duration of the set.
Pulls from blocks build explosiveness a bit better and allow you to set up properly for each rep, which is a benefit if you're just learning the movement.
Stick to the variation that's easiest for you. The less you have to worry about technique, the more you can focus on proper muscle loading. No matter which method you choose, lifts from the hang or blocks above the knees are much simpler than lifts from the floor.
When to Do the High Pull?
High pulls can actually fit into any training day since they not only hit the traps, rhomboids, rear delts, and mid-back, but also the posterior chain. I personally use pulls from the hang on back day and pulls from blocks on lower body days.
The important thing, however, is just that you do them!Top 10 Worst Celebrity Performances in Video Games
VO: Dan Paradis
Script written by Fred Humphries Sigh…I guess Nolan North and Troy Baker were busy? Join WatchMojo.com as we countdown our picks for the Top 10 Worst Celebrity Performances in Video Games. For this list we’ve looked at the most terrible instances of voice acting, motion capture and even some horrendous live action performances in video games. Special Thanks to our user "Dav3VsTh3World" for suggesting this topic on our interactive suggestion tool at WatchMojo.comsuggest Script written by Fred Humphries Sigh…I guess Nolan North and Troy Baker were busy? Join WatchMojo.com as we countdown our picks for the Top 10 Worst Celebrity Performances in Video Games. For this list we’ve looked at the most terrible instances of voice acting, motion capture and even some horrendous live action performances in video games. Special Thanks to our user "Dav3VsTh3World" for suggesting this topic on our interactive suggestion tool at WatchMojo.comsuggest
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Script written by Fred Humphries
Top 10 Worst Celebrity Performances in Video Games
Sigh…I guess Nolan North and Troy Baker were busy? Welcome to Watchmojo and today we’ll be counting down our picks for the top 10 Worst Celebrity Performances in Video Games.
For this list we’ve looked at the most terrible instances of voice acting, motion capture and even some horrendous live action performances in video games.
#10: 50 Cent as Himself
“50 Cent: Blood on the Sand” (2009)
Rather unexpectedly for a game based on Fiddy fighting a paramilitary group in the Middle East the gameplay was actually praised. It is the lackluster performance of a woeful script that dragged this third-person shooter down. We were never expecting Telltale levels of story telling but could have at least hoped for a title that is so ridiculous in not taking itself too seriously. His performance is less ‘G’ and more ‘gee that was bad’.
#9: Matthew Perry as Benny
“Fallout: New Vegas” (2010)
It seemed like Bethesda had found a magic recipe in casting the former “Friends” star, he is a huge fan of the Fallout series and his trademark wit would surely be a perfect fit for a wisecracking mobster. Who knows what went wrong as every line he delivers is lacking the energy and improvisational edge that made his performance as Chandler so popular. Was Benny calling people ‘baby’ Perry’s misguided way of leaving his mark on the character or a poor piece of writing? We really hope it’s the latter as he can do so much better.
#8: Eliza Dushku as Rubi Malone
“WET” (2009)
It was hoped that the former “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” actress would turn in a gritty yet sympathetic performance in this third-person slasher and shooter. What we got was a character who comes across as obnoxious rather than as the cool anti-hero. The developers clearly had “Kill Bill” protagonist The Bride in mind when devising Rubi but she lacks the depth and motivation to come close to Tarantino’s movie character. Dushku probably didn’t have lots to work with but even so still gets a D- for effort. Interestingly enough this isn’t the first game VO flop from Eliza, as she reprised her role as Faith in Buffy The Vampire Slayer Chaos Bleeds Video Game, to very mixed results.
#7: Bruce Willis as Trey Kincaid
“Apocalypse” (1998)
John McClane would be hugely disappointed in the effort that Willis made for this third-person shooter. His role is limited mainly to one-liners and the occasional stretch of dialogue, something that should have been natural for Willis, yet he still manages to leave his charisma at home. Willis’ involvement in the game diminished throughout development and it sounds like his interest in the performance went with it.
#6: Mena Suvari as Aerith
“Kingdom Hearts 2” (2005)
It really appears like the American Beauty Actress’s first take on her lines was her last take as every robotically delivered line comes with bizarre changes in tone and inflection. It takes you out of the game completely as her clunky dialogue sounds as though a machine that has no knowledge of how human conversation actually works put it together. Suvari’s soft voice could have been ideal for Aerith but her woeful performance will leave you cringing. Where’s Sephiroth when you need him?
#5: Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu and Drew Barrymore as Charlie’s Angels
“Charlie’s Angels” (2003)
By the time this video game tie-in was released the trio of actresses must have been well and truly sick of the cheesy action and cliché dialogue that has defined the series. Their collective performance reflected the overall quality of the game: rushed, flawed and ultimately misguided. The late Bernie Mac clearly saw sense and wisely did not reprise his role of Bosley for one of the worst video games ever.
#4: Michael Biehn as Corporal Dwayne Hicks
“Aliens: Colonial Marines” (2013)
Several actors took their characters from the Alien series to the digital realm but Biehn’s Hicks may have been the most anticipated. We need not have been so excited as all of the over-the-top machismo from the film he starred in was noticeably absent. After more than 30 years away from the character he couldn’t recapture what made Hicks so popular in a wooden display of monotonously reading off a sheet.
#3: The Cast of Duck Dynasty as Themselves
“Duck Dynasty” (2014)
The Robertson family have never been afraid to dive into different forms of media with a Christmas album and musical both out there for you to enjoy. Their venture into video games however was perhaps one step too far. They’re certainly not actors and that is painfully obvious as the elements which made the TV show so popular were nigh on impossible to transfer into game form. The show works because it’s real. Video games are not. To be fair to the Robertson clan, this is one of the few things they failed at.
#2: Christopher Walken as George
“True Crime: Streets of LA” (2003)
Walken has a bit of a problem whenever he takes on a voice-acting role: even his own voice sounds like a weird impersonation of the way he speaks. A puzzling paradox for a man of considerable acting talent but his voice always takes the attention away from the character he is portraying. They managed to put quite an ensemble together for this crime thriller but sadly Walken’s distinctive tones don’t bring anything to the party.
#1: Peter Dinklage as Ghost
“Destiny” (2014)
You know you’ve done a pretty poor job when Nolan North re-records voice work you have already done and then you’re taken out of the game altogether. Dinklage is one of the most popular actors in work at the moment yet his dull voice-work became the source of much amusement in the gaming community. How a man who is in such good form in Game of Thrones managed to miss the mark so dramatically in a video game is a mystery to us all.
Do you agree with our list? Which celebrity performances in video games made you shake your head in disbelief?65 million — to win in November. His primary voters are just a drop in the bucket. One quirk of the American political system is that a candidate can win a primary with a much narrower slice of the electorate than he’d need to win a general election. Donald Trump claimed 45 percent of the vote in Republican primaries and caucuses this year, about 14 million votes. That’s a healthy total as these things go: the highest number of votes ever received by a Republican in the primaries. But Trump will need four or five times as many votes — perhapsmillion — to win in November. His primary voters are just a drop in the bucket.
All presidential candidates face some version of this problem. But most make at least some effort to expand beyond their base and build a majority coalition. Trump hasn’t — and he has his work cut out for him like no nominee in history. Trump’s decision this week to make Stephen Bannon of the combative, anti-establishment website Breitbart News his campaign’s chief executive suggests that he’s moving in the opposite direction.
even worse. His favorability rating is just In January, even as he stood atop Republican primary polls, Trump was exceptionally unpopular with general election voters. At that time, Trump had a 33 percent favorable rating and a 58 percent unfavorable rating with the general electorate. Today? His numbers are. His favorability rating is just 32 percent, according to the HuffPost Pollster aggregate, while his unfavorable rating has risen to 65 percent.
Trump is helped by the fact that Hillary Clinton might be the second-most-unpopular nominee ever, after Trump. But still, remarkably few Americans are willing to commit to voting for Trump. In the table below, I’ve listed every poll from a 2012 swing state 1 taken since the conventions. On average, Trump has just 37 percent of the vote in these polls (Clinton has 44 percent). That puts him on par with Barry Goldwater and George McGovern, who each got 38 percent of the vote in their respective landslide defeats of 1964 and 1972
STATE POLLSTER TRUMP CLINTON JOHNSON Colorado Marist College 29% 41% 15% Virginia Marist College 31 43 12 New Hampshire Vox Populi Communications 31 41 11 Michigan Glengariff Group 32 41 8 New Hampshire MassINC Polling Group 32 47 8 Michigan EPIC-MRA 32 43 8 Michigan Mitchell Research 33 44 9 Colorado Quinnipiac University 33 41 16 Virginia Quinnipiac University 34 45 11 Wisconsin Marquette University 34 47 9 Ohio Marist College 35 39 12 Iowa Marist College 35 35 12 Pennsylvania Franklin & Marshall College 36 49 5 Pennsylvania Marist College 36 45 9 Florida Marist College 36 41 9 North Carolina Marist College 36 45 9 New Hampshire YouGov 36 45 5 Pennsylvania Susquehanna Polling & Research 37 46 7 Virginia YouGov 37 49 7 Iowa Suffolk University 37 36 6 New Hampshire Public Policy Polling 37 50 — Iowa Quinnipiac University 39 41 12 Florida Suffolk University 39 43 4 Pennsylvania Quinnipiac University 39 48 7 Virginia The Washington Post 39 46 9 Florida Monmouth University 39 48 6 Nevada Rasmussen Reports 40 41 10 Florida YouGov 40 45 5 Nevada YouGov 41 43 4 North Carolina Public Policy Polling 41 43 7 Pennsylvania Public Policy Polling 42 45 4 Ohio Quinnipiac University 42 44 8 Florida Quinnipiac University 43 43 7 Florida Public Policy Polling 43 46 — Florida Opinion Savvy 44 45 6 North Carolina SurveyUSA 46 42 6 Average 37 44 8 Trump is stuck in the 30s in swing state polls
probably finish with more than 37 percent by picking off some undecided and third-party voters. Trump willfinish with more than 37 percent by picking off some undecided and third-party voters. 2 Still, with almost two-thirds of voters holding an unfavorable view of Trump, it’s not clear how many more people he can rally to his side without a big change in tone and message.
Huge rallies. Gloves off. Brutal fights with Clinton. Heavy emphasis on nationalism and populism. That's the Bannon strategy. — Robert Costa (@costareports) August 17, 2016Unending Wars Against Mankind: Afghanistan And Iraq
By Mahboob A. Khawaja
28 May, 2012
Countercurrents.org
(Democracy at Work: To re-visit the wounds of the Abu Ghraib)
“Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted with Cattle Prods, Burned by Toxic Chemicals, Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq?
They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for BBC Channel 4. It’s terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that you’re not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.
The prison guards stand over their captives with electric cattle prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have been ordered to strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl. ‘Crawl, motherf*****s, crawl.’
If a prisoner doesn’t drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stamps on his back. There’s a high-pitched scream from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg. Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can’t crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes.
Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking. Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by one of the guards.
The images of abuse and brutality he records are horrifyingly familiar. These were exactly the kind of pictures from inside Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that shocked the world this time last year. (Deborah Davies, “Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons” 03/28/2005)
_______________________________________________________________________
Linked to the US Presidential election campaigns, the hurriedly called this week’s Chicago Conference of the sixty or so participating leaders is no joke but had its spill-over reasoning to view:
• That President Obama is actively politicking about the recalls of the troops from the war zones something he promised to do four years earlier,
• Accelerating the number game like the stock markets that counts in an election campaign - Obama’s standing in public perception to be converted by the hourly paid American opinion experts
• Deflect on negative imagery that Mitt Romney- the Republican candidate is creating to beat Obama
• To enlarge Obama’s failing image into worldview that he is actively engaging the global leaders to find amicable solutions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Iran and lot more - the stage acting - the fuzzy pretension of doing something for the global audience.
• Nothing concrete could have emerged because America, its leaders, its economy and not to talk of the most powerful military-industrial complex making difference in the election campaigns, all are for continuous warfare, not for peace
• Some of the dummy global leaders more so from Europe and Asia, got opportunity to divert public attention from the home-grown financial disasters and austerity measures for being non-productive and incompetent to deal with any major issues facing their people - much unemployed and raising voices of REASON against the transitory leadership. Pictures with Obama could make them see different games in varied perspectives - all linked to opinion making at home and abroad. Opinions are not the facts or truth but simple ideas without substance of reality.
• At least, Obama and his invited colleagues wanted to be seen politically active not sitting dummies like the Arab-Muslim leaders, consuming fatty dinners and unable to talk anything worth of moral or intellectual reasoning and most authoritarians specialize in doing nothing for their own people
• The staged drama - tragedy spells out its own rationale that none of these conferences will contribute to address the real world problems in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan and Iran as they were not intended to tackle any problems except uttering lies, deceptions and pretensions and making bogus statements to mislead the global citizenry. After all, it is an election year in America - the former superpower now financially defunct country under the austerity measures of 14 trillion dollars or more (borrowed and used from the unknown future) that does not know what is next in waiting in all the crises situation, it engineered to support its war economy and including its replacement in global politics by another nation or group of productive Asian nations.
• The unraveling impacts and tragic consequences of wars do not end with paper declarations or political statements as to when the invading armies are to be withdrawn. Wars leave scars for generations to be victimized emotionally, politically, intellectually and anything else that can be imagined in human terms of unknown disasters. Long after sixty years of the 2nd World War, the Europeans and others have not recovered its dehumanized consequences of their own perpetuated insanity and barbarity for no obvious purpose of rationality except borders, flags and a primitive sense of pride and nationalism. In the 21st century politics, America is leading in all of these stone-aged qualities to be the lost Empire without being an Empire.
Wars are planned and orchestrated by the few, the privileged ruling elite; the humanity becomes the targeted victims of the few for global hegemonic governance. Throughout the ages, the conscientious mankind searched for ways to undo the war and strive for peace, the real aim for the establishments of international institutions. But now the global institutional capacity to deal with peace and conflict management appears in ruin with the continued onslaught of the American led so called War on Terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Realizing the eminent defeats by the handful forces of Taliban, the allies are gathered to make their presence known for propaganda purposes to the beleaguered people of Afghanistan and global audience. Talaban fighting the intruders are not the foreigners but people of the land. The US, British and others paid agents are foreigner mercenaries fighting in a foreign land, culturally unknown and unconquerable by their armed forces. Piety and peacemaking vis-à-vis aggression and wickedness cannot be combined as credible attributes in ones mindset and one human character. Now, the issue is, how conveniently, the aggressors want to redefine their strategic role and ambitions in Afghanistan as peacemakers as if they have achieved the goals of their aggression. Imagine, Adolph Hitler while occupying France and continuing bombing of London, wanted to organize a peace conference. Would it have been a logical discourse for the French and British people to talk peacemaking with the aggressor? Bush and Hitler had lot in common as both claimed to have the divine support for their mission. Both tried to destroy the living humanity but fell in disgrace and met ultimate defeats.
A week earlier, Taliban spokesman while talking to the BBC reporter in the Arab world, made it clear that they believe in peacemaking but all the foreign forces must leave Afghanistan. The same logic that French and British politicians would have implied to Hitler. Could the facts of human life be changed, be it Iraq, Afghanistan or the occurrences of the 2nd World War?
The people of Iraq and Afghanistan need change for peace and normalcy. The change can only happen if the US led occupying forces after the withdrawal would compensate the victim nations and rebuild their essential social-economic and humanitarian infrastructures destroyed by the ferocious wars. The same formula used at the end of the WW2. The same legal principle is needed that the aggressors be brought to legal and political accountability in an international war tribunal such as Nuremberg tribunal after the end of the WW2. E. H Carr, the famous historian, had emphasized that history has learning role for the future. Those who defy the logic of learning were lost without a trace.
The aggressors have succumbed to public opposition and will withdraw most of their combat forces by 2014. In other words, the invading armies have been defeated by the mujahideens and are unable to carry out any further brutality in those regions. Would the aggressors tell the humanity, when would they end the continued wars? So that the victims could think openly and plan for change and peaceful transfer to making of their own future. This is the issue that the current gathering of the sixty or so nations at Chicago avoided to discuss. The assembly was not for peacemaking but for prolonging the failing war efforts. The leaders wanted to discuss aftermath of the 2014 withdrawals and strategic arrangements with the Afghan government for training and rebuilding, a typical western materialistic scenario to help the impoverished nations. Recall that Karazi shall end his presidency in 2014, so what is the legitimacy of talking beyond that time span? The aid gimmick is an attractive illusion to entrap the needy nations and exploit their resources for the good of the occupying forces. The US and Britain survive on borrowed money from the future generations as their own financial institutions have collapsed and so are the political powerhouses and working agencies. But the aid’s long term purpose is to create more beggars and poverty and dependent nations asking for external aid and to survive on borrowed future and resources. The discussion developmental aid and withdrawal of the foreign forces from Afghanistan sends a clear signal of defeat and prospective surrender to the Talaban fighting for the freedom of their homeland.
Future must be anew, not the repetition of the past. Future making does not lie with the aggressors nor with the failed international institutions, it is with the will and resolve of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan to oust the aggressors and recover their homes and habitats for rebuilding their lives and human dignity. Taken at their face value what Commander Bush claimed at the time that the US led forces went to Iraq and Afghanistan in pursuit of freedom, liberty and justice for the people. Instead they planned and developed the institutions of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Belgraham prison in Afghanistan. Facts speak for themselves. All you need to do is to see the outcomes, the triumphs of the American version of liberty, human rights and justice, the horrifying photos of the prisoners are easily available through the internet, speaking their own language of the American-British civilized achievements in the Arab-Islamic world. Mr. Karzai, the self-made president of Afghanistan does not have any vision or sense of reality that he will not be the president after 2014. So what nonsense he is talking about to have strategic alliance with the US forces beyond the 2014? Mr. Karzai or others in attendance, the Arab-Muslim staged puppets do not represent the interests and priorities of the Muslim Ummah. The people of the Islamic world view them all as pan on the global political chessboard being financed, supported and kept in office to undermine the future of the people of Afghanistan and the Muslim world. They are seen as part of the problem, not part of any workable solution.
Afghan landscape tells its own story with millions uprooted from ancestral homes and forced to go to foreign countries in search of protection and mere human survival. The aggressors do not wish to see the problem, that they are the real problem, not otherwise. How soon the aggressors would leave Afghanistan, nobody can tell. The ancient and civilized people of Iraq and Afghanistan know it well who are the peacemakers and who are the aggressors. The aggressors appear desperate to quit but the Chicago conference seems to indicate that urgent necessity but intellectually confused, morally corrupt and with high rates of self-suicidal deaths US-British militarily apparatus exhausted, and not sure how best to get out of the terrible mess they have created for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and the whole of the humanity. At the Chicago gathering, Obama stated “a responsible end to the war”, but failed to define what he meant after being in office for four years and failing to honor all of his previous election promises and now killings of several thousands of innocents in Pakistan by drone attacks and displacing millions in Afghanistan’s continued warfare. Does President Obama enjoy the credibility to be taken seriously for any statements or promises for the future? Recently, a Malaysian international legal tribunal has issued the judgment and declared George Bush and Tony Blair as responsible for crimes against the humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan. Would the Western world’s responsible legal authorities take the necessary action to implement the verdict of the international tribunal? A century earlier C.E, M. Joad (Guide to Modern Wickedness), captioned the human tragedy in these words:
“….Human nature is at least in part wicked and in part foolish, how can human beings be prevented from suffering from the results of their wickedness and folly? ….Men simply do not see that war is foolish |
time from order to delivery in Baltimore is 36 minutes, Alexander said.
The company, which Chicago-based Groupon acquired for $69 million in July employs 80 people at its headquarters in Canton and 50 people across the country.
sdance@baltsun.com
twitter.com/ssdanceA British Royal Guardsman is facing severe penalties after video of him pirouetting and dancing in front of Buckingham Palace was uploaded to YouTube, and promptly went viral.
The unnamed guardsman, whom The Daily Mail reports has now been nicknamed “Private Dancer” for his act outside of the palace, reportedly faces a 21-day prison sentence, as well as a £1,000 ($1626) fine. His superiors in the British Army have reacted furiously to the guardsman’s display and intend to use his punishment to discourage any similar conduct in the future.
A source related to The Daily Mail commented on the issue.
“There’s no charge in the disciplinary manuals for silly walks and dancing on parade because nobody in living memory has had the cheek to do it, but this guardsman’s senior officers were livid when they saw the footage. His conduct is contrary to everything being a guardsman is about.”
According to the New York Daily News, video of the guardsman’s antics was filmed by a tourist and uploaded to YouTube on Aug. 20. It has since been viewed by more than 1.7 million people, and shows the soldier livening up his two-hour-long shift with a series of dance steps to entertain the crowd. The guardsman speed-walks, pirouettes, and bends down as if to pick something up. At one point he pretends to dust off his rifle, all to cheers and laughs from the crowd.
WATCH> Buckingham Palace guard faces investigation for dancing. http://t.co/J2ufAdpui6 pic.twitter.com/xKYHoPruYB — The Poke (@ThePoke) September 4, 2014
Queen Elizabeth was on vacation in Scotland when the guardsman was filmed. The Queen, along with the rest of the British Government, is said to be quietly concerned about an impending vote for Scottish independence, which will take place on September 18, as The Inquisitr has previously reported. When she is in residence at Buckingham Palace, there are four guardsmen stationed outside, while in her absence, only two stand watch.
Whatever the outcome of that vote, it seems likely that the dancing guardsman will be made an example of, according to The Daily Mail‘s source, who elaborated on the ways in which military officials intend to make an example out of “Private Dancer.”
“He is facing a stint in the jail with no pay and, when he returns to the Grenadiers, he could lose privileges such as going out in London with the other lads in his company. Twenty-one days has been discussed as a prison sentence. The hierarchy want to put a marker down so no guardsman dares prance around outside Buckingham Palace again.”
[Image via The Daily Mail]In Brief The widespread assumption that world population, now at 6.9 billion, will inevitably grow to 9 billion by midcentury is wrong. Population could peak before then and at a lower level, ameliorating environmental risks associated with climate change, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, and food and energy insecurity. The equally widespread belief that an earlier, lower population peak would require coercive “population control” is also incorrect. Population growth rates and average family size worldwide have fallen by roughly half over the past four decades, as modern contraception has become more accessible and popular. The average number of children born to each woman worldwide is not much higher than replacement fertility, an average that would eventually end population growth. Yet more than 40 percent of all pregnancies are unintended, with higher proportions in developed than in developing countries. As these figures suggest, it might be possible to end and then reverse human population growth through a strategy aimed at elevating women’s status and increasing access to contraceptive services, so that essentially all births result from intended pregnancies. Preliminary calculations based on conservative assumptions suggest that global fertility would immediately move slightly below replacement levels, putting world population on a path toward an early peak followed by gradual decline. The success of such a strategy would have many other benefits, such as reducing disability and deaths among mothers and their children and freeing more women to earn money and participate actively in social affairs. There are many barriers to a global movement to assure that almost all births result from intended pregnancies. Foremost among them are the views of certain religious and political leaders and economic thinkers. Better public understanding of the benefits of universal intended childbearing is needed to counteract these obstacles and bring such a vision closer to reality.
Key Concepts Even though most women of reproductive age now use contraception, we are far from a world in which all births result from intended pregnancies. Based on survey data, approximately 40 percent of pregnancies are unintended in developing countries, and 47 percent in developed ones.
More than one in five births worldwide result from pregnancies women did not wish to occur.
An estimated 215 million women in developing countries have an unmet need for family planning: they are sexually active, don’t want to become pregnant, and yet for various reasons—including lack of access—are not using contraception.
If all births resulted from women actively intending to conceive, fertility would immediately fall slightly below the replacement level; world population would peak within a few decades and subsequently decline.
Assuring that all women are fully in control of the timing and frequency of childbearing is not expensive. Religious, cultural, and political opposition to contraception or the possibility of population decline is the key obstacle to such assurance. More research and a public better educated about sexuality and reproduction could engender a global social movement that would make possible a world of intended pregnancies and births.
Those who ponder humanity’s future in the twenty-first century generally take at face value demographic projections suggesting that the world population will reach something like 9 billion around 2050 and will then stabilize at about that level.1 The widespread belief that this 30 percent increase from today’s 6.9 billion people is inevitable undermines consideration of the role of population size in climate change, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, rising energy prices, and food security. Contributing to this is the related view that efforts to prevent population growth would require coercive government policies that constrain couples from having the children and the family sizes they want. While some analysts are confident that the world can feed, house, and otherwise support 9 billion or more people, others are less certain, and voices of caution about population growth are heard more often than in the past.2 A logical application of the precautionary principle in the face of current environmental problems would suggest that humanity could more easily accomplish these feats in an environmentally sustainable manner with a smaller population.
In a joint statement in 1993, representatives of 58 national scientific academies stressed the complexities of the population-environment relationship but nonetheless concluded, “As human numbers increase, the potential for irreversible changes of far-reaching magnitude also increases. … In our judgment, humanity’s ability to deal successfully with its social, economic, and environmental problems will require the achievement of zero population growth within the lifetime of our children.”3 In 2005, the United Nations’ Millennium Ecosystem Assessment identified population growth as a principal indirect driver of environmental change, along with economic growth and technological evolution.4
In October 2010, a group of US and European climate and demographic researchers published findings from an integrated assessment model calculating the impact of various population scenarios on fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions over the coming century. If world population peaked at close to 8 billion rather than 9 billion, along the lines described in a low-fertility demographic projection published by the UN Population Division, the model predicted there would be a significant emissions savings: about 5.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2050 and 18.7 billion tons by century’s end.5
What if we could prove wrong the popular conviction that a future with 9 billion people and a growing population is inevitable? Suppose we could demonstrate that world population size might peak earlier and at a lower level if government policies aimed not at reproductive coercion but at individual reproductive freedom? Suppose such policies aimed to help all women and girls prevent unwanted pregnancies and conceive only when they want to bear a child? This article presents new data on births resulting from women’s active intentions to become pregnant. The hypothesis it probes may appear counterintuitive: if, starting at any moment, all pregnancies in the world resulted from each woman’s intent to give birth, human population would immediately shift course away from growth toward decline within a few decades.
An Ethical Basis for Action to Slow Population Growth
What can societies that value democracy, self-determination, human rights, personal autonomy, and privacy do to include demographic change among strategies for environmental sustainability? An important answer may lie in a relatively untested set of principles adopted by almost all the world’s nations at a 1994 UN conference held in Cairo. The third of three once-a-decade governmental conferences on population and development, it produced a program of action that abandoned the strategy of “population control” by governments in favor of a focus on the health, rights, and well-being of women.6 An operating assumption of this program is that when women have access to the information and means that allow them to choose the timing of pregnancy, the intervals between births lengthen, average family size shrinks, and teen births become less frequent. All of these improve maternal and child survival and slow population growth.7
Experts disagree on how reproductive autonomy compares with other strategies in slowing that growth. Some assume economic growth is the most effective means, although birthrates rose along with prosperity in many countries after World War II and remain relatively high in several wealthy oil-exporting nations in which women have fewer rights and lower status than men.8 Moreover, some analysts argue that the arrow of causation operates more in the other direction, with low fertility stoking economic growth.9
There is a more robust and demonstrable correlation between female educational attainment and fertility. Worldwide, women with no schooling have an average of 4.5 children, while those who have spent at least a year or more in primary school have just three. Women who complete at least a year or two of secondary school have 1.9 children—well below replacement fertility rates. With one or two years of advanced education for women, average childbearing rates fall even further, to 1.7.10 On this basis alone, those interested in depressing population growth rates might want to focus on improving women’s educational attainment.
Questions remain about whether education alone can bring about declines in fertility without other supporting conditions, especially easy, affordable access to a range of contraceptive options. Similar uncertainties cloud understanding of exactly how improved child survival and the empowerment of women affect fertility. Improving both factors certainly contributes to later births and smaller families and is valuable regardless of its demographic impacts. But without clear data on the magnitude of these influences, interventions related to schooling, child survival, and women’s empowerment are rarely seen as core aspects of governmental population policy.
This brings us to family planning. Access to safe and reliable contraception has exploded since the mid-twentieth century. An estimated 55 percent of all heterosexually active women worldwide now use modern contraceptive methods, while an additional seven percent use less reliable traditional methods.11 As the use of birth control has spread, fertility has plummeted from a global average of five children per woman in 1950 to barely more than 2.5 today.1
Glossary of Terms
Total fertility rate refers to the average number of children a woman would bear over her lifetime if at each point in her reproductive age she had the number of live births typical of women at that age. Note that the total fertility rate differs from the population growth rate, which is the percentage by which a population grows each year, and from the birthrate, which is the number of live births each year per thousand people in the population. The global total fertility rate currently stands at 2.53 children per woman.
Replacement fertility rate refers to the total fertility rate in a population that, if held steady over time and absent net migration, would result in a nonchanging population. This rate is often mischaracterized as uniformly and precisely 2.1 children per woman, but not all children survive to reproductive age, and the proportion of those who do not varies over time and by population. For the world as a whole, with many low-income regions still experiencing high death rates among young people, the replacement fertility rate currently stands at 2.35 children per woman.28 Surprisingly, the gap between global total fertility and replacement fertility is now less than one-fifth of one birth.
Even achievement of global replacement fertility would not stop population growth for several decades, due to population momentum. This is the tendency of a population, influenced by its age structure, to continue its current growth dynamic even as fertility changes. Because there are so many young people of reproductive age in any population that has had above-replacement fertility for some time, for example, even low fertility can produce an overall number of births that statistically overwhelms deaths among the smaller cohorts of older individuals. It can take decades before subreplacement fertility actually halts growth. If total fertility falls well below replacement however, this momentum is weakened and a peak in population will come sooner, followed by a decline. These demographic phenomena are evident in Japan, with a total fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman and a population that has already peaked and is now slowly shrinking.16
While not necessarily sufficient to depress fertility on a population-wide basis, family planning is essential to the phenomenon. Women may begin sexual activity later in life and may resort to abortion to terminate unwanted pregnancies. But humanity’s average family size could not have plummeted simply because women had diplomas, contractual rights, or confidence that their children would survive. To have small families, heterosexually active women and their partners need safe and effective contraception—modern birth control.
Lessons from history suggest that women have sought and employed contraceptives since ancient times to avoid unwanted pregnancy when circumstances were inauspicious for the 15 to 18 years of parental commitment a new birth entails. Egyptian papyri that date back 4,000 years describe pessaries, ancient precursors to the diaphragm, made of acacia oil and crocodile dung.12 Literature from Asia to North America documents herbs used for centuries as emmenagogues, substances that induce immediate menstruation and hence expel recently fertilized eggs. In the Mediterranean, in the ages of ancient Greece and Rome, a booming trade in the contraceptive, or possibly abortifacient, silphium helped drive its source, a wild giant fennel, into extinction. And an ecclesiastical court record from 1319 preserves the personal account of a young widow in southwestern France who provided details of her use of an herbal contraception during an extended affair with a priest.13
We know, too, that women and their partners historically have moderated their reproduction in response to their external environments, natural and economic. (Until modern times, these were generally the same thing.) In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sweden, for example, birthrates neatly tracked the price of grain crops with a roughly nine-month delay.14 The Japanese population during the eighteenth-century Tokugawa shogunate declined during several decades of food scarcity—until a government propaganda campaign against infanticide (the dominant method of family-size control at the time) pushed fertility well above replacement levels in the nineteenth century, restoring demographic growth.15
Similar responses of fertility to external circumstances are evident today. The high cost of housing in Japan is prominent among the reasons offered by young people for delaying marriage and childbearing.16 In the United States, a two percent decline in the country’s birthrate in 2008 was attributed largely to the deterioration of the economy.17
Implications of Personal Fertility-Management Aspirations
History and recent fertility phenomena thus suggest the likelihood that the interest in safely and effectively managing the timing of pregnancy and childbirth may be nearly universal among women. Lack of education, affluence, and equality may simply be barriers—along with others related to patriarchal, pronatalist, and even medical cultural norms—to existing aspirations to avoid unwanted pregnancies.18
Data exist for the likely demographic impact of establishing conditions worldwide that would facilitate women’s choices about the timing of pregnancy. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a US reproductive health-care research organization, an estimated 215 million women in developing countries have an “unmet need for family planning.”19 This applies to women who are sexually active and express the desire to avoid pregnancy yet are not using contraception. Estimates of their number derive from demographic and health surveys conducted in certain developing countries every few years.20 Many women in developed countries may be in the same circumstances, but data are insufficient in most cases to suggest their numbers.
Dr. Samarendranath Mandal/Courtesy of Photoshare
In early 2010, researchers with the Futures Group in Washington, DC, estimated the demographic impact of meeting unmet family-planning demand in 99 developing countries and one developed one. The researchers excluded China, on the assumption that government population policies aimed at limiting most families to a single child rule out births from unintended pregnancies. And they supplemented their country list with the United States, the world’s most populous developed county and one for which there is some data suggesting the magnitude of unmet need.21 Using accepted models for the impact of rising contraceptive prevalence on birthrates, the researchers concluded that satisfying unmet need for contraception in these 100 countries—with a cumulative 2005 population of 4.3 billion—would produce a population of 6.3 billion in 2050. Under the United Nations’ medium projection, the countries’ population would be 400 million higher, at 6.7 billion. Average global fertility at midcentury would be 1.65 children per woman, well below the population replacement fertility level—and would continue to fall.
This conclusion, if backed up by further research, is momentous. By implication, simply providing safe and effective contraceptive options to all sexually active women who do not want to become pregnant would end and then reverse world population growth. The effect is independent of any further fertility reductions that might occur as a result of greater educational attainment for women, improved child survival, women’s empowerment, and general economic advancement.
To some experts the idea that simply facilitating women’s childbearing intentions would end population growth, without significant demand creation for family planning through cultural shifts and other means, goes against survey findings from many African and some Asian countries. These findings suggest that in parts of these continents women’s average desired family size is as high as six or seven children.20 Wouldn’t facilitating these women’s childbearing intentions undermine any hope of ending world population growth? Not necessarily. For one thing, women expressing such high desired family sizes are at most a relatively small proportion of the world’s population (albeit significant in Africa’s). But the more important point is that a high desired family size can easily coexist with high levels of unintended pregnancy that, if prevented, would result in significantly lower birthrates than if not prevented.
The reason for this is not hard to understand: women’s individual reproductive decisions arrive at their desired family size, if at all, only cumulatively. Decisions about the desirability of pregnancy are made singly, in individual acts of sexual intercourse in which conception is possible. Whatever one’s hopes for an eventual number of children, pregnancy decisions occur in the context of current personal, economic, and social circumstances. Desired family size can be compared to house size and the number of cars owned. We may wish to have a large house and many cars, but our circumstances may not allow for us to have either without endangering our finances and well-being. We decide moment by moment whether working toward that goal makes sense for us. So it is with reproductive intentions; every step of a woman and her partner’s reproductive lives is governed by their immediate circumstances.
It seems likely that even in countries where women respond in health surveys that they desire six or seven children, they would end up with fewer, possibly many fewer, if at each step of their reproductive lives they were able to choose precisely when to become pregnant. In some developed countries with low fertility, women express a desire to have two children yet have closer to one on average. With the right partner, the right job, the right apartment, and the right economic and social-support systems, a woman in Japan, for example, might have the two children she desires. But with options to prevent or terminate pregnancies, many Japanese women have one child or none; the national average is 1.3.16
All of this suggests the value of developing and testing the hypothesis that meeting the needs of women and their partners for personal control of pregnancy could lead to the end of population growth. Physician and reproductive specialist Malcolm Potts has found that in all countries where women can choose from a range of contraceptive options, backed by access to safe and legal abortion services, total fertility rates are at or below replacement fertility levels.22
Robert Engelman
If these findings can be borne out consistently by additional research, those who worry about the impact of global population growth on environmental and social sustainability might usefully advocate for worldwide universal access to family-planning services. The need for such access is enshrined in the second target of the fifth UN Millennium Development Goal, which calls for developing countries to “achieve, by 2015, universal access to reproductive health.”23 This concept embraces more than family planning, including a holistic state of sexual and reproductive well-being that encompasses maternal and child health, prevention of AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, access to safe abortion services (where these are legal), and post-abortion care.
A Thought Experiment with Data
The Futures Group study has not yet gained the widespread attention its findings merit. Among the reasons for this may be that the concept of “unmet need” for contraception is not widely understood among the public, news media, and policymakers. Moreover, because of lack of data the study excluded not only China, with a fifth of the world’s population, but dozens of other developing countries—and all the world’s industrialized countries other than the United States.
Newly available data on unintended pregnancy in many countries, assembled by the Guttmacher Institute, support an alternative research approach to the question of the demographic impacts of births that result from pregnancies women never sought or wanted to have. These data, based on a range of surveys worldwide, provide the basis for beginning to answer an intriguing and valuable question: What would happen to world population growth if every pregnancy worldwide, starting tomorrow, were the outcome of a woman’s active intention to become pregnant and bear and help raise a child? If no pregnancies were unintended, in other words, how many births would there be compared to current births, and how would this new birthrate affect the future of human population?
Methods Section for “An End to Population Growth: Why Family Planning Is Key to a Sustainable Future” Robert Engelman By The Guttmacher Institute provides estimates, covering various years in the last decade, of the proportions of all pregnancies that women report as unintended in many developing and developed countries.1,2 More than 40 percent of pregnancies fall into this category in developing countries, and more than 47 percent are unintended in developed countries such as the United States. (That unintended pregnancy is higher in developed than in developing countries seems surprising, given the generally greater access to family planning services in developed countries. It may be that access is only part of the story. Perhaps inadequate sex education, ambiguous parental messages about sex, and a sexualized popular culture encourage unprotected and risky sex in wealthier countries. It may also be that women in countries where the value of high fertility tends to be relatively high are more likely to call any pregnancy “intended” regardless of their reproductive aspiration at the time of conception.) Since many unintended pregnancies end in abortion and some in miscarriage, knowing this proportion is insufficient to estimate impacts on fertility in any population. Guttmacher researchers do further separate out these national data by pregnancy outcome, allowing for an estimate of the proportion of all births that result from unintended pregnancies. Globally, the proportion is surprisingly consistent: 22 percent in developed countries and just over 21 percent in developing ones. More than one in five human births, based on survey results, are the result of a pregnancy that the woman did not want to happen. Read more..
Averaged over the 73 countries for which data exist, and comprising 83 percent of the world’s births, just under ten percent of births result from pregnancies occurring among women who never wanted to have another child. Even under the most conservative scenario—extrapolated globally, with all births from pregnancies that are merely mistimed considered equivalent to births from intended pregnancies—a hypothetical world population in which women only become pregnant when they want to would reduce today’s global total fertility rate to 2.29 births per woman. That figure is slightly below today’s global replacement fertility rate—placing world population on a direct path toward future decline, albeit at a very slow pace given population momentum (and assuming neither future fertility decline nor improvement in mortality among young people). Under the less conservative assumption that one-quarter of births from mistimed pregnancies are equivalent to unwanted pregnancies, the total fertility rate sinks lower, to 2.22 births per woman—resulting in a somewhat faster track toward a human population peak, even with no future fertility decline. These calculations are, at best, first-order analyses of the impact on world population growth of an idealized scenario in which all births are the outcomes from intended pregnancies. As noted, they do not take into account the possibility that global fertility would continue its decline once all births resulted from intended pregnancies. More survey research and data on pregnancy intention among individual women in all countries would be needed to make a more robust determination of demographic impacts.
But the essence of research on this question remains hopeful—and little known: a successful global effort that assured all women the capacity to decide for themselves whether and when to become pregnant would also place world population on a path toward a reasonably imminent peak followed by slow demographic decrease. Additional efforts to see that women have the educational, economic, legal, and political opportunities they deserve would accelerate this transition.
Toward a World of Intended Pregnancies and Wanted Children
Given the feasibility of such a transition, why isn’t it happening today? Why aren’t higher proportions of births the result of intended pregnancies? And what might we do to overcome the obstacles and actually bring that world about?
Worldwatch Institute and Richard Morin/Solutions
Popular as it is with women and couples, contraception remains a deeply sensitive issue for much of the public. Vehemently opposed by the Catholic Church and regarded with suspicion by many other Christian, Islamic, and even some Jewish religious leaders, open advocacy for contraceptive availability and use inevitably risks stoking religious opposition. Influence of the Catholic Church hierarchy has blocked efforts in the Philippines, for example, to include access to modern contraception in the country’s government health system.24 Opposition from the Holy See, which has permanent observer status within the UN system, led to silence on reproductive health in the UN Millennium Development Goals when they were forged in 2000—even though representatives of the world’s governments had pledged to achieve universal access to reproductive health by 2015 at the UN conference in Cairo in 1994.25 Only in 2007 was language aiming at that reproductive health access target added to Millennium Development Goal number five. Seven years of opportunities to achieve the target had been squandered.
Perhaps more destructive than religious opposition is a relative denigration in most cultures of concerns that lie principally in the sphere of women. Access to contraception is clearly one such concern, since women bear the babies and undergo most of the risks to life and health associated with reproduction. At least since the rise of agricultural, urban, and hierarchical societies, male interests in reproduction have differed markedly from those of women. Men are often anxious to produce a multitude of future heirs, soldiers, laborers, farmers, and followers. Women tend to be strategically concerned with the survival and well-being of each of their children.13 These gender differences are anything but ironclad, and in many cultures the gender gap in attitudes has narrowed in recent decades, especially as women’s status has risen relative to men’s. In other cultures, however, the gap not only remains wide, it demands the subjugation of women, sex, and reproduction to male needs.
Beyond male reproductive dominance lies the conviction among neoclassical economists that endless economic growth is possible and that it requires endless population growth. Politicians often measure their self-worth based on the size of their electorates. They happily side with economists on the idea that endless economic and demographic growth is both possible and desirable.
With all these factors in play, it is not surprising that the world’s governments are nowhere close to allocating the resources the Cairo conference had estimated would be needed for all women in developing countries to have reasonable access to decent family-planning services. This was roughly $18 billion for the year 2010, a third of which was to be contributed by industrialized-country governments (the 1993 dollars in the UN document are here converted to current dollars).6 Despite that commitment—and an increase in the population of reproductive-age people in developing countries, from 2.3 to 2.9 billion—actual expenditures from these governments on international family-planning assistance fell from $723 million in 1995 to $338 million in 2007.26,27 Assistance has changed little since the latter year.
Female Education: A Solution for a Crowded Planet Wolfgang Lutz By I fully agree with the idea that world population growth can—and should—be reversed through fertility rates that fall below replacement level on a long-term basis. This is an important but not a new idea. It has been mentioned by several authors in a more qualitative way and, in 2001, I contributed to an article published in the leading science journal, Nature, that shows in quantitative, probabilistic terms that there is an 85 percent chance that world population will reach a peak over the coming decades and then start to decline due to sustained, global, below-replacement fertility.1 More recently, I published an editorial in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society entitled “Toward a World of 2–6 Billion Well Educated and Therefore Healthy and Wealthy People.”2 This paper presents extensions of demographic scenarios into the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries that illustrate that if the world, by the end of the century, achieved fertility levels currently found in Europe and China (about 1.5–1.7 children per woman), world population size could well decline to approximately two to six billion people even with continued significant increases in life expectancy. But such low fertility levels will likely only be achieved if the rest of the world population attains female education levels comparable to those of existing low-fertility regions. Read more..
A global social movement is needed to pressure policymakers and influential cultural and thought leaders to reverse this dismal trend. Raising $9 billion a year from wealthy governments that currently spend just a few hundred million on international family-planning assistance shouldn’t be as difficult as it is. As much money is allocated for a few days worth of military activities worldwide. A comparable or greater amount probably would be needed to assure that the vast majority of pregnancies in wealthy countries are intentional, but this sum has never been estimated. Significant investments in all countries in education on sexuality and reproduction are also needed, but what these should be is unknown as well.
Still, the point undoubtedly still holds: a world in which almost all births result from intended conceptions would not be prohibitively expensive or difficult, aside from cultural barriers, to bring about. Yet due to contraception’s sensitivity—complicated by a history pockmarked with episodes of contraceptive coercion in China, India, Peru, and a few other countries—environmentalists and advocates for women’s rights and health have never succeeded in forging an activist alliance capable of raising the modest sums needed for all to have access to family planning.
Several elements are needed if a global social movement to promote family planning and intentional pregnancy is ever to have its own birth. One is more research about the likely population and environmental outcomes of a world of fully intended pregnancies—and the policies, programs, and costs that could lead to such a world. Another is agreement that any such policies and programs must be based on reproductive rights rather than on coercion, and therefore on the intentions of women and their partners rather than on those of anyone else. And a third is the creativity to shape—or the courage to stand up to—the religious, economic, and other cultural forces that promote population growth and oppose the gender and reproductive health conditions that undermine it.
There is nothing fated about a world of 9 billion people—in 2050, or ever. While true control of population is beyond our aspirations and capacities, policy choices are available that will nudge our numbers closer to environmentally and socially sustainable levels. The choices are rooted in human development and human rights, specifically the right of all, and most directly of women, to decide for themselves when it is the right time to bring a new child into the world.
Further reading
http://www.blogher.com/we-know-what-problem-food-deserts-and-tough-conve...The DDJ-SX2 is the industry’s first controller to give DJs dedicated control of the new Serato Flip functions within Serato® DJ. Serato Flip is an expansion pack for Serato DJ that gives DJs the power to record and re-play hot cue sequences on the fly. The DDJ-SX2 is the only controller with designated buttons – Record, Start, and Slot – to put intuitive Serato Flip performances at their fingertips. The four-channel DDJ-SX2 builds on the popularity of its predecessor, but inherits two must-have features from the top-flight DDJ-SZ: Performance Pads with velocity sensitive, multi-colored LEDs and on-jog digital cue point markers. The DDJ-SX2 is also Serato DJ DVS upgrade ready and boasts improved jog wheel reaction time.
CONTROL LAYOUT
The DDJ-SX2 provides the same functional layout of its predecessor with quick access to a multitude of Serato DJ features. The layout of the buttons, knobs, sliders and Performance Pads deliver the best DJ controller experience designed to match the applicable software functions perfectly:
Multi-colored Performance Pads – Introduced in the top-of-the-line DDJ-SZ, the DDJ-SX2 now incorporates the highly attractive and functional multi-colored Performance Pads that control eight types of Serato DJ functions. The various illumination colors provide quick identification of the different actions/commands such as beats and drum rolls. The eight pads located below the Jog wheel offer HOT CUE, ROLL, SLICER and SAMPLER functionalities. While in velocity SAMPLER mode, the output level from the pad can vary depending on the strength of each tap from the user.
Amplified MIC Input – Improved from the first generation, the controller features a balanced microphone (MIC) input circuit to provide clear audio output with no distortion regardless of the type or brand of microphone used. The controller can deliver clear audio even at high volume levels because of increased headroom and highly improved signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio.
– Improved from the first generation, the controller features a balanced microphone (MIC) input circuit to provide clear audio output with no distortion regardless of the type or brand of microphone used. The controller can deliver clear audio even at high volume levels because of increased headroom and highly improved signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio. High Accuracy Jog Wheel – The output reaction time of the JOG wheels is significantly improved, further cutting down on latency, ensuring tasks such as “scratch” performances are at their highest levels. The model also features “Hot Cue Countdown” providing users, via its JOG Display, with the time remaining to a Hot Cue point, helpful in quickly arriving to a specified position in the music playing.
4-Channel Mixer – The DDJ-SX2 features an independent 4-channel mixer that can be used with other external sources such as turntables. Its master level meter provides instantaneous sound level adjustment as well as independent output controls with a display indicator for each channel when used as a standalone mixer.
EXPANDED FUNCTIONALITY
The DDJ-SX2 features four external inputs for connection with CD players, analog turntables, microphones and more, with the ability to act as a stand-alone mixer (without the need to connect to a PC/MAC). The controller includes two Master Out and one Booth Out outputs for connection to external public address (PA) equipment. The DDJ-SX2 also features support for the Serato DJ DVS function. Users will have the ability to purchase Serato’s DVS Expansion Pack and perform Serato DJ deck control on the DDJ-SX2 with Pioneer CDJ players or analog turntables.
ADDITIONAL FEATURES
High Quality Audio – A low-jitter clock and high-performance digital-to-analog converter (DAC) provide accurate and clear audio playback
– A low-jitter clock and high-performance digital-to-analog converter (DAC) provide accurate and clear audio playback Slip Mode – While activated, Slip Mode silently continues song playback during a performance loop, scratch or hot cue and resumes audible playback when the loop, scratch, or hot cue operation is ended, creating smoother and more seamless transitions
– While activated, Slip Mode silently continues song playback during a performance loop, scratch or hot cue and resumes audible playback when the loop, scratch, or hot cue operation is ended, creating smoother and more seamless transitions Aluminum Finish – The DDJ-SX2 sports an aluminum top panel and a brushed aluminum finish on the JOG wheels for optimal look and feel
– The DDJ-SX2 sports an aluminum top panel and a brushed aluminum finish on the JOG wheels for optimal look and feel Multiple Connection Options – The DDJ-SX2 offers dual CD and phono/line inputs for external devices as well as two microphone inputs, two Master Outputs (XLR and RCA) and a Booth Out terminal
– The DDJ-SX2 offers dual CD and phono/line inputs for external devices as well as two microphone inputs, two Master Outputs (XLR and RCA) and a Booth Out terminal Built-in Sound Card (audio interface)
(audio interface) Needle Search – Users can immediately jump to a specific part of a music track with a simple touch of the Needle Search pad
– Users can immediately jump to a specific part of a music track with a simple touch of the Needle Search pad Adjustable Cross-Fader Curve – Suits any type of mixing style
– Suits any type of mixing style Channel Fader Start – Enables use of the channel fader to control and play/cue tracks.
– Enables use of the channel fader to control and play/cue tracks. Assignable Settings – Pioneer offers a TSI file for use with the Native Instruments TRAKTOR PRO2 software
RELEASE DATE OCTOBER 2014
PRICE: $999The Roman Catholic Church and Non-therapeutic Circumcision
The early teaching of the Roman Catholic Church regarding the practice of male circumcision was stated by Eugene IV in a Papal Bull, Bull of Union with the Copts, in 14421 Persons who practice circumcision risk loss of eternal salvation.1
The Roman Catholic Church has never issued an official policy specifically regarding non-therapeutic neonatal male circumcision as it has been practiced primarily in the English-speaking nations in the Twentieth Century and now the Twenty-first Century. The Church, however, has a strong moral statement on amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations.2 Circumcision falls under both amputation and mutilation, so it is clearly covered by this policy. Catholics generally are required to respect bodily integrity.2 Lack of respect for bodily integrity is viewed as a violation of the Fifth Command |
bugaboo of “non-local consciousness,” which causes the hair on the back of their necks to stand on end. A layman would be forgiven for not grasping why such an innocent-sounding phrase could spell danger to ‘good science.'”
They would have you think that legitimate attempts to maintain scientific quality is just a ploy by atheists and skeptics who are just too closed-minded to accept the cutting edge science of consciousness. The cranks have been increasing their attacks on skeptics over the last few years. Skeptics have developed a finely-tuned bullshit detector, and spend their time keeping up with the tactics and antics of the pseudoscientists, and then publicly exposing and dissecting them. Pushback is to be expected.
They continue:
“The reason becomes clear when you discover that non-local consciousness means the possibility that there is mind outside the human brain or even outside material reality, that a conscious mind is in some way intrinsic to the quantum universe, and that we all are quantum entangled.”
What is deliciously ironic is how, even in this letter, Chopra and his fellow authors trigger many of the red flags of bad science that the TEDx directors warned about in their letter. For example, one of their red flags is:
“Uses over-simplified interpretations of legitimate studies and may combine with imprecise, spiritual or new age vocabulary, to form new, completely untested theories.”
It’s hard not to suspect that they were thinking of Deepak Chopra when they wrote this line.
It gets better:
“Fearing that God is finding a way to sneak back into the kingdom through ideas of quantum consciousness, militant atheists go on the attack against near-death experiences, telepathy, action at a distance, and all manifestations of purpose-driven evolution. Like the guardians in “A Game of Thrones,” these militants haven’t actually looked over the wall, and given their absolute conviction that the human brain is the only source of awareness in the universe, you’d think that speculative thinking on the subject wouldn’t be so threatening. (Most people wouldn’t picket a convention of werewolves in their hometown. It’s not hard to tell what is fantasy.)”
First, if you are going to make a Game of Thrones reference, at least get it right. Previously in the letter they characterized the night’s watch (which they insist on calling “the guardians”) as a “hereditary” order, when in fact it is not. Now they say that the night’s watch never looks beyond the wall – that is, if you don’t count the groups of rangers who constantly explore north of the wall.
Chopra appears to be as unaware of the Game of Thrones and the Night’s Watch as he is of skeptics. But I’ll run with his flawed analogy – skeptics too range “north of the wall” that demarcates the boundary between legitimate science and pseudoscience. We explore it carefully and report back to those living comfortably south of the wall. It is a wild and untamed region, silly with magical thinking. We also defend against attempts by the denizens north of the wall to infiltrate civilization. Our warnings are often taken as seriously as the Night’s Watch’s – those who have never looked north of the wall have a hard time believing the nonsense that goes on there.
Chopra would like nothing better than to have the wall go unguarded – meaning that there would be no effective quality control in science, or in what gets presented as science to the public. Keep in mind there is no censorship here. He and anyone are free to write as many books as they want, create web pages, organize their own conference – they seem to have no trouble distributing their nonsense without fear of any censorship.
This is about institutions that self-impose a level of quality control, including universities, journals, professional organizations, and TED conferences. There is also (or should be) certain publicly required quality control, such as what health care interventions should be covered by Medicare, or what gets taught as science in the public science classroom. These are all areas where there is purported to be some level of quality control, and the barbarians are rushing all of these walls. They want in, and one of their primary tactics is to argue that there shouldn’t be any walls at all – no quality control. Quality control to them is censorship.
Failing that, their alternate strategy is to argue that, OK, walls are fine, but we deserve to be let in because we are legitimate. To do this they try to present themselves not as cranks but as visionaries (all cranks think they are visionaries), and to do this they write:
“But TED took the threat seriously enough that Anderson’s letter warns against “the fusion of science and spirituality,” and most disappointing of all, it tags as a sign of good science that “it does not fly in the face of the broad existing body of scientific knowledge.” Even a newcomer to science knows about Copernicus, Galileo, and other great scientists whose theories countermanded the prevailing body of accepted knowledge.”
That’s right – the Galileo gambit, one of the most reliable indicators of a crank. Notice also his clever choice of words – “prevailing body of accepted knowledge.” At the time of Galileo there wasn’t much of an “existing body of scientific knowledge,” and those who were pushing back against Galileo were not exactly scientists. The analogy here is as bad as his Game of Thrones failure.
Chris Anderson from TED wrote a nice response to the Chopra letter, in which he points out:
“No one here claims that mainstream science is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It isn’t. But it’s the best starting point we have for judging new information. Yes a modern-day Galileo may be out there with paradigm-shifting ideas that will at some point overturn huge pieces of existing science. But he or she should expect to face a robust standard of proof before their ideas take hold. And for every Galileo, there are thousands of people who just have bad, unscientific ideas.”
Cranks refuse to accept or acknowledge that, unlike at the time of Galileo, we now have a substantial body of scientific knowledge. We are not starting from scratch with every new idea, and not all ideas are equally valid. We know stuff, and we can use that hard-won body of knowledge to make judgments about new ideas. Also, science has developed an elaborate set of methods and standards, and we can judge the activity of researchers based upon those standards.
We can therefore examine and then judge new ideas on these two broad lines – are the ideas plausible based upon currently well-established science, and are the methods of its proponents legitimate and rigorous?
The authors conclude:
“But the main flaw in TED’s position has been made abundantly clear. It isn’t the organizers’ job to exclude questionable science but a job shared between them and the audience. We’re all adults here, right? Any speculative thinking worthy of the name should make somebody in the audience angry, inspire others, and leave the rest to decide if a challenging idea should be thrown out or not. Any other approach casts shame upon tolerance, imagination, and science itself.”
There it is – they do not want any standards. Let the audience decide for themselves. What, then, does the TED brand mean? Chopra and his ilk would cheapen the brand to allow in their preferred pseudoscience. They would cheapen the brand of science itself, muddy the waters, blur the lines, until it’s impossible to tell what is legitimate and what isn’t. That is an environment in which cranks and charlatans can thrive.
But it’s not good science.
Good on TED for holding the line against pseudoscience. Hopefully, in this entire affair, the Chopras of the world have revealed their hand. They do not appear to be interested in legitimate science, only giving their spiritual beliefs the appearance of scientific legitimacy, and they don’t care if they have to bring down the wall of scientific standards to do so.VICTORIAN state and lower league clubs' hopes of taking on Melbourne Victory and Melbourne Heart in an FA Cup-style knockout competition have been shattered after the game's governing body forbade the A-League clubs taking part in the inaugural Mirabella Cup.
The competition was launched this year to replace the Dockerty Cup, with around 150 clubs statewide looking to pull off the ultimate giant-killing act against the A-League sides, who were given a bye until the quarter-finals.
That stage of the tournament has yet to be reached, but Victory and Heart will not be there after Football Federation Australia ruled that they should not be involved.
The peak body fears that its own efforts to set up a nationwide FFA Cup - modelled on the English competition - next year could be compromised by the Victorian tournament. It doesn't want the Victorian competition to erode its chances of gaining significant sponsorship revenue and media coverage.
Football Federation Victoria went ahead with its concept after initially being given the go-ahead to include the two local A-League teams, but an FFA spokesman yesterday said that the situation was now different.Minister for IT, Government of Telangana, K.T. Rama Rao has announced a proposal to build a data analytics park in Hyderabad. Speaking at the inauguration of Techwave Consulting’s office there, he also stressed on the importance of SMEs. The government is also planning to set up SME Tower to house SMEs at Kondapur. He believes it would attract investment for them.
Speaking further he added that Government of Telangana has proposed to set a data analytics park in Gachibowli in the city. “This kind of park does not exist in India yet. We have made a proposal to Engineering Staff College of India (ESCI), an autonomous organ of India’s largest body of professional engineers. Its Board of Directors will meet in September and decide on the same,” informed K.T. Rama Rao.
Rama Rao described how, over the last twenty years, Hyderabad has transformed in ‘Cyberabad’ and that now the city is considered one of the best options for low cost, high value human resources. Hyderabad is the second largest IT exporting company and contributes 12% of country’s IT exports.
Addressing the gathering, Dr. BVR Mohan Reddy, Chairman-NASSCOM said the industry continues to grow. It is a $148 billion industry which is growing at the rate of 14% per cent annually. The IT sector employs 3.1 million people in India. 2.5 lakh IT professionals were recruited last year. “We expect similar or better growth this year,” he said.
“While this industry is generating lot of employment, there is a word of caution to the budding professionals. You will not have better prospects, until you have domain knowledge and vertical specialisation. Make yourself distinctly different. Learn continuously. Catch up with ever changing technologies. And have right skills,” BVR Mohan Reddy added.
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.1/17/19 Update: The Hamlet is launching a new website soon and Meetup.com will no longer be used. Join the new mailing list here https://bit.ly/2QVwvxD to stay informed.
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Daisuke Maki Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 15, 2016
So apparently rakyll received a copy of the book that I co-authored with my fellow Japanese gophers. Feels weird to see our book written entirely in Japanese floating around in other parts of the World, but I’m very glad that people are expressing interest. Thank you for those who have purchased it :)
Onto the main topic.
Soon after I wrote my previous article, “WTF Was Wrong With My Go Code”, I noticed somebody referencing another one of my old Go libraries. …And, right. It was old, and it was bad. So I updated this one time again.
The Subject In Question
This time around the subject in question is a library that is used as a log destination, which also happens to be one of my earliest Go works. It was easy to tell it was old, as the.travis.yml file specified this library to be tested against Go 1.1 and 1.2 on Travis CI.
If you are new to running services, you tend to naively assume that your host server has unlimited disk space that allows you to log how much ever data you want to your log files. Those of us who have been in this field know better not to assume such things, and instead we *rotate* the logs.
You could use an external service for this, but there are cases where it’s just easier if the application that is emitting the log handle the log rotation — but it’s a very tedious job. This is where my go-file-rotatelogs package comes in.
But then again, the code was… not very Go-ish, or particularly good. Let’s see why.
Naming Things
Yes, just like my previous article, I yet again named things weirdly.
The package URL path does not match that of the actual package name.The constructor function includes the package name with it, making it feel very redundant. This was the same deal as my previous post, so I guess back then I thought this was the right way.
A Case For Mutexes
For whatever reason, I was using a semaphore via channels to limit accessibility to critical sections of my code. However, I was only allowing exactly one goroutine to have access to this section.
A sync.Mutex in Go can be thought of as a semaphore where the number of goroutines allowed is exactly one. And it’s ever so slightly more efficient than using channels to protect blocks of code. So I really don’t know why I used channels back then. I guess I was trying to be hip…
In this case, I just switched to using sync.RWMutex. Simple, and the way I did it, it saves me from writing an explicit initialization.
Hiding What’s Not Necessary
While tweaking the code, I also noticed many methods that were public APIs that just did not need to be public. For example, a method to generate the next file name to be used is not exactly something that an end user would need to access. All of these extra methods are now private.
One slight problem was that I had test code that relied on it, but I recently also tend to write my tests in the “foo_test” package to make sure I don’t unintentionally rely on some non-public parts of the API. The parts that were now private could not be tested in this scope. It’s easy to fix this, though: Just create another test file that has access to the internal parts, and run your private tests there. Simple.
Configurable Instance Variables
I come from the land of interpreted languages where words like “public”,”private”, and “protected” do not mean a thing. In that world, you can not really limit the visibility of any piece of data, except for sheer obfuscation.
So naturally I thought: well, if some parts of the RotateLogs object are optional/configurable, why not just expose them as public struct fields. For example, things like maximum age of a file before being deleted, or name of symlink to use were available as public fields.
At first glance, this may seem harmless if a bit awkward, but with Go you should always be thinking “Well, what if multiple goroutines tried to read/write to this field…? For example, in our case, what could happen if a goroutine changed the LinkName field (the name to use for symbolic links) was modified while we were calling os.Symlink…?
Recently my rules regarding this sort of thing is: If it doesn’t look like it needs to be updated by the end user, just keep fields private. This is obviously not a rule that has to be followed 100% of the time, but this is what I’m using when I’m in doubt. So in the new version, I have no public fields: everything is private.
Now that the important fields are private, it was now easy to use sync.Mutex objects where necessary to protect them from possible corruption.
Optional Parameters
However, this leaves one problem: So how exactly should users provide optional parameters? You cannot just ask them to assign them as they are all private.
One obvious way is to provide a constructor that can take all of those optional parameters. However, this leaves the end user having to specify really ugly constructor calls like this:
There are other ways to work around this problem, but one particular idiom that I like is the way Go code from Google Cloud Platform client libraries handle optional parameters. For example, below are the two ways to create a Google Storage client, one using the default OAuth token source, and the latter one to explicitly specify one yourself:
The trick is to receive the optional parameters as a variadic list of a generic interface. This allows you to specify as many of them as you want, or none at all.
I find this pattern very pleasant to the eye. There are definitely cases where this does not fit, but when it does, it’s beautiful.
You can now just create a RotateLog object with all default values like this, passing the only mandatory parameter:
Or you can specify the full set of optional parameters, or a subset thereof:The Metro Board of Directors on Thursday unanimously approved a new light rail station at Aviation Boulevard and 96th Street along the Crenshaw/LAX Line to serve as the “gateway” transfer point to an Automated People Mover that would take people to terminals at Los Angeles International Airport. The people mover is being planned by Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA), which would also build the project.
The next steps: Metro must environmentally clear the station, design it and identify the funding before anything gets built. The Crenshaw/LAX Line is currently under construction and the new station will be built as a separate project. The Crenshaw/LAX Line is scheduled to open in 2019; the people mover could be completed as early as 2022 according to the Metro staff report. Officials with L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office said Thursday that the city will attempt to accelerate that date.
“This is a historic day for LAX and a historic day for our city because we’re finally on the way to bringing rail to LAX,” Garcetti told the Metro Board on Thursday. “I think we’ll be able to fix a historic mistake of our past.”
The Metro Green Line infamously came up two miles short of LAX and requires a shuttle bus ride to reach airport terminals. The new Aviation/96th station would also serve some Green Line trains; please see the conceptual operating map below.
People movers are a type of train and are used to connect to regional transit systems by large airports in the U.S. and abroad. The chief advantage of the people mover over the existing shuttle bus: the people mover would run on an elevated guideway above traffic while the shuttle bus shares roads with traffic.
The new Aviation/96th station would be about.4 miles north of the station to be built at Aviation and Century boulevards as part of the Crenshaw/LAX Line. The idea, according to Metro, is that the Aviation/96th station would be the gateway for passengers headed to LAX while the Aviation/Century station would connect riders to the many businesses along the Century Boulevard corridor.
Metro Board Members made it clear that the Aviation/96th station needs to be extraordinarily designed to serve as the airport gateway.
“The question before us is can 96th Street do what it needs to do to be a world class experience?,” asked Board Member Mike Bonin who co-authored a motion (posted after the jump) directing Metro to make the station an enclosed facility with a number of amenities including concourse areas, restrooms, LAX airline check-in and public art, among others. The motion was co-authored by Garcetti and Supervisors Don Knabe and Mark Ridley-Thomas.
LAWA is scheduled to finalize details on the people mover alignment and the number of stations near airport terminals in Dec. 2014. In a presentation to the LAWA Board in May, LAWA staff showed options that included two or four stations for the people mover within the central terminal horseshoe. Should LAWA move the people mover alignment back to 98th Street — as was previously studied — Metro would seek to make the Aviation/Century station as the primary connection point to the people mover.
Metro — in coordination with LAWA — has in the past couple of years looked at a number of options for connecting the airport terminals to the Metro Rail system. Among those was bringing light rail directly to the terminals or building a spur to a new airport transportation hub that is being planned east of LAX.
Ultimately, Metro studies found that a Metro Rail-people mover connection took about the same time and resulted in about the same ridership as having a light rail line run directly into the airport terminals. The Metro Rail-people mover connection also cost billions of dollars less and resulted in speedier train rides for Crenshaw/LAX Line passengers not heading to the airport.
In the future, it’s expected that about 57 percent of airport bound passengers would arrive by private car, 33 percent by shuttles, taxis and limos, eight percent by the Flyaway bus and one to two percent via transit buses and trains, according to the Metro staff report. About 66.6 million passengers used LAX in 2013, meaning even small percentages can add up to a lot of riders.
Metro Board Member Don Knabe raised a salient point several times in recent months: what guarantees are in place that LAWA will actually build the people mover? LAWA Executive Director Gina Marie Lindsey told the Metro Board on Thursday that traffic has gotten so bad in the airport’s horseshoe — up to 200,000 vehicles a day — that the airport must build the people mover, a consolidated rental car facility and a new ground transportation hub to steer more vehicles away from the terminals.
The Airport Metro Connector is one of the dozen transit projects to receive funding from the Measure R half-cent sales tax increase approved by 68 percent of Los Angeles County voters in 2008.
Please see the motion on the Aviation/96th Street station that is posted after the jump.
Like this: Like Loading...Guests: Guy Branum Guy Branum Guests: Margaret Wappler Margaret Wappler Guests: Oliver Wang Oliver Wang Guests: Wynter Mitchell Wynter Mitchell
This is our 100th episode! In honor of this, Guy, Margaret (via skype), Oliver, and Wynter talk about pop culture families as a way of paying tribute to the Pop Rocket family that has formed over the past two years. Guy finds out which pop culture family the gang wishes they were a part of, and which TV and movie families represented their own. Then, they talk about the best pop culture families composed of friends (**Spoiler: Friends isn’t one of them). Then, as always, we find out what the panel’s current Jams are and what their individual pop culture obsessions are.
A very special shout out to all of the Rocketeers who have listened and made these 100 episodes possible! THANK YOU!
That’s My Jam:
Margaret Wappler - Plastic
Oliver Wang - Better Things
Wynter Mitchell - Looking Up Through You
Guy Branum - The Andy Cohen Diaries
Each week we’ll add everyone’s jams to this handy Spotify playlist.
You can let us know what you think of Pop Rocket and suggest topics in our Facebook group or via @PopRocket on Twitter.
Other Links:
Search Party
Cucumber
How Far I’ll Go- Moana
The Donna Reed Show
Produced by Christian Dueñas and Kara Hart for MaximumFun.orgRio Olympics: Mayor Eduardo Paes asks Australians not to come to Brazil with unrealistic expectations
Updated
"Peace and love, Australia, please!"
Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes flashes a peace sign at the camera, and with that he both pleads for a fair go, and signals his exasperation with Australian Olympic officials, and all pre-Games critics.
Key points: Eduardo Paes asks Australians to keep an open mind about Rio Olympics
Comments follow AOC's criticism of Rio's preparations, ban on Australian athletes visiting poor communities
Mr Paes acknowledges Rio has had a lot of problems but calls for fairness
Mr Paes is Rio's ultimate salesman and he is on the front foot about those people — especially Australians it seems — who misjudge his city.
His strong personality has made him one of the most popular political figures the country has seen and his attention has been aimed squarely at the Olympic Games during his eight-year term.
Here when you say 'don't go to the favelas', it sounds a little bit prejudiced. Eduardo Paes, Rio Mayor
He told the ABC Rio would defy the world's narrow expectations.
"We are working with contingencies, but things are on time, on schedule. We are going to show that Brazil and Rio is something more than nice beaches and great parties and good music and beautiful people," he said.
"That this is also a place that, in spite of all the problems, there are people that work hard and deliver things on time, [on budget], the proper way; I would say more an Australian way."
But Australians, he said, were the ones most likely to "bring bad news".
"It's amazing — all the bad news comes from Australia!" he said.
Tensions flare over preparations, rules for Australian athletes
Tensions were raised when Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) president John Coates in 2014 said Rio's preparations were "the worst" he had ever seen.
Last month, Mr Paes also hit out at news the Australian Olympic Team would be banned from visiting favelas due to safety concerns.
At the time, the Mayor was quoted as calling the Australians "aggressive", but he said that was lost in translation.
"I like Coates a lot. John Coates is a nice guy. I think he voted for us. Hope he doesn't regret it," he said.
"No, I didn't say aggressive. Translation is always dangerous... let me give a good translation: bringing all always bad news, complaining about Rio and the Olympics here.
"I understand that. I mean, when you look at developed countries like Australia, when you look at a country like Brazil — now it's worse especially because of all the problems, political and economic problems we are facing — there is this view of uncivilised Brazilians there, in this tropical jungle, come on, what are these guys going to be doing.
"So you are here, you see it's not like that.
About the Australians' ban on entering favelas, he said: "Peace and love Australia, please!
"When you say 'don't go to the favelas', it sounds a little bit prejudiced, against the poorest people of our city which we are very proud of.
"It's a part of the city. It's our reality, we are not ashamed about favelas. We are not... they are nice places to go, beautiful places to go," he said.
Mr Paes said obviously safety measures would need to be taken, and indicated that ultimately he would accept the ruling — it is just another thing on Australia's bad news list.
"It's OK to do it. I don't complain, but what I say is it always comes from Australia," he said.
'Don't come to Brazil waiting for Australia'
Amid concern about stadium readiness, logistics and water pollution less than five months from the Games, Mr Paes acknowledged there had been "missed opportunities".
"We have a lot of problems. I don't say that the problems that people point to, are not problems. I mean if you look at the Games there are some missed opportunities," he said.
"One is the [water pollution targets] at Guanabara Bay. We got better, but we didn't solve the problem. So I think we are delivering much more than what we said. What we want people to have is a clear view... to be fair to us."
He said Rio won the bid not because it was better than its rivals, but worse —the Olympic movement wanted to enrich his city with an understanding of the difficulties that lay ahead.
"Look at this country from a different perspective. Don't come to Brazil waiting for Australia. We are not like you. We haven't got there yet. We are working hard to get there but we haven't got there yet... so come with more open heart and open minds," he said.
Topics: olympics-summer, sport, community-and-society, travel-and-tourism, brazil
First postedTo be honest, this shouldn’t be a surprise. The Galaxy Nexus was postponed for more than a month, and we all figured the Motorola DROID 4 wouldn’t see a pre-holiday release 3 days before Christmas. It was rumored we may see the device tomorrow, but evidence was still thin. Now we have some concrete info from a Verizon document stating a February 2, 2012 launch date.
It’s much better that the device has been pushed a few months, rather than every couple of days like the recent Galaxy Nexus LTE. This way, consumers that need a phone in the very near future should count on the DROID 4 as a possible candidate. I’m sure many OG DROID owners that are now eligible for a 2-year upgrade are furious, and may be forced to wait it out. QWERTY lovers are hard to convert.
The DROID 4 will most definitely ship with Android 4.0 by February, and if it doesn’t then remember to call me out on it. Like all information found through leaked documents or emails, they are subject to change. It could see store shelves earlier than predicted, but in the end – Verizon should take all the time they need to iron out all of the bugs. There is nothing worse than hyping up a device, just to find out there’s something wrong with it a few days later.
[via Phandroid]Apple II Repair Tips
Note that authorized Apple dealers repaired boards by swapping them out for tested and repaired boards provided by Apple. They left the board level debugging to Apple.
"Shotgun" Repairs
These approaches may restore many boards to operational status, but certain faults like opens, shorts in the PC board or bad sockets will not be found.
Bad Connections: reseating the chips
Basically most Apple II's and Apple IIplus machines that don't work correctly, can be "repaired" by reseating chips that aren't making good connections with their sockets. This is the number one problem that occurs with early Apple II's and Apple II plus machines. Finding the chip with the bad connection can be a challenge, but if you are desperate, you can always reseat every chip on the board.
Bad Chips: Exchanging the chips
If reseating the chips doesn't work, then you might have a bad chip. One way to trouble shoot this is to swap one chip of the same type for another of the same type and see if behavior of the system changes.
You can also swap chips with chips from another known "good" board. Except for the ROMs, almost all of the chips on the Apple II are still manufactured and available from distributors like mouser or digikey. Some parts are even available from Radio Shack.
Targeted Repairs
The best way to repair a board is to understand the circuit and use an oscilloscope to debug it. This will save wear and tear on old chips and sockets and allow you to fix problems not found by simple swapping/reseating of chips.
What you need
You need an oscilloscope and schematics in order to pinpoint problems without swapping chips. The famous "Red Book" has the required schematics as well as a nice system diagram. The schematics and detailed circuit descriptions can also be found in the book "Understanding Your Apple II" by by Jim Sather. This book is available for download in pdf format from http://alfter.us/files/uaii.pdf. Older Tektronics oscilloscopes can now be had for very low prices on Ebay or you can buy a new USB scope that uses a PC for monitor and control for a few hundred bucks. Keep in mind that bandwidth may become important as there are some fairly high frequencies in the video circuit. For instance, a 60 MHZ HP digital storage scope that I once borrowed didn't have the bandwidth to troubleshoot a color video problem. It didn’t have enough resolution to detect the master crystal was out of tolerance. I finally only changed it only after examining the rest of the circuit and finding no fault.
There are two common errors for Apple II's that are not working: no video and/or system will not boot.
System will not boot
A common failure for a non-working Apple II is that it will not display prompt or boot. You will not even hear the bell, which is done almost immediately after reset is removed from the processor. This is because a large portion of the logic of the Apple II needs to be working before the computer can even get this far. The following parts of the system are required to work in order to ring the bell and get a prompt. In parenthesis is the schematic page in the "Red Book". Be aware that all portions of all of these systems don’t have to be working perfectly in order to get a boot, but some components of each of these systems are critical.
Power supply
Clock and timing (S-3)
Processor (S-2)
Address bus (S-2, S-5, S-6, S-7, S-8, S-9, S-10)
Data bus (S-2, S-5, S-8, S-9, S-10)
Latched data bus (S-8, S-10) data from onboard I/O or DRAM is read back to processor with this bus
PROM (S-5)
Ram address mux (S-7) used to share memory between processor and video
(S-7) used to share memory between processor and video Dynamic RAM (S-8)
On-Board I/O (S-10) latches data from DRAM for reads from processor
The parts of the system that are not required in order to get a prompt (beware that without video, it is hard to tell how far it gets past the startup beep).
Video Sync Counter
Video Generator
Peripheral I/O - (expansion slots)
For debugging I would recommend following this sort of sequence
Check voltages from power supply Check processor to make sure it is not being held in reset Check processor to make sure it is receiving 1MHZ clock Check address bus to make sure that all signals look normal Check data bus to make sure that all signals look normal Check chips selects on ROMs to see which ones are being selected, if any. Check R/W line to see if processor is just reading instructions or writing data, as well
If everything looks normal, then you must try to find out what is happening right after boot. You want to reset the system and check the signals as she boots. Check to see that the F8 ROM is selected right after reset and the output from the ROM looks reasonable both on the ROM itself and back at the processor. DRAM is also accessed just a few cycles after boot when the processor calls a subroutine and the return address is put on the stack. Almost immediately, the screen is put into text mode and the bell is rung.
No Video
If your system beeps and boots from floppy disk, but doesn't display video, you problems are far more constrained than a system that simply will not boot. This problem is probably limited to one of the following.
Clock frequency (timing could be slightly off or you could have wrong crystal)
Video Sync Counter (S-4)
Video Generator (S-11)
The DRAM address mux (S-7) is used to refresh memory and share DRAM between processor and video. Note that the video system was designed to work at either PAL or NTSC frequencies. Some cuts and jumpers are made on the motherboard to switch frequencies. The master crystal is also changed out to a slightly different frequency for PAL operation. I once spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out why the vertical sync wouldn’t lock on a new board I had just obtained from eBay. It turned out that it was set up for PAL. Reconfiguring the board to NTSC timing and changing out the PAL frequency crystal to an NTSC frequency crystal solved the issue.
Apple Service Notes!
Testing Ram
Example Debugging Sessions
Case 1:
Check out these service notes that someone sent me. There are a lot of tips in this doc, including information on peripheral cards. I found at least one error while putting these notes into PDF format, so beware, but there are a lot of good ideas in there.Apple's programmers aid prom contantains a nice memory test that can be run from PROM. I have ported a 6502 memory test to the Apple 1 and Apple 2, but it runs from memory, so the system has to be pretty functional for it to work.
Typical No Prompt Screen after Power ON
One system that would not boot, was recently debugged.
Data Bus But Not Driven Completely to Low State
All expansion cards were removed. After probing the clock, data and address pins on the processor with an oscilloscope, I found that the data bus had some bits that looked odd. These bits were not being driven completely down, but only down to 2.5 volts during some cycles. The R/W line was never being driven low, so I knew that the processor was trying to read, and was never writing. After studying the schematics, I found that there were two primary sources for data on the data bus for reads when no I/O cards were present. One were the ROMs and the other was the latches on page S-10.
These latches are 74LS257s at location B6 and B7 on the motherboard. I checked the ROMs to see which ones, if any, were being selected and found that only ROM F8 was being read. I pulled the 74LS257s and the data bus looked cleaner, though I knew the system couldn't boot, since it couldn't read DRAM without these l |
story campaign last night, and am still messing around with its plethora of sidequests and optional challenges. If you’re just getting started and want to know what to do (and what not to do), I’ve got you covered. Let’s do some tips.
Go stealthy.
You can go in guns blazing if you want, but Watch Dogs 2 works much better if you go for stealth. It’s a more rewarding way to play, and it makes it much easier to survive.
Stay nonlethal when you can.
You have a variety of different options for getting around guards, and a lot of them are deadly. Marcus’s stun gun is one nonlethal means of dispatching guards, and I recommend using it when you can. For starters, it’s much more in character for him to be knocking guards out while he does his hacking. It also makes the game a touch more interesting, since K.O.’d guards can wake up after a period of time.
GIF
Count the Z’s on sleeping guards.
Watch Dogs 2 borrows Metal Gear Solid’s “count the Z’s” approach to sleeping guards. As time passes, a stunned guard will go from three Zs to two, to one. If a guard only has one Z on them, they’re about to wake up. You can fill a sleeping guard’s Zs back up by shooting them again with your stun gun.
If you kill someone, tell yourself they’re just sleeping.
Marcus’s melee attacks are always lethal. There’s no way to put a sleeper hold on someone; you just choke them out or beat them to death with your pool-ball mace. The game doesn’t punish you for this or anything, it just feels out of character for Marcus to wantonly murder people. I decided that Marcus had just knocked out whoever he killed. Shh... they’re sleeping.
Stick to cover.
If you’re sneaking around, stay in cover as much as possible. The enemy AI isn’t all that bright, but they’ll see you very easily if you’re running around out of cover. If you have to get from point A to point B, use the cover-transition system (aim where you’re going and press X/A) instead of moving freely.
Consider playing on easy.
Watch Dogs 2 is a fun game, but it has some of the worst checkpointing I’ve come across in a long time. Multiple times, I’ve died on the final phase of a multi-phase mission only to be kicked back to the very start. Consider knocking the difficulty down to easy, which will help you survive gunfights more easily. You might have more fun, and you can always change it back.
Get the aerial drone as soon as you can afford it.
Marcus can equip two remote-controlled drones to help him infiltrate the game’s many guarded compounds. You get the R.C. car almost right off the bat, but you have to save up and buy the aerial drone. Do so as fast as you can—the aerial drone is easily the most useful tool in the entire game.
Use your aerial drone at every opportunity.
Before you head into a new restricted area, you should always whip out your drone first and see what’s what. The drone can fly into ducts and bounce off walls and ceilings without taking damage, which means it can get above and inside every area. Take the lay of the land and be sure to tag as many guards as you can see. Drone recon is also usually a good time to grab any access keys you see floating around (they’re coded with a red cloud of squiggles and a key icon).
If a guard is detecting your drone, quickly deactivate it.
If your R.C. car or your aerial drone get spotted, guards will throw rocks at them or shoot them. That’ll leave you waiting on a cooldown before you can spawn another one, and it’ll put the guards on alert. If you see that you’re being spotted, quickly hold down the circle/B button and instantly recall the drone. The guard will forget they saw it and you’ll be able to re-deploy the drone with no harm done.
Know your locks.
The game actually doesn’t explain the various types of locks all that well, so I’ll take a crack at it. A red locked door is usually on a closed circuit. You can trace the red line from the door to a red power box somewhere on the wall. You have to hack these boxes in person or with your R.C. car.
GIF I always use my R.C. car, because the hacking animation is extremely good.
Other times, you’ll need an access key to open a red door—these are located on guards or laptops that you can see surrounded by a red cloud in your hacking view. Hack the person or laptop (a ranged hack is fine) and you’ll be able to open the door.
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Sometimes a locked junction box will be accompanied by a second box that you can interact with. Activate the second box and you’ll see a symbol that looks like this:
…which means that you have to connect a bunch of Pipe Dream-like junctures to turn the pipes from red to blue before you can access the locked box.
Lastly, if you’re on a mission, your hacking objective will usually be highlighted in orange. The game will tell you if these are a physical hack or not, but generally speaking, Marcus has to do these hacks in person. Sometimes it’s a quick download, and sometimes you’ll have to hold out while a longer download takes place. Watch Dogs 2 doesn’t do a good job of communicating what each hack requires, so it’s best to be prepared.
Use your aerial drone to solve environmental locks.
Those pipe-flow locks are often spread over a large area. Even if you’re underground or in a confined space, it’s much easier to solve these using your aerial drone than it is to lug Marcus around from point to point, particularly for the ones that have a timer.
Leave patrolling guards alone.
The minute you stun or kill a guard, even if you do it remotely, the other guards will often deviate from their patrols and begin to look for you. Sometimes you can get away with picking off a lone guard, but even that will usually lead to an increase in alert status. In general, it’s good to keep from ruffling any feathers for as long as humanly possible.
Try to use fuse boxes as distractions only.
You can hack a fuse box to emit a spark that attracts a guard to come investigate. At that point, it can be very tempting to take the next step and shock the guard into unconsciousness. Resist this urge. Fuse box explosions make lots of noise, and the odds are someone will find the body of the guard you knocked out. First and foremost, think of fuse boxes as methods of distracting and directing the AI, not as weapons for knocking guards out from a distance.
If you’re near the end of the mission and get spotted, do whatever you can to get out alive.
Don’t count on having gotten a checkpoint when you completed that final objective—it’s not worth risking being thrown back to the very start of the mission. Shoot your way out, or just run. The important thing is that you escape.
Be careful when hacking during a car chase.
If you’re being chased, the game will occasionally throw up prompts for you to blow up a steam vent or toss up another sort of obstacle to slow your pursuers. Thing is, sometimes the cars chasing you will pull directly alongside you, and you’ll get a prompt for a countermeasure that will also blow up your car. It’s easy to press the button whenever you get the prompt, but be prudent. If a pursuer is right next to you, you could wind up killing Marcus and having to do the whole chase (or even the whole mission) over from the start.
Stop onrushing enemies cold with the old hack ’n stun.
If you’ve got a dude in body armor rushing your position with a shotgun, you can stop him if you do things in the right order. Tap the left shoulder button to automatically hack his headset or phone, which will stop him cold and lock him in an animation. Then pop out and nail him with your stun gun. I have taken out whole squads of heavily armed dudes this way, one right after the other. It works like a charm.
Get the right research upgrades.
Most of the upgrades Marcus can get aren’t all that exciting, but a few will make your life much easier. Obviously you should get the first of each skill tree, but after that, here’s what to prioritize.
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Proximity Scanner: This lets your aerial drone tag enemies through walls, which makes recon much more useful and can be a lifesaver when infiltrating larger buildings.
This lets your aerial drone tag enemies through walls, which makes recon much more useful and can be a lifesaver when infiltrating larger buildings. Steady Aim: An increase to stun-gun range is extremely helpful. Get this one early.
An increase to stun-gun range is extremely helpful. Get this one early. Hijacker: Very nice to be able to immediately drive any car in the game without risking alerting the cops.
Very nice to be able to immediately drive any car in the game without risking alerting the cops. Improved Profiler: This tags anyone with a lot of money in their account, which makes it much easier to prioritize who you should rob. You only get around $500-700 a pop, but it adds up. Don’t think too hard about the fact that you’re stealing hundreds of dollars from innocent people. Shh... Marcus is a good dude... shhh...
This tags anyone with a lot of money in their account, which makes it much easier to prioritize who you should rob. You only get around $500-700 a pop, but it adds up. Don’t think too hard about the fact that you’re stealing hundreds of dollars from innocent people. Shh... Marcus is a good dude... shhh... Gang Attack: This is a really silly ability but also a lot of fun to use. I get the sense that Watch Dogs 2 was supposed to have a more fleshed out gang metagame at some point, and this ability is an echo of that.
Use the map to pause the game.
It’s actually kinda hard to pause Watch Dogs 2, but the fastest way to do so is to go to your map. You can also go to the settings menu on your phone, though that takes a few extra steps. On PS4 you can hit the PlayStation button to pop out of the game and quickly pause it, though I don’t know if that works on Xbox One.
Always grab Key Data when you see it.
One of the collectible-types in Watch Dogs 2 is called Key Data. They’re marked by a white skull in a green diamond. They’re usually pretty easy to get, and most of the time you can grab them with your aerial drone. You definitely want to do that, because you’ll need to collect a specific piece of Key Data to unlock each of Marcus’ research nodes. Key Data is also pretty fun to find and it doesn’t take very long.
Go to pawn shops every so often.
As you drive around the Bay Area, stop by pawn shops whenever you see one nearby. They look like a diamond ring on your map. There, you can sell all the junk you’ve looted out of people’s glove compartments and make a few bucks.
Track down all the operation intel.
This being a Ubisoft game, you’ll start out with a ton of icons on your map. Be sure to track down all the ones that mark side missions—they’re called “operation intel” and are marked with small-ish orange and black icons. Each one will open up a new side mission for you to do, and some of them are pretty cool.
Go clothing shopping.
The clothes in Watch Dogs 2 are surprisingly good, and shopping in the game is actually pretty fun. Whenever you pass by a clothing store, stop by and see what they’ve got.
Talk to your crew in between missions.
Wrench, Sitara and Josh are all hanging out at DedSec HQ in between missions, and you can go talk to them. I recommend doing so. Like the rest of Watch Dogs 2, these conversations can be dopey and annoying, but also like Watch Dogs 2, they’re just as often charming and funny.
Download all the apps.
You can go to the app store on Marcus’s phone and download various apps that let you do things like listen to music or order a car for delivery. It’s easy to forget to check the app store, and there were a few apps that I didn’t download until I was more than a dozen hours into the game. Don’t be like me! Get them apps.
Pet all the dogs.
There are dogs in Watch Dogs 2. You can watch them, but you can also pet them. You should do this. (If any video game gives you the opportunity to pet dogs, you should take it.) You can also send your little drone buddies to go play around with the dogs you find. Furry friends love R.C. cars, turns out.
Prepare for the possibility that you might kill a dog.
Because Marcus has no nonlethal melee attack, there is a distinct possibility that you will beat a dog to death in this game. There’s probably nothing for it. It was you or him. Prepare yourself emotionally for this turn of events.
Turn on the seamless multiplayer features (once they’re working).
The game’s seamless multiplayer features are currently bugged and inoperable, so you can’t use them at the moment. When they’re back up and running, however, I recommend turning ‘em on and doing invasions and fighting off invaders. It’s not a very deep system, but it’s still a good time.
When you’re being invaded, rely on your drone.
If someone invades you, immediately pull out your aerial drone to find them. During the few invasions that I’ve fought off, I found it extremely difficult to find my invader on foot. The moment I switched to the drone, however, I was able to profile everyone in my area in less than a minute. The drone may well prove to be overpowered when it comes to finding invaders. Use it if you want to win.
Find a co-op buddy.
Watch Dogs 2’s co-op is a hell of a good time. It’s more fleshed-out than I was expecting and it’s arguably more fun to tackle big stealth missions with a buddy to watch your back than it is to go it alone. If you know anyone else who has the game and might want to play co-op, give it a go. It’s one of the best surprises in the game.
Those are my tips for starting out in Watch Dogs 2. If you have any of your own, feel free to add them below. If I come up with more tips over the next few days, I’ll update this article with ‘em.
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Good luck, and happy dog-watching.Black Sun Entertainment, a company we heard about for the first time today, has posted an incredible proof of concept trailer for a new animated movie trilogy called "Azureus Rising." This had better get made.
The animation is fantastic, and the storyline involves some kind of ninja cyborg (cybrid?) doing exactly what you want him to be doing.
Black Sun Entertainment posted this plot description on its YouTube page:
Azureus Rising is the proof-of-concept for an all new feature film trilogy. Azureus is the story of a young man who after escaping death and enduring a life changing journey - matures into a heroic freedom fighter. Azureus Rising is an epic tale of self discovery, obligation and love against all odds.
We're sold. Check out their website for more. Let us know what you think in the comments.A Colorado moose bull isn’t hiding his feelings for a newly-installed male moose statue in the town of Grand Lake.
Within a week of the statue going up, residents started noticing that the moose was spending more time in the town.
“He’s not too shy,” Bob Balink explained to KUSA. “There’s two things he wants to do. And one of ’em is eat.”
“The strange thing is he’s trying to mate with a statue,” he added. “Because they’re both male.”
The moose courtship has even become a tourist attraction in Grand Lake.
“He’s in love,” one woman told the station. “He’s nuzzling, and he kisses and he walks around, and he… gets on top of him.”
The moose has left a few scratch marks from mounting the statue, but residents don’t seem to mind.
“I say, what happens in Grand Lakes, stays in Grand Lakes,” a resident insisted to KUSA.
Watch the video below from KUSA, broadcast June 2, 2013.SINGAPORE - In some countries, globalisation is viewed as a monster that wrests jobs from workers.
But in Singapore, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong sees it as a creator of jobs and booster of workers' wages.
This is because as a globalised nation, "we can play a role which is servicing the region, which is servicing the world''.
In doing so, "we can have jobs in Singapore which are better paying for a wide range of our people," Mr Lee said in an interview with Australia's ABC Radio National on Saturday (June 10), the written transcript of which was released by the Prime Minister's Office.
The interview covered a range of issues, including the strategic power shifts in Asia, China's growing influence, the terrorism threat and how Singapore is preparing for the economy of the future.
While Mr Lee is confident that technology will generate jobs, "the question is what kind of jobs and will it be able to use the talents and meet the aspirations of our people?''.
PM Lee (right) in an interview with Australia's ABC Radio National on Saturday (June 10). PHOTO: MINISTRY OF COMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATION
Also, "can we prepare our people for the jobs which we think they should be capable of doing?"
He did not think the answer lies in having the money to do it.
What's crucial, he said, are three factors.
One, the mindset that technology can make a big difference and a desire to make full use of it.
Two, there must be organisations that run efficiently, "not just automating your own way of doing things, you may have to restructure all together".
Three, the country must have people with "the ideas and technical know-how to make the projects happen".
This includes having the managers, leaders, promoters and people who may not be techies but "know what is snake oil and what is real'.
Mr Lee thinks Singapore is "some distance'' from such an environmentment and ethos, and getting there will require "a lot of work.
On the strategic shifts in Asia, he sees China's growth and influence in the region continuing to grow.
"We are happy to see China prospering, we are happy to see China playing a constructive and positive role in the region.
"We hope that this will be within an international framework where all countries can prosper, big and small, in a rules-based international order," he said.
"If that is the case, then it will be welcome and it will be positive.
"But it is quite hard to do because when you have a major shift in the strategic balance like this, it is easy to have anxieties, nervousness and pushbacks.
"I think that is something which China has to be conscious of and is conscious of."
Mr Lee sees the Belt and Road initiative as a constructive way for China to integrate with other countries.
Proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping, the development strategy focuses on building connectivity and cooperation with China's neighbours.
The Prime Minister said Singapore supports the Belt and Road initiative as well as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, another China-led project to support infrastructure building in the Asia Pacific region.
India is also growing, he noted. "It is still not as vibrant or as big as China is as an economy, but it has tremendous potential because its population is younger."
Like Australia, Singapore is adjusting to the strategic shift, he said and added: "No country can be an island unto itself or world unto itself. Not even the biggest country."
Mr Lee believes the US will continue to play an important role in the security of the region. "That is something which many countries benefit from and support in their own varying ways."
The new US administration under President Donald Trump is "still defining a new direction for itself", he said.
"We should work with it and hope they will be able to work something out which will be in the long-term interests of the US and the region, which will mean is good for Singapore and I think will be good for Australia," he added.Disclosure of Material Connection: I received one or more of the products or services mentioned above for free in the hope that I would mention it on my blog. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."
Schwan’s Home Service Review + Recipes
I’ve heard of Schwan’s Home Delivery service before but have never took the time to actually look into it. Recently I was given the opportunity to review their services/food at a very awesome discount and jumped right onto to their website! They have so much to choose from and at nice, competitive prices that it was hard for me to choose just exactly what I wanted. I had a long list but eventually narrowed it down to two products, Boneless Skinless Chicken Breasts and Chocolate Chip Frozen Cookie Dough.
Ordering & Delivery
Ordering was simple, except the fact that I couldn’t narrow it down to what I wanted! I wanted it all, everything looked so delicious! A great thing that I learned was that they accept EBT cards! You can’t use it online so make sure that if you do use EBT that you have the card on you during delivery time. Prices weren’t so bad, especially since they deliver the food to your door.
I have to say that the delivery driver was super nice! He introduced himself, shook my hand, and asked if there is anything else he could do for me as far as setting up any repeat services. I declined since I was reviewing them for the first time and wasn’t sure how we would like it. That all changed after eating the food!
Oh. My. God…the chicken breasts are to die for! I was worried that they would be tough but they turned out moist & tasty. I cooked them frozen in our NuWave Oven using only Seasoned Salt. By the way, if you have never heard of a NuWave oven then you are missing out! My father-in-law bought me one in the beginning of this year. I love mine and rarely use the regular oven anymore.
The chocolate chip cookies came out amazing. Unfortunately, my new phone ate my pictures that I had took of them from start to finish. 🙁 They didn’t last long at all! Schwan’s made it simple since it was individual pucks of dough. Just pop them on the pan & go!
I have come across a few other recipes using Schwan’s food!
You Can Save $ On Your First Order at Schwans Home Service! (expires 10/31/14)
OR, you can enter to win a $25 Schwan’s gift card! Enter below using the giveaway widget & GOOD LUCK! 🙂
{Hosted by Loving Life and Living On Less}
**Daily Deals From A Nerd Mom is not responsible for choosing the winner or prize shipment. This giveaway is in no way administered, sponsored, or endorsed by or associated with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or any other social media.
Like this: Like Loading...To the west you can see a natural light. For the first time in your life, you are looking at the outside world.
Got shivers when I read those two lines in preparation for this write-up, just like when I first read them, all those years ago. Proves you don't need walls of text to evoke emotion and the gravity of the situation in which the Vault Dweller finds herself. Less is more, and the writer aced this one.
Fallout doesn't waste any time in granting the player total freedom of exploration. Yes, there are some rats to kill and a vault to explore, if we like (it's only plausible that we would waste time doing so), but five minutes after the FMV we can loot that corpse and hit the Wasteland in search of the water chip.
The pacing of the whole campaign is impeccable, actually. Thank you, doesn't waste any time in granting the player total freedom of exploration. Yes, there are some rats to kill and a vault to explore,(it's only plausible that we would waste time doing so), but five minutes after the FMV we can loot that corpse and hit the Wasteland in search of the water chip.The pacing of the whole campaign is impeccable, actually. Thank you, time limit
***
The Lord of Murder shall perish / But in his doom he shall spawn a score of mortal progeny / Chaos will be sown from their passage / So sayeth the wise Alaundo.
Please refer to Baldur's Gate prologue. Candlekeep is similar in that nothing is stopping players foregoing introductory quests and tutorial dialogue and just bee-lining to Gorion's death and non-linear exploration of the Sword Coast. Perfect.Please refer to this post for more info on theprologue.
***
The crossbow. Sometimes you've got to make a silent takedown.
This is not a prologue but who cares? No prologue is even better than a short prologue! Here, giving the player a simple but meaningful choice serves as a great way to engage them and set the tone straight away. Makes you instantly feel like a badass. The choice you make affects the immediate approach you take on this first mission of Deus Ex, and potentially the style of play adopted over its course. Perfect start for an almost perfect game.
Also, yes. Deus Ex is an RPG: An action RPG that has more meaningful reactivity than many classic cRPGs out there. In fact, a very strong argument could be made for why it's the greatest game of all-time.
* * * I have completed maybe a dozen runs over the years and never played the tutorial because the devs wisely set it apart from the game itself.Also, yes.is an RPG: An action RPG that has more meaningful reactivity than many classic cRPGs out there. In fact, a very strong argument could be made for why it's the greatest game of all-time.
A laughing boy. A woman with golden skin. A wall of screaming souls...
Bear God's Barrow is my fave starter dungeon. It's well-presented, perfectly itemized and offers multiple pathways, optional Imaskari vaults to explore, and an uber-bear blocking your escape to the surface of Mulsantir. The interjections by our clinical but compassionate companion serve to add extra depth to these initial stages of Mask of the Betrayer, without becoming tiresome. I have covered its short yet content rich prologue Theis my fave starter dungeon. It's well-presented, perfectly itemized and offers multiple pathways, optional Imaskari vaults to explore, and an uber-bear blocking your escape to the surface of Mulsantir. The interjections by our clinical but compassionate companion serve to add extra depth to these initial stages of, without becoming tiresome. I have covered its short yet content rich prologue here, in-depth.
Also, thank you for giving Safiya
* **
And then there's waking up on a slab and having a skull float over and start talking to you...
The Mortuary of Planescape: Torment.
Well, I already espoused some of its virtues at the end of my Well, I already espoused some of its virtues at the end of my Numenera review (so please refer to that) but what I didn't say there was that TNO can hit the Hive five minutes after sliding off his slab. Great for replays, of which we've all conducted many.
***
One has to remember, in many cases the player just went through an exhaustive chargen process; the last thing I want is to be bored to death by spoon-feeding and overly long prologues. I just want genuine game-play and role-playing ASAP. It's not too much to ask, is it? Well, it seems even a few classics got it wrong...
Prologues that don't make the cut
It's a peaceful village. Except for the plants possessed by evil spirits. And of course, The Temple of Trials filled with those deadly spear traps and the man-eating giant ants. - The Chosen One.
W hile no one can reasonably argue against Fallout 2 holding Top 5 status in the genre, the decision to sully its beginning with the off-putting Temple of Trials is just puzzling as hell. Fallout didn't have a mandatory "tutorial" so why did Fallout 2 have to? And why force non-combat characters to impale ants and scorpions with a spear, or punch them to death bare-fisted? Blame the clueless suits at Interplay for only allowing skilled veterans to get through ToT passively, and in under five minutes. - The Chosen One.
You know, there's a reason a mod exists that places the exit grid to Arroyo just outside the entrance to ToT: it's because ToT sucks!
Not this shit again!
Ah, the Child of Bhaal has awoken. It is time for more... experiments.
Again, there is a reason the Dungeon Be Gone mod exists and enjoys such a high download count: Chateau Irenicus is just too long and boring! The banters, interjections and scripted events are way over the top and mostly just fluff. The writing itself is poor, too. That said, the first appearance of Irenicus was ok and it was great to catch up with old friends, aka the canon party. Or was it? Maybe you didn't adventure with those guys in BG? Talk about rail-roading... Anyway, for ridiculously in-depth treatment of the Chateau please refer to this post. It covers almost every single word. And there are A LOT of words. You know, there's a reason a mod exists that places the exit grid to Arroyo just outside the entrance to ToT: it's because ToT sucks!
The first 20 minutes of Icewind Dale 2 has you running around the Targos docks killing scores of GOBLINS. So yeah, it sucks ass. After that the Prologue gets complex and nuanced - too much so for its own good (no walkthrough has covered all of its reactivity). But the main problem is its progression which cannot be fast-tracked like its predecessor: time-consuming FedExing is mandatory if you are to trigger the goblin invasion on the Palisade. This is the longest IE prologue and the worst because of it. Just show me the orcs, ffs.
Original IWD prologue is covered
The prologue for the Neverwinter Nights OC has already been The first 20 minutes ofhas you running around the Targos docks killing scores of GOBLINS. So yeah, it sucks ass. After that the Prologue gets complex and nuanced - too much so for its own good (no walkthrough has covered all of its reactivity). But the main problem is its progression which cannot be fast-tracked like its predecessor: time-consuming FedExing is mandatory if you are to trigger the goblin invasion on the Palisade. This is the longest IE prologue and the worst because of it. Just show me the orcs, ffs.Original IWD prologue is covered here, in-depth.The prologue for theOC has already been covered by me, in-depth. tl;dr, it's bad but skippable.
Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, Morrowind (pretty brief chargen prologue but I don't like unskippable dialogue), Oblivion (shitty tutorial dungeon), Oblivion With Guns (even shittier), Dragon Age: Origins (its Origins segments), Gothic, Gothic 2, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, and many others.
Next post: Reflections on Diablo II. Titles omitted at this point:(pretty brief chargen prologue but I don't like unskippable dialogue),(shitty tutorial dungeon),(even shittier), Temple of Elemental Evil (its opening vignettes),(its Origins segments),, and many others.
by default!I had an occasion to use this instructable tonight and found that three refinements were necessary for the repair to work properly and in sharing them below it is my hope that others will at least give this solution a try because it is a clever option and I would not have thought of it were it not for this site. That said, let's dive in.
1. First, the need to make the zip tie head thinner is necessary and without question, however, the process by which you do it is important. I found that for the zip ties I had it was not possible to use an exacto or disposable precision blade because the plastic was too hard. I ended up using a large butcher knife and a kitchen chopping block. PLEASE use caution when doing this. Take careful note of where your fingers are before cutting. If you have smaller hands or are at all unsure about your ability to do this, get an adult or someone with strong, steady hands to do it for you.
2. Next, it is extremely unlikely that the thinning of the head with a knife will be precise enough. I found it easier and more precise to refine the thinning process with a metal nail file. The one I used has a black plastic handle about 1.25 inches long and the metal file portion is about 2 inches. They are available in the beauty section of any popular store like Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, Target, etc.
The thickness must be such that the zip tie head does not stick up above the RJ45 connector when in place. I found it easier to keep the nail file still in one hand while moving the zip tie head back and forth across it.
When the thickness is precisely the same height as the top of the RJ45 connector, the next step is to cut the head of the zip tie to a shorter length, perhaps in half. This is because the point of the "click" which secures the connector in the jack is quite a precise location and my zip tie head was just too long thus causing the notch to be too far back and not click. Use the nail file to file the end square and smooth.
3. Lastly, I found that using a small rubber band around the connector under the zip tie will provide a better spring action. An additional rubber band around the cable and zip tie on the cable area behind the connector entirely will provide additional support and finally about a half inch behind that is where I put the zip tie to hold it all tight. This makes three points (see pictures) where the modified zip tie is held to the cable and this is important because any side to side movement will cause the "click" to fail and the connector to come out of the jack.
Caution: As stated by the author of this instructable, this is a temporary repair and certainly is not something you'd want to do in a business environment for more than a short time period. For the home user, however, it should suffice. However, there are certain jacks where this fix may not be suitable; for example if the jack is hard to access or is where the connector will be the only thing holding the cable in the jack. For the latter, some sort of strain relief rigging is required either with a piece of string or wire holding the cable up or some type of clever cable management. This would most likely occur if the repaired end of the cable was connected to a switch or router mounted on a wall or in a rack. But that's for another article!
Feedback: Some commenters here have suggested that the better solution is to cut off the broken connector altogether and replace it with a new one. Respectfully, this is not always feasible. Having been a network administrator for over a decade, I've run into several situations where an "in the field" repair was the only option.Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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The US Supreme Court’s conservative majority continued its project of bartering off American democracy to the highest bidder with a decision Monday that will make it dramatically harder to counter free-spending attack campaigns funded by billionaire donors and corporate spin machines. Ad Policy
With a 5-4 vote, the Court has struck down a matching-funds mechanism in Arizona’s Clean Elections Law that allowed candidates who accepted public funding to match the spending of privately funded candidates and independent groups that might attack them. Under the Arizona law—which has long been considered a national model for using public funds to pay for campaigns—candidates who accept public funding are limited in what they can spend.
Candidates who refuse public funding are not so constrained; and nor are independent groups that support privately funded candidates; indeed, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s sweeping Citizens United v. FEC ruling of 2010, which cleared the way for corporations to spend as much as they like to influence election, restrictions to the flow of private money into politics have been all but eliminated.
Faced with the threat of being overwhelmed by private money, no candidate would go the “Clean Elections” route, unless some mechanism was put in place to counter attack ads by privately funded opponents and groups associated with those opponents. The Arizona Clean Elections law provided that mechanism under a formula requiring that for every dollar a privately funded candidate (or group supporting that candidate) spent above established spending limits, a dollar in additional public funding would go to the “Clean Elections” candidate.
The genius of the Arizona law was two-fold. The guarantee of matching funds assured that candidates who accepted “Clean Elections” money would be able to compete on a level playing field and, in so doing, this discouraged privately funded |
erson 45 Steve Van Buren 1950-10-15 4,000 203 Clinton Portis 23y 81d Eric Dickerson 33 Steve Van Buren 1949 3,000 >250 Clinton Portis 22y 104d Eric Dickerson 27 Cliff Battles 1937 2,000 >250 Clinton Portis 22y 48d Eric Dickerson 18 Cliff Battles 1935 1,000 >250 Rashaan Salaam 21y 77d Adrian Peterson 8 Cliff Battles
Bronko Nagurski
Jim Musick 1933
Receiving Yards [ edit ]
Yards # of Players Youngest Fewest Games First 22,000 1 Jerry Rice 41y 7d Jerry Rice 277 Jerry Rice 2003-10-20 21,000 1 Jerry Rice 40y 21d Jerry Rice 262 Jerry Rice 2002-11-03 20,000 1 Jerry Rice 39y 57d Jerry Rice 250 Jerry Rice 2001-12-09 19,000 1 Jerry Rice 38y 37d Jerry Rice 234 Jerry Rice 2000-11-19 18,000 1 Jerry Rice 37y 47d Jerry Rice 217 Jerry Rice 1999-11-29 17,000 1 Jerry Rice 36y 12d Jerry Rice 197 Jerry Rice 1998-10-25 16,000 2 Jerry Rice 34y 42d Jerry Rice 184 Jerry Rice 1996-11-24 15,000 6 Jerry Rice 33y 72d Jerry Rice 172 Jerry Rice 1995-12-24 14,000 12 Randy Moss 32y 275d Jerry Rice 164 James Lofton 1994-01-03 13,000 18 Randy Moss 31y 298d Jerry Rice 154 Steve Largent 1989-12-10 12,000 26 Randy Moss 30y 306d Jerry Rice 142 Charlie Joiner 1986-11-16 11,000 34 Calvin Johnson 30y 37d Calvin Johnson 127 Don Maynard 1971-10-17 10,000 48 Randy Moss 28y 314d Julio Jones 104 Don Maynard 1969-11-02 9,000 61 Randy Moss 27y 310d Julio Jones 95 Raymond Berry 1966-12-10 8,000 96 Randy Moss 26y 297d Lance Alworth 83 Billy Howton 1963-09-29 7,000 139 Larry Fitzgerald 26y 111d Lance Alworth 72 Don Hutson 1944 6,000 192 Randy Moss 25y 270d Lance Alworth 62 Don Hutson 1943 5,000 >250 Randy Moss 24y 292d Lance Alworth 52 Don Hutson 1942 4,000 >250 Randy Moss 23y 308d Odell Beckham
Lance Alworth 42 Don Hutson 1941 3,000 >250 Mike Evans 23y 74d Charley Hennigan 29 Don Hutson 1940 2,000 >250 Larry Fitzgerald 22y 109d Charley Hennigan
Bill Groman 20 Don Hutson 1938 1,000 >250 Mike Evans 21y 129d Harlon Hill
Lionel Taylor
Bill Groman 10 (Five players confirmed) by 1937
Note [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]Man electrocuted while attempting to break into business, officials say
Medical officials in Milwaukee believe a man was electrocuted while trying to break into a business, possibly to steal copper.Paramedics were called to Greer Tire at 6550 N. 40th St. after an employee noticed a man hanging over the roof of the building."There was a man slumped over the edge of the roof, right by where the electrical connections are coming in," Pat Greer said.VIDEO: Man electrocuted while cutting power lines on roof of Milwaukee businessGreer described the terrifying scene that workers came upon early this week at his north side tire wholesale business."He was leaning over the cap at the time with the wire cutters in his hands and had been electrocuted," Greer said.Fire Department officials believed the man may have been attempting to cut the business security system wire and was electrocuted in the process. Authorities suspect the victim may have been on the roof to steal copper wiring.Devon Williams, 38, was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics.Investigators believe Williams had cut two thick wires to the building, but had been protected by his rubber shoes and rubber handles on his bolt cutters.We Energies employees investigated the scene and believe that Williams leaned over to cut a third wire when his chest made contact with the aluminum siding on the building, causing live current to flow through his body.We Energies employees told investigators that numerous copper wire thefts had been reported in that vicinity.Investigators believe that Williams may have had an accomplice with a ladder, but that individual likely left the scene following the electrocution.We Energies said it has increased security around its substations, and is working with Milwaukee and other cities to guard against cases of copper theft in vacant homes and businesses.
Medical officials in Milwaukee believe a man was electrocuted while trying to break into a business, possibly to steal copper.
Paramedics were called to Greer Tire at 6550 N. 40th St. after an employee noticed a man hanging over the roof of the building.
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"There was a man slumped over the edge of the roof, right by where the electrical connections are coming in," Pat Greer said.
VIDEO: Man electrocuted while cutting power lines on roof of Milwaukee business
Greer described the terrifying scene that workers came upon early this week at his north side tire wholesale business.
"He was leaning over the cap at the time with the wire cutters in his hands and had been electrocuted," Greer said.
Fire Department officials believed the man may have been attempting to cut the business security system wire and was electrocuted in the process. Authorities suspect the victim may have been on the roof to steal copper wiring.
Devon Williams, 38, was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics.
Investigators believe Williams had cut two thick wires to the building, but had been protected by his rubber shoes and rubber handles on his bolt cutters.
We Energies employees investigated the scene and believe that Williams leaned over to cut a third wire when his chest made contact with the aluminum siding on the building, causing live current to flow through his body.
We Energies employees told investigators that numerous copper wire thefts had been reported in that vicinity.
Investigators believe that Williams may have had an accomplice with a ladder, but that individual likely left the scene following the electrocution.
We Energies said it has increased security around its substations, and is working with Milwaukee and other cities to guard against cases of copper theft in vacant homes and businesses.
AlertMeA senior company executive shouldered a cyclist to the ground and began strangling and beating him for riding his bike on a Dublin city-centre footpath, a court has heard.
David Corcoran (50), of Collinswood, Whitehall, Dublin, pleaded guilty to assault causing harm to Philip Fitzgerald who suffered dental injuries during the incident at Clanwilliam Terrace, Dublin 2 on July 1st, 2015.
Judge Michael Walsh said Corcoran’s actions were completely disproportionate but ruled he could avoid a criminal record and a possible sentence by paying €3,930 to cover Mr Fitzgerald’s medical expenses and new false teeth. He was also ordered to donate €2,500 to charity.
Garda Brian Cleary told Dublin District Court that Corcoran was walking along Clanwilliam Terrace at about 10.30am when a cyclist approached on the footpath. Garda Cleary said Corcoran shouldered Mr Fitzgerald off his bicycle causing him to fall to the ground.
Headlock
The court heard Corcoran punched Mr Fitzgerald in the face and head and got him into a headlock and “kneed him while he was in a headlock”. The attack ended when members of the public intervened.
Defence solicitor Eugene Dunne said his client was a senior company executive who had no prior criminal convictions. He said cyclists using the footpath had been a problem in the area. Vans were parked on the side of the path and his client leaned in and the hit the bike causing the cyclist to come off.
Judge Walsh said the businessman went further than that and had used the strap of the victim’s helmet “to try and strangle him, the effect was strangulation”.
Mr Dunne said Corcoran was apologetic for his behaviour and prepared to pay the cyclist’s out of pocket expenses and to donate money to charity.
Judge Walsh noted Corcoran first saw Mr Fitzgerald approaching on his bike when he was 20 feet away and said he could have stood back to let him by.
The judge accepted it can be annoying but said “we live in a congested city and sometimes needs must”.
Disproportionate
Mr Dunne said the cyclist should not have been on the path but Judge Walsh described Corcoran’s actions as disproportionate. “It was not more than a very temporary minor nuisance, we have it on every street of the city but we do not get someone by the throat and try and strangle them,” the judge said.
He was also told by Garda Cleary that Corcoran was co-operative and Mr Fitzgerald was happy to put the matter behind him if he gets his dentures replaced.
Noting his remorse, Judge Walsh adjourned the case saying he will strike it out if Corcoran pays €3,930 to the victim to cover his dental injuries and donates €2,500 to the Capuchin Day Centre in Dublin.It's been nearly two years since he left the White House with the lowest domestic and global approval ratings of any US president in living memory. But, it seems, we still can't get enough of George W Bush.
This morning's papers lead with extracts, snippets and lines from Bush's new memoir, Decision Points. The Times (£) is serialising the book and has an exclusive interview with "The Decider" himself. The Guardian's front page focuses on how Bush instructed the Pentagon "to draw up plans to attack Iran". The Indie, oddly, leads with a review of the book from the New York Timeschief literary critic, Michiko Kakutani.
One bit from the extracts of the book that stands out to me, and perhaps sums up both the ridiculous and odious nature of George Bush and his presidency, is the section on Hurricane Katrina and the fallout from it. The ex-president describes how upset and angry he was to hear, at the time, how the rapper Kanye West had told television viewers: "George Bush doesn't care about black people."
From the Guardian:
"Five years later, I can barely write these words without feeling disgusted. I am deeply insulted by the suggestion that we allowed American citizens to suffer because they were black... The more I thought about it, the angrier I felt. I was raised to believe that racism was one of the greatest evils in society," Bush writes. "I faced a lot of criticism as president. I didn't like hearing people claim I had lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was a racist, because of the response to Katrina, represented an all-time low. I told Laura at the time that it was the worst moment of my presidency. I feel the same way today."
Hmm. So the botched response by the federal government to Hurricane Katrina itself, the costliest natural disaster in US history, which led to the deaths of 1,836 people, wasn't Bush's "all-time low", it was all the nasty name-calling afterwards.
And even "today", with the benefit of hindsight, the suggestion from a rapper that he might be a "racist" is considered by Dubbya as "the worst moment" of his presidency, not the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; not the failure to prevent the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, which killed 3,000 people on American soil; not the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib Prison; not the hundreds of thousands of people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan as a direct result of his so-called wars of liberation.
Words fail me...In the Grant Houses, a public-housing project in West Harlem, he was known simply as Bam, short for the superstrong cartoon baby Bamm-Bamm in “The Flintstones.” He had a reputation as a fierce street fighter. At 15, he posted a video in which he knocks a man out cold in a hallway.
Prosecutors say Taylonn Murphy was also eager to be a leader in the housing project’s gang, a loosely aligned group of older teenagers who called themselves 3 Staccs and regularly battled two nearby crews, Money Avenue and the Make It Happen Boys — sometimes with fists or pipes, sometimes with guns.
Those feuds, played out on the streets and on social media, eventually led to the murder of Mr. Murphy’s sister, Tayshana, in a dingy high-rise hallway in September 2011. Ms. Murphy was a high school basketball star, scouted by several colleges, and her fatal shooting became emblematic of the toll of crew violence over turf and respect.
Nearly three years after the killing, the police raided the Grant Houses and neighboring Manhattanville Houses, arresting 103 young men on conspiracy charges in one of the largest roundups of people suspected of gang membership in New York City’s history, a sweep intended to dismantle the crews and end the violence.Strict editorial control may have its benefits, but it is rarely unbiased. Audiences that face a flow of slanted information from a centralized outlet are not likely to get a full picture of a story.
This state of affairs is widely criticized as a threat to true freedom of speech, especially in authoritarian nations where media are commonly used to implement propagandist agenda. Extensive usage of social networks by media and public figures effectively follows the same pattern.
An alternative decentralized environment might become the way to obtain more impartial information based on a manifold of independent opinions.
For numerous up-and-coming companies, Blockchain offers a chance to implement an independent and decentralized media outlet while providing the means for distributed data storage, transparent incentive models, and community moderation.
Decentralized Social Networks
Currently there are only a handful of viable products in this area, though there have been numerous attempts to build such a platform. For instance, sharing and tipping platform CoinAwesome went silent after two failed crowdsale attempts.
Blockchain-based social network Minds.com that sought to “take on Facebook” didn’t get much attention either; a Q&A reputation-driven system Reveal has gained initial traction, but withered away as well in the wake of unpleasant issues with users’ cryptocurrency accounts.
In most cases, when it comes to creating a decentralized Blockchain-powered media, it results in creation of a social network of some sort.
There are some notable examples of projects that seek to build a working decentralized social environment using Blockchain-powered solution. Some of them are already operational, while others are still under development or seeking funding through ICO’s and token sales.
One of the most remarkable examples in this area is Steemit, which has been operational for more than a year. It is a system built around community-driven posting, evaluation, and curation of content, based on the Steem Blockchain.
While the “traditional” social media outlets extract value from their audience for their own benefit, Steemit distributes the benefits of so-called “attention economy” among its participants.
The system rewards users for posts and content curation: users upvote posts they like, upvoted posts get popular, authors of the popular posts and users who upvoted them get STEEM token rewards. Steemit also employs a logarithmic reputation system, in which every member has a score that represents their individual contribution to the platform and its community.
Japan boasts its own local initiative called Alis, which is somewhat similar to Steemit. The service enables users to consume reliable information from experts, post articles and receive rewards in ALIS tokens for trustworthy and valuable content.
All submissions are evaluated by the community; members click the like button to upvote the articles they enjoy and find credible. Authors of highly rated materials gain token rewards, recognition and trust from community members. The project is currently raising funds for further development and is focused mostly on the Japanese community.
Content distribution platforms
Another effort in decentralization of media is the DECENT Network. Unlike Alis and Steemit, which are essentially social networks, DECENT is a Blockchain-based content distribution platform that ensures invariant storage of published materials and eliminates any intermediaries along with their potential influence and distribution fees.
The network can be used to publish any sort of media: music, programming code, video, images, books, etc. DECENT’s native DCT token is used to facilitate media assets trading. DCT token awards also incentivize network nodes to store content and verify new blocks with metadata and transactions. The network provides its members with a transparent, trustless and decentralized environment to store, consume and monetize original media content.
One more notable specimen is the Synereo project, a middle ground between DECENT and social media platforms like Steemit. It is a decentralized social network aiming to provide its users with the tools to monetize their original content or good taste in content curation.
The system is built on a Blockchain 2.0 employing Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. The native AMP token serves as a measurement of users’ interest in the particular submission and as an incentive to exchange information.
An interesting post may be sponsored by its author or grateful readers who leave AMP tokens as tips. Authors of popular posts get a share of the tokens invested into their posts as a reward. For advertisers who use Synereo platform to promote their product, AMP tokens provide both the leverage to reach wider audiences and a reliable performance indicator.
Finally, there is Snip, a project which deviates from the obvious social media-focused trend and builds a decentralized news outlet. It provides a decentralized environment for user-generated news, free of any censorship and editorial control over the published material.
Every user of the platform is able to write and post concise stories on any desired topic and access a personalized newsfeed tailored to their individual preferences. The system employs so-called SnipCoin as an incentive for authors to submit relevant content, while giving readers the means to express their gratitude to contributors of interesting stories.
Since community feedback directly influences the popularity of the story in question and its author’s welfare, users are encouraged to submit only interesting and unbiased news.
Conclusion
Media today is headed towards decentralization. This trend manifests itself in the growing number of new companies that employ Blockchain technology, and may result in tokenization of existing media businesses. Even though most attempts at a decentralized media outlet are not fully developed yet, this trend seems to be positive.
It’s likely that at least one decentralized media platform will gain significant traction, so old-school centralized outlets and clickbait media may eventually be forced to adapt to the changing landscape. Otherwise they risk becoming obsolete in the decentralized society of tomorrow.Reports coming from the Korean peninsula in the past few weeks have been disturbing and contradictory. On the one hand, tensions continue to escalate as Pyongyang and Seoul are locked in an upward spiral of threats to raze each other to the ground. This is the most severe situation since the 1968 Korean crisis, when the DPRK captured the US Navy spy ship USS Pueblo. Pyongyang’s suggestion on April 5, 2013, to evacuate foreign diplomats from North Korea for their own safety is also unprecedented.
On the other hand, the March 31 plenary session of the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) adopted a policy of economic development to run parallel with a further build-up of the country’s nuclear forces. This event was followed by a session of the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA), which re-appointed former Prime Minister Pak Pong Ju, a supporter of economic reforms, to head the cabinet.
These developments suggest that, rather than unleashing an all-out war, Pyongyang is in fact keen to develop its economy. Of no less importance is the fact that, for the time being, people in both countries continue to live their normal daily lives.
In analyzing the current Korean escalation we must specifically look at two major recent events: North Korea’s announcement on March 8 that it was invalidating the 1953 Armistice and all associated agreements with South Korea; and also Pyongyang’s cutting of military hotlines between Seoul and Washington.
International media reports have been primarily focusing on Pyongyang’s increasingly belligerent statements that an order had already been issued to deliver nuclear strikes against US military bases in different regions of the world and that North Korea is now at war with South Korea. This news certainly cannot leave anyone indifferent.
However if we discard emotions and scrutinize the North Korean documents that are being cited by the media, we will find the following. First, just as was the case with similar statements Pyongyang has made in the past, the fresh threats clearly state that any military action would be entirely reciprocal, only to be resorted to if the country was subjected to an outside aggression. For example, the Special Statement issued by the DPRK on March 30 “declaring” the state of war with the ROK pointed out the following:
If the U.S. and the south Korean puppet group perpetrate a military provocation for igniting a war against the DPRK in any area including the five islands in the West Sea of Korea or in the area along the Military Demarcation Line, it will not be limited to a local war, but develop into an all-out war, a nuclear war.[1]
Or the same statement regarding the US:
If they make a reckless provocation with huge strategic forces, the KPA should mercilessly strike the U.S. mainland, their stronghold, their military bases in the operational theaters in the Pacific, including Hawaii and Guam, and those in south Korea.[2]
The very strong warning and menacing statement issued by the General Staff of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) spokesman on April 4 was full of threats towards the US like the following:
We formally inform the White House and Pentagon that the ever-escalating U.S. hostile policy toward the DPRK and its reckless nuclear threat will be smashed by the strong will of all the united service personnel and people and cutting-edge smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear strike means of the DPRK and that the merciless operation of its revolutionary armed forces in this regard has been finally examined and ratified.[3]
However even in such case the final conclusion of this belligerent document looked like the appeal for a dialogue: “The U.S. had better ponder over the prevailing grave situation.”[4]
Therefore, there are grounds to perceive these public statements as a strong warning to North Korea’s opponents not to cross the “final line” and, in fact, Pyongyang does not appear to be harboring plans for a pre-emptive strike against its potential adversaries.
Moreover, in considering the risky game that has again brought the two Koreas to the brink of open warfare, we should assess the role of all the parties involved, and their contribution to the present standoff. The US and South Korea have been fueling the tensions with just as much fervor. In fact, while North Korea has so far been limiting itself to rhetoric (although admittedly fairly belligerent rhetoric), its opponents have been taking actual steps towards greater escalation of the conflict.
Washington’s decision to deploy interceptors in Alaska as a measure against a possible North Korean missile attack by Pyongyang’s non-existent intercontinental ballistic missiles is one such step. Another is the deployment of nuclear-capable B-52 strategic bombers (for the first time in many years) and a B-2 stealth bomber close to North Korea’s borders in the on-going joint US-South Korean exercises Key Resolve and Foal Eagle. The scenarios of these exercises include practice bomb runs to imitate nuclear strikes against North Korea. This is no longer just rhetoric but actual military activities aimed, among other things, at intimidating and demoralizing the opponent. Any country would view such behavior as an act of provocation, and would react accordingly.
It is also important to realize that the North Koreans have actually nowhere to retreat. Since displaying any sign of weakness will have a devastating effect, there must be no doubt left that it will fight to the end using all the means at its disposal in case an attack is launched.
However Washington and Seoul have recently announced plans for yet another exercise, a third one in the span of the last two months. It will involve the two countries’ Marine Corps troops and will last the better part of April. The exercise will be staged in a disputed sector of the Yellow Sea on the border between the two Koreas, roughly in the area where North Korean artillery bombarded South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island in 2010 in an exchange of fire during a South Korean military exercise. China’s recent moves to increase its military presence along the border with North Korea may be a response to US-ROK military exercises as well as to emphasize that the PRC-DPRK military alliance treaty is still in force.
Regarding China, we are now witnessing an obvious contradiction in US policy. On the conceptual level, Washington is trying hard to persuade Beijing to give up Pyongyang as a troublemaker harmful to Chinese interests. However, contrary to what some in US policy circles may believe, the American deployment of additional forces near PRC territory and increasing the military threat not only to North Korea but also to China may have the opposite effect, compelling Beijing to postpone (or skip) addressing the actual contradictions in its policies—supporting a troublemaker—and its desire to punish an unruly partner in favor of consolidating alliance ties.
In the light of the current situation on the Korean peninsula, and in order to prevent the worst-case scenario, the international community should immediately and unambiguously call on all parties either side of the 38th Parallel to exercise maximum restraint and to weigh their actions against the possible consequences. As initial steps to stop further escalation all participants should first cool the highly belligerent rhetoric, reduce the scale of military exercises and remove them from direct vicinity of the DMZ and the most sensitive zones, such as disputed areas in the Yellow Sea.
The rapid aggravation of the crisis should remind us of the successful experience of direct US-North Korea “unofficial” contact in order to prevent the worst-case scenario. Many observers do not understand the importance of former US President Jimmy Carter’s visit to Pyongyang in June 1994, when in the course of intensive talks with the late North Korea leader Kim Il Sung, he succeeded in helping the Clinton administration escape a seemingly unavoidable military conflict and turn the situation in a positive direction.
From a broader perspective, we can also argue that empirical data in dealing with North Korea demonstrates the following: strong-arm tactics, isolation and sanctions alone, including the US policy of “strategic patience,” have failed to bring positive results and to stop Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs. To the contrary, only a policy of diplomacy and strategic compromise has proven successful. Talks placing the parties on an equal footing and taking into account their legitimate mutual concerns have succeeded in delaying or freezing the situation at different points in the development of North Korea’s nuclear program, and in some cases have even resulted in a cessation of nuclear activities. We should also not ignore a growing appeal to focus on nonproliferation in negotiations with North Korea, not disarmament, at the present time, while not abandoning disarmament as an ultimate, long-term goal.
Moscow has already committed to preserving peace in the region and has strongly urged stopping the dangerous rhetoric and military drills and working to create the conditions for restarting the Six Party Talks. At the same time, Russia has strongly condemned the decision at the recent KWP and SPA meetings to adopt the ordinance, “On Consolidating the Position of Nuclear Weapons State for Self-Defense.” The Russian Foreign Ministry emphasized that such step “extremely complicated the six-party talks resumption prospects.” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, commenting on recent events in Pyongyang, outlined on April 5, “We maintain close contacts with our Chinese, American, South Korean, Japanese partners—parties to six-party talks.”
Of course Russia can play its conciliator role. Considering its historic strong interests on the Korean peninsula and vast experience as a mediator, now may be the right time for Moscow, working closely with its Chinese partners, to take an initiative designed to end the current tensions and help the concerned parties move back to more peaceful diplomacy and negotiation.WHAT is the best way to stop teenagers from committing crimes? Some politicians think it is harsher punishment for young offenders. This theory was put to the test in 2010, when Denmark lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 14, meaning that 14-year-olds now face the criminal-justice system rather than social services. A new working paper finds that after controlling for the long-term decline in crime and seasonality (teenage crime rates tend to fall in the summer as more go off on holiday), 14-year-old Danes were no less likely to make mischief after the change to the penal code than they were before.
The paper's authors, Anna Piil Damm, Helena Skyt Nielsen and Marianne Simonsen, of Aarhus University, and Britt Ostergaard Larsen of the Danish Centre for Applied Social Science, find that the change might actually have had an adverse effect on those 14-year-olds who did go on to commit crimes. Having gone through the criminal-justice system, these youngsters were actually more likely to reoffend between 12 and 18 months after the initial offense than 14-year-olds who committed offences before the reform was enacted. They also did worse in school.
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A criminal record hurts job prospects, and raises the odds of recidivism. Prosecutors and the police also treat people with a rap sheet less leniently. Earlier sentencing means that more young people risk falling into this vicious cycle.About a week ago, I decided to drop into one of these scenes, feeling like a 1979 rubbernecker trying to catch a glimpse of Debbie Harry outside Studio 54. My initial plan had been to visit Trillium, a white-hot Boston brewery with a downtown (Fort Point) HQ. Some unpleasantness intervened (hey, nice Virginia-plated rental; shame if anyone towed it) and we didn't make it. Instead we went to merely red-hot Bissell Brothers following a loop through Maine. (Were it in downtown Boston rather than outer Portland, it would also be white hot.)
What follows is a simple tour of things as I found them, mostly photographic. The idea of standing in line for beer is bizarre to me. It's especially bizarre for beers one can readily find on tap nearby. After this visit, Sally and I stopped into Salvage Barbecue near the brewery, where we found their flagship The Substance, which sold out in minutes at the brewery, on tap. In Boston, you can find Trillium pouring near the brewery at the Boston Greenway.
I polled my New England inlaws about this, and their theory had to do with status. I pass this along as one possible reason for this phenomenon--though it's one New Englanders may not find flattering. My in-laws are New England born and bred and have lived in the Boston area for decades, though, so I trust their judgment more than my own. They said owning rare things in the status-conscious city was a big deal. One offered an example about some particular silver bracelet that's wildly popular right now as an analogue to the rare-beer thing. Whatever the reason, it's a real deal. There are tons and tons of superb IPAs to be found in the region, but only a few breweries command the kind of lines we saw.
I will also add that, to their credit, everything about the Bissell Brothers struck me as transparent, authentic, and good-hearted. They have original loose-leaf recipes lacquered onto the walls of the men's room, which is the opposite of secretive. The line was perhaps 150 feet long when we arrived, and we had our four-pack within 20 minutes. They seem to genuinely want to serve their customers, and I suppose it's not their fault they've become this crazy status symbol. So, anyway, here's what it's like to visit the Bissell Brothers on any given Saturday.On Thursday the United States House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, run by Texas Republican Lamar Smith, retweeted a Breitbart News story that dismissed climate change as “a scare” manufactured by “alarmists”. An overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that the phenomenon is real and primarily the result of human activities, and many of them took to social media to express their dismay (to put it mildly) that the committee, which oversees government offices such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admiration, would promote such a misguided article. Here are a few of the best reactions:
A classic example of false news. https://t.co/ECOkzeBW9j
The truth? pic.twitter.com/zEZGzOF7vi — Katharine Hayhoe (@KHayhoe) December 1, 2016
Jesus. The House Science Committee just cited a false Breitbart report that the climate is cooling.
Our Orwellian future is here. https://t.co/KY6CE8JqJz — Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) December 1, 2016
@HouseScience This committee should have its decision-making privileges revoked for one month. And no Twitter. You're grounded. — Joe Hanson (@jtotheizzoe) December 1, 2016
suggest Texas based scientists have a word with @LamarSmithTX21 over this @HouseScience tweet? https://t.co/YlxLijRK01 — Sarah Kendrew (@sarahkendrew) December 1, 2016
.@HouseScience congratulations on taking meretricious balance to a new level of stupid by not bothering to give the consensus view at all. — Michael Merrifield (@ProfMike_M) December 1, 2016NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India’s universal health plan that aims to offer guaranteed benefits to a sixth of the world’s population will cost an estimated 1.6 trillion rupees ($26 billion) over the next four years, a senior health ministry official said.
A paramedic distributes free medicine provided by the government to patients inside a ward at Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital (RGGGH) in Chennai July 12, 2012. REUTERS/Babu/Files
Under the National Health Assurance Mission, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government would provide all citizens with free drugs and diagnostic treatment, as well as insurance cover to treat serious ailments.
The proposed plan would be rolled out in phases from April 2015 and will cover the entire population by March 2019, C.K. Mishra, an additional secretary at the health ministry, told Reuters. When the entire population is covered, it would cost an estimated $11.4 billion annually.
“If you want to deliver the service, that is what it will take,” Mishra said, disclosing for the first time an expert group’s cost estimates that will be considered by the finance ministry for inclusion in the government’s spending plans.
Healthcare experts caution that it could take decades before India’s 1.2 billion people are adequately covered and that the costs of provision could face significant upward pressure.
If approved, India would need to drastically raise its healthcare spending. In the current financial year, the budget allocated about $5 billion to healthcare.
“We are not in a position to implement it across the regions, states (right now). It’s impossible. So we are choosing number of districts each year,” said Mishra.
Despite rapid economic growth in the last 20 years, the government spends only about 1 percent of gross domestic product on healthcare. That compares to 3 percent in China and 8.3 percent in the United States.
More newborns die in India than in poorer neighbours such as Bangladesh, and preventable illnesses such as diarrhoea kill more than a million children every year.
Government hospitals are overcrowded and lack resources to meet the growing demand, while access to basic health services in rural areas and smaller towns remains poor.
“I can say that you are covered, but your closest facilities are 100 kilometres away. You are limited by that fact,” said Rana Mehta, leader of healthcare at consultants PwC India.
“To build infrastructure and then provide care over a period of time would obviously take decades.”
A 2012 study by Indian business lobby FICCI and consultants EY estimated that universal health cover in India was feasible in a decade and would require government health spending to rise to 3.7-4.5 percent of GDP.
PLAN STRUCTURE
The new plan will focus on improving preventive healthcare services by ensuring adequate availability of medical practitioners in rural areas, while new infrastructure will be created under existing welfare programmes, Mishra said.
Tertiary care services would be provided through an insurance-based model and the government will offer more than 50 drugs free to all its citizens.
Along with the drugs, about 12-15 diagnostic treatments will be offered in the package.
Mishra said states will be encouraged to enter into outsourcing agreements for the provision of treatment.
In recent years, thousands of small private hospitals and test centres have flourished, betting on high demand created by lack of adequate public facilities. Such providers opened 80 percent of India’s new hospital beds during 2002-2012, according to a PwC-NatHealth report.
While private players will be involved in the ambitious programme, the government will need to ensure speedy payments for the partnership to work, said Harish Pillai, chief operating officer at private healthcare group Indus Health.
“Private providers can definitely help and execute it better, but the government should not only see us as commercially-driven entities,” said Pillai.
The World Bank and Britain’s health cost-effectiveness agency NICE are also assisting India, providing technical assistance and advice on treatments the government should offer in the package, the bank said last week.
($1 = 61.4200 rupee)Ryan Kelly was a three-star recruit coming out of Lakota West HS in West Chester, OH. Rivals ranked him as the #6 center in the 2011 HS class. He was recruited by Florida State and Michigan, but signed with Alabama instead. Kelly was redshirted his freshman season, but later became a full-time starter for three of his four eligible seasons. As redshirt senior, Ryan Kelly earned Consensus first team All-American honors and won the Rimington Trophy Award as the nation’s top center. He enters the 2016 NFL Draft as the consensus best center in the class.
Measureables
DOB 1993 Bench (225 lbs) 26 Height 6’4″ Vertical Jump 30″ Weight 311 lbs Broad Jump 8’7″ Arms 33.625 in 20 Yard Shuttle 4.59 sec Hands 9.625 in 3 Cone Drill 7.58 sec |
to pay for it out of his own pocket, and, in the absence of CPS manpower, two junior crown counsels had to create the index themselves. Over and again, the defence teams had the resources to find some helpful stick with which to beat a potentially dangerous witness – a misremembered date, a forgotten detail, even on one occasion the fact that the witness had once had coffee with Nick Davies from the Guardian. So they were able to create complication, confusion, doubt.
An expert witness claimed to be able to track the movements of defendants by analysing their use of mobile phones: the prosecution failed to notice that his conclusions were contradicted by his own data; he was chopped to pieces by the defence and admonished by the judge. The jury was told that the News of the World had hacked phones to obtain a story about Paul McCartney having a row with his then wife Heather Mills and throwing their engagement ring out of a hotel window: the prosecution failed to take account of evidence in the possession of the police which indicated the paper had bought the story from someone who worked in the hotel.
These weaknesses were exploited by the kind of high-octane cross-examination which could raise reasonable doubt about whether the witness is breathing. (“When did you start this breathing? … You can’t remember?! … How often do you breathe? … You don’t know?!”). Here the disparity in funding was striking but not so important. There were masterclasses in the skills of advocacy from Edis as well as from some of those acting for those in the dock. It simply stuck in the craw that Edis was earning less than 10% of the daily fees enjoyed by some of his opponents.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andrew Edis QC: the lead prosecutor earned less than 10% of some defence barristers' daily fees. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
Finally, the crown was hampered by the rules of court that allow it to make an opening statement but require it then to present items of evidence without any comment as to why they matter, a rule policed with ferocious efficiency by the Rolls-Royce defence teams. In a normal case, where the prosecution might spend only three or four days presenting its case, that would not matter: the evidence would be relatively simple; it would be clear how each piece fitted into a picture. In a seven-month trial, the rule combined with the crown’s scarce resources to produce a kind of chaos.
When Brooks’s barrister, Jonathan Laidlaw QC, rose to open her defence after nearly four months of prosecution evidence, he told the jury with his trademark combination of gentle delivery and vicious effect, that it had not been “the easiest case to follow”. The crown had jumped from topic to topic, he said. It had made “something of a mess” of timelines for the key hacking victims, which were incomplete and potentially misleading. It had flashed up documents on the courtroom screens and forgotten to give them to the jury: “If there is a sense of confusion about the evidence and what it is supposed to relate to, that would be entirely understandable … There are categories where we simply don’t know or understand the point that is being made.”
Unpredictable contest
It may have been patronising, but he had a point. The crown had spent months effectively throwing random bricks at the jury with little or no explanation as to how they fitted together. Laidlaw set about building the prosecution’s house for them, attempting to persuade the jurors that, when they saw it in its final form, they would see it was full of holes.
This is not to say that the defendants had no problems. In pre-trial hearings, Brooks lost her lead barrister, John Kelsey-Fry QC, because the former royal editor, Clive Goodman, said he wanted to call him as a witness to the cover-up at his own trial for hacking in 2007. The judge agreed to delay the trial for seven weeks while she instructed Laidlaw – and that meant Coulson lost his barrister, Clare Montgomery QC, because the new timing overlapped with a case she had to conduct in Hong Kong. The trial opened against a backdrop of public hostility to Brooks and Coulson, not only because of the high-profile hacking saga, but also because of their careers. Brooks’s lawyers tried and failed to persuade the judge to ban all trade union members from the jury on the grounds that they were bound to be antagonistic.
Throughout the trial, the defendants were thrown off-course as the crown, struggling to keep up, served new evidence that should have been presented before the trial started. Even as the final evidence was being put to the jury in April, the prosecution suddenly announced it had 48,000 email messages which the FBI had obtained from News Corp in New York; they had been with police in London for 16 months.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson arrive at the Old Bailey to begin their defence
All this made the trial a peculiarly unpredictable contest. From the start, the crown case was weak, particularly against Rebekah Brooks. There was no direct evidence at all to implicate her in phone hacking. Indeed, there was simply a lack of any direct evidence about her of any kind. That was partly because of the passage of time: she stopped being editor of the News of the World in January 2003, so naturally paperwork and other evidence had been lost. Some had been destroyed. Over the years, News International had deleted some 300m emails from their systems, only 90m of which were retrieved, including only a handful from Brooks’ editorship. The hard drive had been removed from her computer for safe keeping then lost.
But there was no doubt at all that the News of the World had been involved in crime on a massive scale. Before the trial opened, three former news editors and the specialist phone-hacker Glenn Mulcaire had pleaded guilty to conspiring to intercept voicemails. By the time it finished, News International had paid compensation to 718 victims of the hacking – an average of nearly three agreed victims for every week during the five years for which patchy evidence of Mulcaire’s work has survived. Hundreds more alleged victims were still being identified by police.
Platform of inference
The hacking case against Brooks and Coulson was based on a platform of inference. How could they not have known about the beehive of offending around them, the crown asked. How could they not have known about Mulcaire’s speciality when he was one of only two outside contributors with a full-time contract and was being paid more than any reporter, at one point more even than the news editor? How could they not have known the origin of all those stories whose accuracy they had to test? How could they have been ignorant when a humble sports writer described Mulcaire, a former footballer, as “part of our special investigations team” in a story published by the News of the World when Brooks was editor? Brooks and Coulson insisted they had known nothing of Mulcaire’s criminality. They had not even heard his name until he was arrested in August 2006, they told the jury.
The attack on this platform of inference included a striking example of the impact of Murdoch’s money. The evidence which lies at the core of the hacking scandal is the collection of notes found by detectives when they first arrested Mulcaire in August 2006: 11,000 pages of his barely legible scribble and scrawl and doodle. The original police inquiry took one look at it and decided it simply did not have the resources to go through it all. When Operation Weeting in 2011 finally did the job properly, it took it the best part of a year. Brooks’s Rolls-Royce did it in three months and then had the resources to produce a brilliant analysis.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Glenn Mulcaire: the phone hacker was tasked 2,255 times in five years by the News of the World. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images
The notes showed that Mulcaire was tasked some 5,600 times during the five years that he worked on contract for the News of the World, an average of more than four for every working day. As a crude average, that would imply that between September 2001, when he was contracted to work for the paper, and January 2003, when Brooks left, he was commissioned around 1,400 times. But Brooks’s legal team set aside all those notes where it was not 100% certain they had been written during that time; and all those where it was not 100% certain that Mulcaire had been tasked to intercept voicemail as opposed to “blagging” confidential data. Since a considerable mass of his notes were incomplete and/or ambiguous on either date or task, this allowed Laidlaw to tell the jury that there were only 12 occasions when it was 100% certain that Mulcaire had hacked a phone while she was editor – an eye-catching point to be able to deliver in answer to the crown’s inference.
Where Brooks was concerned on the hacking charge, there was very little extra evidence to add to that platform of inference. Three witnesses came to court and recalled social occasions when she had discussed hacking with apparent familiarity. Brooks told the jury that she had read about hacking in newspaper stories; she had talked about it casually because she had not realised it was illegal; but she would never have sanctioned it because it was such a severe breach of privacy. One of these three witnesses – the former wife of the golfer Colin Montgomerie, Eimear Cook – was cut to pieces by a particularly destructive cross-examination.
Cook told the jury she recalled a conversation at lunch in September 2005, when Brooks had not only warned her that her own phone might be hacked but had described the ease with which it could be done. Cook added that during the same lunch, she thought Brooks had discussed the famous incident when she had been arrested for assaulting her then partner, the actor Ross Kemp. Laidlaw gently pawed her into position, confirming without doubt the date of the lunch, challenging the strength of her memory until she insisted she was absolutely certain and then, like Hannibal Lecter in a horsehair wig, softly and courteously, he cut out her heart: the incident with Kemp had happened six weeks after the lunch. Her story could not possibly be right.
Then there was Milly Dowler. This was almost spooky. It was the Guardian’s disclosure of the hacking of the missing Surrey schoolgirl’s phone that finally broke open the scandal. That was purely about the emotional impact of the story – that this was no celebrity victim, but an ordinary civilian, a child, and one who had been abducted and murdered by a predatory paedophile. Now, in court, once more, it was Dowler who presented the threat, not because of any emotional impact, but because it just so happened that this was the one example of hacking under Brooks’s editorship where there was some hard evidence. This was, as the judge said in a ruling, “the high point of the prosecution case”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Milly Dowler investigation: the News of the World hid information from police. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA
Having picked up a voicemail which seemed to suggest that Dowler was alive and working in a factory in Telford, the News of the World not only hid that information from police but later, when they had failed to find her, they contacted Surrey police and demanded that they confirm the story for them – and quoted the voicemail, in phone calls and even in email. The records of those calls and messages survived in the Surrey police archive. Brooks must have been consulted about the high-risk decision to hide information from the police, the crown argued.
She must have been told about this potentially huge scoop – and about its origin, they said. She must have known that seven journalists were working on it, including her news editor, Neville Thurlbeck, and her managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, who had both personally contacted Surrey police and quoted the intercepted voicemail. If it was not secret from the police, why would it be a secret from the editor? From the editor who was running a national campaign to protect children from predatory paedophiles?
Brooks’s answer was that she had been on holiday that week, in Dubai, and simply had not been told about any of this. Even here, the Dowler case proved special. She had been using a News International phone, and the itemised bill had survived in the company’s vaults. If she had been in London, there would have been no record of her conversations, but the phone bill showed she had called the desk occupied by her deputy, Coulson, for 38 minutes on the Friday of that week, as reporters crawled over the big story, and again for 20 minutes on the Saturday, as they pressed the police to confirm it. She had texted him too. However, the prosecution had failed to realise that the records of some of those calls and texts were linked to the time in Dubai, not London, a three-hour difference which allowed Laidlaw to pour justifiable confusion over the evidence.
In addition, she and Kemp had been joined on the holiday by a British tourist, William Hennessy, who told the jury that she had spent a lot of time on the phone, explaining on one occasion that she had to make a call “about the missing Surrey girl”. Hennessy was sure of the timing: he had bought a watch in Dubai and kept the receipt, which was dated. Brooks said she had no memory of that. She had remained oblivious to the whole saga, she said, even when she returned to the office the following week, never reading the story which the paper had published quoting the voicemail verbatim, never knowing that managing editor Stuart Kuttner was still hectoring Surrey police to confirm the tale. Kuttner, also on trial, was himself found not guilty of conspiring to hack phones.
Close to the action
Coulson always had more to deal with. While evidence of his three years as Brooks’s deputy was hard to find, there was a wealth of phone records, emails, voicemail recordings and Mulcaire notes about the hacking that happened when he was in charge, from January 2003 to January 2007. And Coulson had got himself dangerously close to the action.
Searching Mulcaire’s home and the News of the World office, police found hundreds of voicemails left by David Blunkett for his lover, Kimberley Quinn. Coulson startled the court by admitting that his chief reporter, Thurlbeck, had played some of them to him. He had then personally confronted the then home secretary with the allegation of his affair, telling him: “I am certainly very confident of the information... It is based on an extremely reliable source.” Blunkett taped that meeting, and the tape survived. Coulson argued that this might show that he was aware of one instance of hacking but not that he was part of the conspiracy to make it happen.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Blunkett was confronted by Andy Coulson over his affair after the News of the World hacked his phone. Photograph: PA
Mulcaire then hacked the voicemail of a Labour special adviser, Hannah Pawlby, attempting to prove a false allegation that she was having an affair with the next home secretary, Charles Clarke. Coulson personally called Pawlby, saying he needed to talk to Clarke about “quite a serious story”. Mulcaire actually hacked his own editor’s message from Pawlby’s phone, and the recording was found by police when they searched his home. Coulson said simply that he wanted to talk to Clarke about a different story which was also serious; he had known nothing about the hacking of Pawlby’s phone.
When they were investigating Calum Best, News of the World executives feared that one of their journalists might be leaking information to him, warning him about what they were planning. Coulson sent an email: “Do his phone.” Mulcaire’s notes showed that he did then target Best, though it was not clear whether he succeeded in hacking his messages. Coulson said his email was an order to pull the itemised phone bills of the journalist who was suspected of leaking, to see if he had been calling Best.
Unlike Brooks, Coulson also faced two live witnesses who claimed he had known about the hacking. A showbusiness writer, Dan Evans, who had become a specialist hacker, told the jury that Coulson had hired him from the Sunday Mirror explicitly because of his hacking skill. He claimed that one day in the newsroom, he had played Coulson a tape of a voicemail hacked from the phone of the actor Daniel Craig in which Sienna Miller said she was in the Groucho club with Jude Law.
Coulson’s counsel, Timothy Langdale QC, a model of old-school courtesy built around a core of steel, released a swarm of questions around Evans. He stung him into describing his own criminality, his deal with the police, his history of cocaine abuse, finally pushing him into claiming to be sure of the date when he had played the Craig voicemail to Coulson – and then revealed that the editor had not been in the office on that day. When Langdale went on to query whether Miller and Law had been in the Groucho during that timeframe, the prosecution was left floundering: it had failed to get evidence from the club to prove their point.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Timothy Langdale: old-school courtesy built around a core of steel. Photograph: Mark Thomas/Rex Features
Similarly, Coulson’s former friend and royal editor, Goodman, went into the witness box and told the jury that Coulson had personally approved his hacking of royal phones, for which Mulcaire was paid in cash with a false name and address on internal paperwork. He added that hacking was going on on “an industrial scale” at the time and was often discussed in meetings with Coulson until he banned any further open mention of it. Langdale pushed back hard, confronting him with evidence to suggest he had lied about the extent of his own involvement in the royal hacking.
Unheard evidence
A trial deals with only a limited amount of information, considering only the evidence which is available and also admissible and which relates directly to the charges on the indictment. As in any case, there was a great deal which the jury did not hear information which could have tipped their judgment for or against the defendants.
Some 30 News of the World journalists provided information which helped the Guardian uncover the scandal. But almost without exception, they spoke off the record. One of them – Sean Hoare – spoke openly, but he died in July 2011. A senior former executive and two of those who had pleaded guilty before the trial – Mulcaire and Thurlbeck – had discussions with the police about giving evidence for the prosecution. All three negotiations failed. Evans and Goodman were alone.
The jury heard nothing about earlier police inquiries into allegations of the News of the World’s involvement in blagging confidential records and bribing corrupt police for information, which occurred in the late 1980s and 90s. They heard nothing of the 3,000-word feature in the Guardian that described in detail the alleged involvement in this blagging and bribing of a senior executive from the paper. Similarly, they were told very little of the paper’s use of Steve Whittamore, who blagged information illegally, culminating in his conviction in court in April 2005.
The jury was told in detail about the information which Brooks said she had been given by an officer from the original inquiry, DCI Keith Surtees, who met her in September 2006 to tell her that her own phone had been hacked by Mulcaire. An internal email written at the time reported that, according to Brooks, police had found “numerous voice recordings and verbatim notes of his accesses to voicemails” and that they had a list of more than 100 hacking victims (as distinct from the eight who were later named in court) and that they came from “different areas of public life – politics, showbiz etc” (as distinct from the royal victims who were of interest to the only News of the World journalist they had arrested). This information was shared with Andy Coulson.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rebekah Brooks told MPs in 2009 that the Guardian had'substantially and likely deliberately misled the British public' over phone hacking. Photograph: Rex Features
However, the jury was not then told of the letter which Brooks wrote to the media select committee in July 2009, after the Guardian first reported the true scale of the hacking, in which she said that the Guardian had “substantially and likely deliberately misled the British public”. Nor were they shown Brooks’s famous evidence to that committee in March 2003 when she said that her journalists had paid police for information in the past. Select committee evidence is not admissible in court because of rules around parliamentary privilege.
Beyond all that, the jury was specifically not invited to consider behaviour which may not be criminal but have most offended public opinion.
Breaking boundaries
As tabloid newspaper bosses, Brooks and Coulson ruined lives. They did it to sell newspapers, to please Murdoch, to advance their own careers. One flick of their editorial pen was enough to break the boundaries of privacy and of compassion. The singer’s mother suffering from depression; the actor stricken by the collapse of her marriage; the DJ in agony over his wife’s affair: none of their pain was anything more than human raw material to be processed and packaged and sold for profit. Especially, obsessively if it involved their sexual activity.
With all the intellectual focus of a masturbatory adolescent, their papers spied in the bedrooms of their targets, dragging out and humiliating anybody who dared to be gay or to have an affair or to engage in any kind of sexual activity beyond that approved by a Victorian missionary. They did it to friends – like Blunkett, for example, sharing drinks and private chats with him and then ripping the heart out of his private life, sprinkling their story with fiction as they did so. And to Sara Payne: befriended by Brooks in her campaign to change the law about publication of the home addresses of sex offenders; investigated by her paper on the false suspicion that she was having an affair with a detective.
But above all, they did it to their enemies. Among the politicians who they exposed for being gay or for having affairs, the leftwingers easily outnumbered the occasional stray rightwinger. In among them were the special enemies who dared to challenge News International. In the early stages of the hacking story, there was only one frontbench politician from any party who was willing to attack the News of the World – the Lib Dem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne. In June 2010, when Brooks was chief executive of News International, it was her News of the World which exposed Huhne’s affair.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chris Huhne was targeted by the News of the World. Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters
The News of the World also targeted the private life of its most outspoken critic in parliament – Tom Watson. Brooks had loathed Watson since he took part in the “curry house” plot in 2006, attempting to engineer Gordon Brown into Downing Street at the expense of her favourite, Tony Blair. News International reporters say that during the hacking saga, she called in reporters to ask if they had any dirt on Watson. The News of the World put a private investigator on his tail, hoping to catch him having an affair.
They did all this with breathtaking hypocrisy. While Coulson and Brooks were using their front pages to expose public figures for having affairs, they were themselves having an affair and keeping that information very private. Behind the scenes at the trial Brooks took the hypocrisy a step further. Although her newspapers had frequently attacked the Human Rights Act, she tried to use Article 6 – on the right to a fair hearing – to prevent her “affair” letter to Coulson being put before the jury.
Before the trial started, Laidlaw attempted to get the whole case against Brooks thrown out on the grounds that prejudicial newspaper coverage meant she could not get a fair trial. The crown replied by citing the case of Abu Hamza, who tried and failed to stop his own trial in 2006 because of prejudicial publicity in the Sun, then edited by Brooks. Laidlaw went on to complain about the scrum of press photographers waiting to pounce outside the Old Bailey door.
Power games
Their willingness to ruin lives was directly linked to their political power. MPs feared that they might find their own private behaviour being monstered on News International’s front pages. This is the power of the playground bully: he has only to beat up one or two children for all of them to start trying to placate him. Beyond that, government collectively feared having its agenda destroyed, its daily activity destabilised, its future terminated if Murdoch’s editors turned against it. Former ministers and senior Whitehall officials all tell the same tale – that as Murdoch increased the size of his empire, governments became obsessed with newspaper coverage, particularly that of the Sun.
The power which Coulson and Brooks enjoyed delivered the kind of access for which unscrupulous lobbyists will pay large bundles of cash. As a tabloid editor, she was courted by ministers. At the Leveson inquiry, Brooks disclosed 185 meetings with prime ministers, ministers and party leaders while apologising that her records were incomplete. At the News of the World, Coulson showed little enthusiasm for politics, according to former Downing Street officials, one of whom remembers him being invited for breakfast with Gordon Brown and showing so little interest in policy that the two men ended up talking about newspaper circulations. Brooks, however, was a different story.
Far more than Coulson, she played the game of power, exploiting her extraordinary social skills to build an unrivalled network of connections.
Backed by fear of what her journalists could do, Brooks used her access to get her way. She could do it over small things: “If she was going to the US and she realised she had no visa, all she had to do was to make a phone call to a minister, and they’d sort it out for her,” according to one former official. She used it to get stories. An adviser from the Ministry of Defence recalls the government being under pressure about British soldiers being killed and maimed by roadside bombs in Afghanistan: “We were told we couldn’t release all we were doing for opsec reasons, yet the MoD went ahead and gave the information to the Sun.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sharon Shoesmith was unlawfully sacked from Haringey council after a campaign by the Sun and others
More than that, she used her influence to try to change government policy, not simply and legitimately by publishing stories but privately with ministers by cajoling, insisting, playing on their fear. This might be aimed at scoring a victory for her newspapers – persuading the government to order a police review of the Madeleine McCann case as part of her strategy to encourage the toddler’s parents to let her newspapers serialise their book; pushing hard to end the career of Sharon Shoesmith, head of children’s services in Haringey, whom the Sun blamed for the death of Baby P. Shoesmith was sacked, a decision which was later described by the court of appeal as “intrinsically unlawful.” Or Brooks aimed at larger policy which suited the ideology of the Sun and of its owner – over crime, immigration, public spending and notoriously over Britain’s membership of the European Union and its potential involvement in the euro.
This exercise of power reached a peak with the sequence of events surrounding Murdoch’s attempt to buy BSkyB: the Sun turning on Gordon Brown in September 2009; the sustained campaign of hostile reporting apparently calculated to ensure that the electorate would force him out of office; the parallel campaign in all the Murdoch titles attacking the BBC and Ofcom; the announcement of the BSkyB bid within a month of David Cameron’s election; the Cameron government imposing drastic cuts on the BBC and Ofcom; Cameron’s culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, allowing his special adviser to act as a back channel to the Murdochs while he considered the bid. Hunt duly gave a green light to the deal, which was within days of being confirmed in July 2011 when the hacking scandal erupted and moved parliament to denounce it.
Political distortion
And in all of this, Brooks consistently injected a highly contentious political ideology into the arteries of public debate, a toxic cocktail of crude populism and intellectual confusion. They demanded lower taxes and then damned public services for the failures inflicted on them by lack of funding. She led the cheers for stripping regulation out of the financial sector and then blamed Brussels for the ensuing crisis in the eurozone. She attacked the state when it inhibited corporate power and then promoted it when it engaged in military violence. She insisted on wars and then dared to claim to be the protectors of the soldiers who died in them (while Mulcaire, without her knowledge, hacked the phones of some of their families). She was a leader of opinion who had thought no further than the bland and self-serving simplicity of James Murdoch’s theory about free media, that the only guide to independence is profit.
As a single example of the distorting impact of their work, YouGov in December 2012, working for the TUC, found that the average public perception was that 41% of the welfare budget was spent on the unemployed. The reality is 3%. And that 27% of that budget was eaten up by fraud. The reality, as far as official figures can detect, is 0.7%. So the simple, beautiful idea of all citizens voting for government became an exercise in the bland leading the blind.
And while Operation Weeting succeeded in bringing cases to court, these "crimes" remain unchallenged. The power remains. Leveson’s attempt at independent media regulation was throttled at birth, not simply by the genuine concerns of those who care about a free press but also by a Fleet Street campaign of aggressive falsehood and distortion of precisely the kind that had made the Leveson inquiry necessary in the first place. Police officers resigned and politicians were embarrassed as the scandal erupted, but Scotland Yard – with dazzling cynicism – has reacted by trying to silence the kind of police whistleblowers who helped to expose the failures of their leaders; and ambitious politicians continue to dine with Rupert Murdoch. How long before News Corp’s famous summer party is revived as a compulsory opportunity for political genuflection?
It seems to have become forgotten, conveniently by some, that before the Old Bailey trial two former newsdesk executives, Greg Miskiw and James Weatherup, pleaded guilty, as did the phone-hacker Glenn Mulcaire and a former reporter, Dan Evans, who confessed to hacking Sienna Miller’s messages on Daniel Craig’s phone.
Neville Thurlbeck, the News of the World’s former chief reporter and news editor, pleaded guilty after the police found the tapes he had of Blunkett’s messages in a News International safe.
In the trial, Coulson was convicted of conspiring to hack phones while he was editor of the News of the World. The jury was discharged after failing to reach unanimous verdicts on two further charges of conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office faced by Coulson and Goodman.
But Brooks was found not guilty of four charges including conspiring to hack phones when she was editor of the News of the World and making corrupt payments to public officials when she was editor of the Sun. She was also cleared of two charges that she conspired with her former secretary and her husband to conceal evidence from police investigating phone hacking in 2011.
The jury at the Old Bailey returned true verdicts according to the evidence. They were not asked to do more.Caracas, 1st September 2013 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – Venezuela’s second minimum wage increase of the year came into effect today, provoking renewed focus on inflation and the state of the economy.
The salary increase is part of a three-tiered rise in the minimum wage being implemented this year by the government of Nicolas Maduro, which will result in a total minimum wage increase of 38 – 45%.
On 1 May the minimum wage rose by 20%, from 2,047 Bolivars (U.S. $325) to 2,457 Bolivars ($390). A further wage increase of 10% from today increases the salary to 2,703 Bolivars ($429).
Finally, in November, the government will decide whether to raise the wage by 5 or 10%, to either 2,838 ($451) or 2,973 Bolivars ($473).
Around 3.24 million workers on minimum wage will benefit from the increase, as well as pensioners and those on social benefits. This cash income forms part of a social wage received by all salaried workers in Venezuela, which includes monthly food tickets worth around 1,200 Bolivars ($190) and access to universal health and education services.
However, the cumulative salary increase of 32% so far this year is only just ahead of inflation, which rose 29% in the first seven months of 2013. This is due to an inflationary spike in the first six months of the year, peaking at 6.1% in May. Inflation has since almost halved, falling to 3.2% in July.
Further, the government’s National Institute of Statistics (INE) estimates the current cost of the basic monthly food basket for a family of five to be 2,779 Bolivars.
Under the administration of late President Hugo Chavez Venezuela’s minimum wage was increased annually, a policy which Nicolas Maduro has committed to continuing. In 2012 the minimum wage was raised by 32%, while annual inflation closed at 20.1%.
“During the [Bolivarian] revolution there have been permanent salary increases, unlike previous governments,” said INE president Elias Eljuri in an interview recently.
Meanwhile the conservative opposition’s Justice First (PJ) party has criticised the latest salary increase as “insufficient”.
“The new minimum wage…isn’t enough to eat properly,” said PJ leader Jorge Millan to Venezuelan media on Friday. The opposition politician went on to criticise the government as “a corrupt and inept gang who will never manage to defeat the inflation and shortages that are wearing down all Venezuelans”.
Nevertheless, analysts such as Caracas-based financial consultant Henkel García consider that the spending power of ordinary Venezuelans has increased over the previous fourteen years, in part due to the rate at which the minimum wage has increased.
“The [minimum] salary since the arrival of Hugo Chavez in 1998 has multiplied by approximately 24.5, but inflation has also risen significantly, which has left a minimum wage increase of 17% in real terms,” Garcia said in a recent interview with media outlet Noticias 24.Every year average Americans pay dozens of different types of taxes, and yet many of our politicians are very open about the fact that they want to raise rates even higher and invent even more ways to bleed us all dry. Someday historians will look back and be absolutely amazed at how stupid we were. We have the most complicated tax code in all of human history and at this point the federal tax code is more than four times as long as the entire collected works of William Shakespeare. In many places it is so incomprehensible that nobody actually understands what it means and the entire thing is absolutely riddled with loopholes from the beginning to the end. Trust me, I used to study this stuff. Nobody could ever read the entire thing – it is close to four million words long. But that is just for federal income taxes. We have a number of other taxes taken out of our paychecks such as state income taxes, Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes. Sadly, the taxes taken out of your paycheck are only just the beginning. As I will detail below, there are more than 40 other taxes that average Americans pay each year in addition to the taxes that are taken out of our paychecks. Our politicians love to find ways that they can “raise revenue” without us feeling it. Most people just focus on income tax rates and they forget about the dozens of other ways that they are bleeding us dry. It really is kind of like “death by a thousand cuts”, and of course the middle class gets hit the hardest. The poor are exempt from many taxes, the ultra-wealthy are masters at cheating the system and avoiding taxes, and so the most pain is always felt by those in the middle. Hard working middle class families and small businesses all over America are being financially raped by this insidious system. If you know of anyone out there that believes that taxes are “too low”, please show this article to them.
Just counting federal, state and local income taxes, some Americans will be paying marginal tax rates of over 50 percent in 2013. But like I said, there are a lot of other taxes we pay than just those.
The following are 44 more taxes that at least some average Americans are paying now or will be paying soon other than federal, state and local income taxes…
#1 Building Permit Taxes
#2 Capital Gains Taxes
#3 Cigarette Taxes
#4 Court Fines (indirect taxes)
#5 Dog License Taxes
#6 Drivers License Fees (another form of taxation)
#7 Federal Unemployment Taxes
#8 Fishing License Taxes
#9 Food License Taxes
#10 Gasoline Taxes
#11 Gift Taxes
#12 Hunting License Taxes
#13 Inheritance Taxes
#14 Inventory Taxes
#15 IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax)
#16 IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
#17 Liquor Taxes
#18 Luxury Taxes
#19 Marriage License Taxes
#20 Medicare Taxes
#21 Medicare Tax Surcharge On High Earning Americans Under Obamacare
#22 Obamacare Individual Mandate Excise Tax (if you don’t buy “qualifying” health insurance under Obamacare you will have to pay an additional tax)
#23 Obamacare Surtax On Investment Income (a new 3.8% surtax on investment income that goes into effect next year)
#24 Property Taxes
#25 Recreational Vehicle Taxes
#26 Toll Booth Taxes
#27 Sales Taxes
#28 Self-Employment Taxes
#29 School Taxes
#30 Septic Permit Taxes
#31 Service Charge Taxes
#32 Social Security Taxes
#33 State Unemployment Taxes (SUTA)
#34 Tanning Tax (a new Obamacare tax on tanning services)
#35 Telephone Federal Excise Taxes
#36 Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Taxes
#37 Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Taxes
#38 Telephone State And Local Taxes
#39 Tire Taxes
#40 Tolls (another form of taxation)
#41 Traffic Fines (indirect taxation)
#42 Utility Taxes
#43 Vehicle Registration Taxes
#44 Workers Compensation Taxes
Sadly, this list is far from complete. There are many more forms of taxation that could be included.
When you account for all forms of taxation, there are some Americans that “play by the rules” that are sending more than half of their incomes to the government.
This is why “tax avoidance” has become a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States. People are sick and tired of being drained dry by a system that is way too complicated and way too unfair.
Posted below are 30 reasons why the U.S. tax system is stupid. Some of these facts I have discussed before, and some of them are new. You might want to be sitting down while you are reading this, because this list is likely to make |
chart below, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, also illustrates the strong positive relationship between educational attainment and income.
A 2016 study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics notes that “U.S. elite high schools and (even more so) elite colleges remain among the best in the world,” but:
“Whereas the United States was the leader in high school graduation and then college graduation for much of the twentieth century, over the last 30 years it has become something of a laggard in both as compared to other industrialized nations...
AP calculus students in the United States compare favorably with the advanced mathematics students in almost any country, while the average U.S. student lags behind the average student in most OECD countries in math and science.
The U.S. school system is not performing well overall, but it is failing particularly for poor, minority and immigrant children. The problem is not necessarily that the U.S. school system has declined in absolute quality, but that the skill requirements of the workplace have risen and, simultaneously, the challenges that schools face in managing the diversity and poor school preparedness of a substantial fraction of the student population have mounted.”
Concluding Comments
To summarize, bringing China into the WTO has delivered significant benefits for many American workers, consumers and companies.
The problem is that a relatively small number of workers always bears the brunt of labor market volatility, including that caused by imports from China. In our search for policies to assist those people, we must avoid the temptation to focus on protectionism— which would not bring back lost jobs. We should instead work toward creating programs that will directly help those who have lost employment due to technology and trade, and which will better educate our future workforce.
In the upcoming, final issue of our Sinology trilogy, we will examine the U.S. trade deficit and its impact on employment.
Andy Rothman
Investment Strategist
Matthews Asia
As of February 28, 2017, accounts managed by Matthews Asia did not hold positions in General Motors, Ford Motor Company, Boeing, Nike and Siemens AG.David Gauke, a Treasury minister, told The Daily Telegraph that home owners who allow workmen to evade VAT or income tax were forcing others to pay more.
His comments reflect growing concern in Whitehall about the cash-in-hand economy, which costs Britain billions of pounds a year in lost tax revenues.
However, critics accused the Government of being “unnecessarily moralistic” about ordinary people trying to keep their household bills down.
Mr Gauke, the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, said: “Getting a discount with your plumber by paying cash in hand is something that is a big cost to the Revenue and means others have to pay more in tax.
“I think it is morally wrong. It is illegal for the plumber but it is pretty implicit in those circumstances that there is a reason why there is a discount for cash. That is a large part of the hidden economy.”
According to a report by the Public Accounts Committee, more than two million people make cash-in-hand payments costing the Treasury an estimated £2 billion. There is no law against paying someone in cash, but tradesmen are under a legal obligation to disclose their earnings to HMRC and say whether they are liable for income tax or VAT.
Labour MP Austin Mitchell, who sits on the Public Accounts Committee which monitors public spending on behalf of Parliament, said that Mr Gauke was being “unnecessarily moralistic” and should focus instead on large-scale tax avoidance.
He said: “This is petty stuff. There would have to be large-scale surveillance to stop it. You can’t control people’s morals like this and it is best not to try.”
HMRC is planning an amnesty to encourage cash-in-hand builders and general tradesmen to pay their fair share of tax. Under the amnesty, workmen who admit they have avoided tax will face reduced penalties of £200 plus a fine equivalent to 10 per cent of unpaid tax.
Anyone refusing the “last chance” offer will face criminal prosecution if they are subsequently found not to have paid what they owe.
Previous operations have targeted home tutors and eBay traders, and have pulled in an extra £500 million in tax since 2007.
Mr Gauke spoke to The Daily Telegraph after outlining plans for a crackdown on millionaires who use aggressive tax avoidance schemes.
In a speech to the Policy Exchange think tank, he said that while using Isas and claiming gift aid on charitable donations was acceptable, buying homes through companies to avoid stamp duty and using service companies to reduce income tax was “morally repugnant”.
Mr Gauke said: “These schemes damage our ability to fund public services and provide support to those who need it. They harm businesses by distorting competition. They damage public confidence. And they undermine the actions of the vast majority of taxpayers, who pay more in tax as a consequence of others enjoying a free ride.”
Mr Gauke criticised BBC stars paid through personal service companies, which allows them to minimise their tax bills. Last week the BBC admitted it paid 342 stars earning over £50,000 a year in this way.
Mr Gauke said: “Where arrangements are artificial, where they are contrived, and designed for the purpose of reducing National Insurance contributions for the employer or the employee, then those artificial arrangements are such that they do constitute tax avoidance. Tax avoidance is tax avoidance.”
His comments come a day after the Government announced plans to force accountants to surrender the names of millionaire tax avoiders to the taxman. Gary Ashford, head of tax investigations at accountancy firm RSM Tenon, said: “HMRC are coming down hard on the hidden economy.”For a few months in 2007, American Alan Webb was the world’s best miler. Ten years later, we take a look back at Webb’s magical summer.
By Jonathan Gault
July 31, 2017
Matthew Centrowitz still remembers it clearly. It was June 2, 2007, and he was at the Reebok Grand Prix on Randall’s Island in New York City. He may have an Olympic gold medal now, but back then Centrowitz was an 18-year-old senior at Broadneck (Md.) High School running in his first mile against professionals, where he would face the greatest field of his young life: Nick Willis, Craig Mottram, Bernard Lagat, Kevin Sullivan and the headliner, Alan Webb.
Centrowitz arrived a couple of hours before his race on a warm, muggy night at Icahn Stadium. As he and his training partner, Dan Wilson, headed for the warmup area, Wilson spotted Webb seated on a hill nearby. Wilson, a 2002 UConn grad and three-time U.S. finalist at 1500 meters, knew Webb from his years on the circuit and made a beeline toward him. Centrowitz followed along and remained quiet as the two pros talked shop.
Wilson asked Webb if he was in shape. The answer to this was already fairly obvious — Webb had run 3:51.71 for the mile in his last race at the Drake Relays. But even if they’re in monster shape, pros generally don’t admit it to other pros. Better to downplay expectations and let your opponent underestimate you.
That wasn’t Webb’s style. Webb thrived on confidence, so when Wilson asked him if he was in shape, Webb responded truthfully.
“Yeah, I’m in really good shape,” Webb told him.
Like any running geek, Wilson wanted to know more. He asked Webb what kind of workouts he had run recently. So Webb proceeded to rattle off details of two recent sessions: a set of 20 x 400 in which Webb went 57-56-55-50 for his final four reps, and a set of 9 x 800 starting at 2:13 in which Webb dropped two seconds per rep before blasting the final one in 1:48.9.
Centrowitz sat there stunned.
“I was like, Oh my god, that’s almost 10 seconds faster than my PR,” Centrowitz recalled. “Those were just mind-boggling workouts…I just remember being in total awe…Even to this day, I can’t remember ever hearing someone talk about the type of fitness they’re in and be that confident about it.”
A few hours later, Webb stepped on the track, blasted by Lagat in the homestretch and won the mile in 3:52.94.*
The Legend of Alan Webb was growing.
Video: Last Lap of 2007 Reebok Grand Prix Mile Where Alan Webb Destroys Bernard Lagat in New York (Lagat would go on to win double gold at Worlds)
Ten years ago, American middle-distance running was in a prolonged medal drought. It had been 10 years since an American man had won a middle-distance medal at the World Championships. The Olympic drought was even longer, dating back to Brian Diemer‘s steeplechase bronze in 1984.
But in 2007, things were beginning to change, and one of the men leading the charge was a brawny 24-year-old from Reston, Va., named Alan Webb, who for a few glorious months that summer stamped himself as the world’s greatest miler. Webb’s accomplishments that year remain unmatched by an American: world leader in both the 1500 and the mile, the latter an American record of 3:46.91, a time that no one on Earth has bested since. Webb and Lagat, who would go on to claim double gold at that year’s World Championships in Osaka, ignited a spark in American distance running that has grown into a bonfire, peaking with six medals on the track at last year’s Olympics in Rio.
Webb’s success was built on confidence, which had its benefits and its drawbacks. At its best, Webb’s confidence was a snowball rolling downhill, building on itself and flattening everything in its path. But once its momentum had halted, it could be very hard for Webb to get the snowball moving again.
Part of the reason for that was the system in which Webb operated. Working with Scott Raczko, who coached Webb as a high schooler from 1998 to 2001 and again as a professional from 2002 to 2009 after Webb went to the University of Michigan for a year, Webb’s training program was an intricately structured combination of running, lifting and drills. Webb likened it to the story of Goldilocks. When the pieces fit together “just right,” the results were incredible, such as in 2001 when Webb ran 3:53.43 for the mile at the Prefontaine Classic to break Jim Ryun‘s legendary U.S. high school record.
But if something was off, it could take years for Webb to strike the correct balance again. During Webb’s only year Michigan, he struggled to adapt to new coach Ron Warhurst and spent much of the season trying to recreate what had made him successful under Raczko. Even once he went pro and returned to Raczko, it took until 2004 to find the Goldilocks zone again. That year, Webb ran a mile PR of 3:50.73 and won the U.S. Olympic Trials in the 1500 to make his only Olympic team. He followed it up the next year with personal bests of 3:32.52 and 3:48.92 and a ninth-place finish at the World Championships in 2005, in which he made his famous power move to the front 800m into the race.
All the while, Webb was working to improve his aerobic strength. In April 2006, he ran 27:34.72 for 10,000 meters, a ridiculous time for someone who would go on to break 1:44 for 800. That 2006 season eventually went off the rails due to a hamstring injury sustained during that 10,000 and a case of anemia stemming from changes Webb had made to his diet.
By the time Webb returned to training in Reston in the fall of 2006, he had some work to do to restore his confidence. The good news is that he wasn’t starting from rock bottom.
“Despite the anemia, we knew that he had an incredible base built up from years of consistent training that he was going to run fast [in 2007],” Raczko said recently when we chatted on the phone.
Things began clicking quickly. After losing weight stressing out about his hamstring injury over the summer, the 5’9″ Webb was back to his ideal weight of 143-145 pounds.
“We did all the things that we knew were right and we didn’t do too much and we didn’t do too little,” Webb said.
Goldilocks had returned to Reston, Virginia.
***
Indoors, Webb enjoyed a solid campaign, running an indoor PR of 3:55.18 and winning the mile at USAs. That was just a taste of what was to come. By the spring, his routine was set: 70-85 miles per week, with workouts on Tuesdays and Fridays and a long run of 12-15 miles on Sundays.
But for Webb to reach his peak, everything else had to be dialed in, and it was. He’d finish up workout days with an hour-long lifting session, and like everything else in his training regimen, that session was meticulously planned. Webb used a rotation of 11 lifts: power cleans, squats, dead lifts, lunges, calf raises, bench press, bent-over rows, military press, upright rows, biceps and triceps. He’d do three sets of each, the number of reps varying from six to 14 depending on the day (for every two additional reps, Webb would remove five pounds). Webb had precisely two minutes to complete each set, with the beep-beep-beep of his watch ushering him to the next station.
Webb could have trained in a local gym but did not want any outside distractions to interrupt his focus. Instead, he converted the dining room of his house into his own personal gym. His sweat would pool in the middle of the floor, leaving an unsightly stain in the middle of the room when Webb moved out a few years later.
The result of all those hours of weights? Webb was ripped. In fields full of rail-thin middle-distance runners, Webb’s bulging biceps and cut shoulders separated him from the crowd before a step had been run.
“[Lifting] gave me power off the line and I also felt like it helped my form, it helped me maintain my form,” Webb said. “I didn’t break down because I was strong.”
One new part of Webb’s routine in 2007 was the addition of what he called a “mini” workout of hard 200s, 150s and 120s followed by plyometrics on Mondays and the day before meets. Webb would start out around 29 seconds for the 200s, but by the end of the session, he was moving; he’d always try to run the final 100 of those 120s in under 13 seconds. These sessions had two benefits. First, they helped Webb drill his speed while remaining short enough for him to recover quickly.
“When we got that balance right, it was just enough, it really made a big difference to me,” Webb said. “Because I still feel that I wasn’t really that fast. I had to make myself fast. It was the speed that was my weakness and I had to work really hard on that and get it right.”
Second, they provided a confidence boost — always key in Webb’s world.
“It was like a little check-in before the race… I’d do that and I’d be like, I’m good.”
Webb opened up his outdoor season on April 7 with a 3:57.83 mile victory at the Blue Shoes Mile in Greenville, S.C., and followed it up with a 1:47.32 800 at the Mt. SAC Relays a week later (3rd place). By the time he headed to the Drake Relays for a mile at the end of April, Webb was ready to run fast. For much of the winter, Webb had hit the weights hard, but he backed off after the indoor season and was starting to feel the benefits. Webb likened it to coming down from altitude: he felt looser and faster, and it was easier for him to hit and sustain his top gear.
“I was like shot out of a rocket,” Webb said. “Suddenly, you couldn’t stop me. I just was like, Oh my gosh, I can just keep going.”
Those feelings were confirmed in his mini workout the day before the race. Webb ran a series of 150s and 120s at a high school track in Des Moines, splitting a ridiculous 11.0 for the final 100 of his last rep.
“Now I will say that it was wind-aided,” Webb said. “It was breezy that day, as it was the next day. But still! I remember thinking, Wow, I feel GREAT.”
Webb was light, confident and fast. Only one piece of the puzzle remained: Julia.
***
Julia Rudd met Alan Webb for the first time in February 2007. A Division III national champion in the steeplechase, Rudd was living in Indianapolis running for a club called the Indianapolis Invaders. One of Rudd’s friends ran for Raczko and mentioned that her teammate “Alan” would be in town and needed someone to show him around. Rudd called the number her friend had given her and after a few minutes, it dawned on her.
“Wait, are you Alan Webb, the runner?” she asked.
Rudd was dating another runner at the time, who, ironically, had a poster of Webb above his bed. The real thing was even more impressive. He helped her cook her dinner. That was new.
“It was stuff that I wanted my boyfriend to do and he just never would,” Rudd said. “Alan, when I met him during that relationship, I was like, This is clearly what I should look for in a guy.”
Rudd ended the other relationship and kept in touch with Webb. Both of them happened to be racing the Drake Relays. So, the night before his race and a few hours after Webb blasted through 100 meters in 11 seconds, he took Rudd out for their first date, which ended with an awkward first kiss in Webb’s hotel room.
Julia Rudd is now Julia Webb. The pair, now parents to two children, will celebrate their seventh anniversary in October.
“I think if you want to know where the extra magic sprinkle came [from] or some of the giddy up in my step came from that season, I think that explains a lot,” Webb said.
Conditions can be fickle in Iowa in April but everything else in 2007 was going Webb’s way, so why wouldn’t the weather Gods cooperate? On a sunny, 70-degree day, Webb followed around pacer Moise Joseph for 1000 meters before blasting the final lap and a half all alone, finishing in 3:51.71 in front of a packed house that went wild. And for good reason: nobody has ever run a faster mile in the month of April. Second place was a distant 4:03.15. Webb’s mark also broke Steve Scott‘s 28-year-old meet record of 3:55.26 and as soon as he crossed the line, he thought of Scott’s American record: 3:47.69. Though it was beautiful out, it had been windy during the race. Surely he could find a few more seconds on a still day…
Julia had run the steeple earlier that day and met up with Webb for his cooldown, but she didn’t last long; still riding the emotional high of the race, Webb dropped her. She still went out with him again that night.
Webb’s next race was the mile at the Reebok Grand Prix and his victory there against Lagat, the second-fastest 1500 man in history, was proof that everything he and Raczko had been working toward was coming to fruition. Webb ran fast — 3:52.94 — but he also flashed the strength to hang on to a hot pace set by Lagat and the combination of speed and power to blow by him in the home straight. With 80 meters to go, the two men were level, but by the time Webb crossed the finish line, biceps flexing, he had put a good six meters on Lagat.
***
Alan Webb’s 2007 season lives on because of the times he ran in races, but the times he ran in workouts were almost as impressive. Even 10 years later, Webb can recite every rep of his best sessions from memory.
There was the 4 x mile workout before Drake: 4:24 (2 mins rest), 4:20 (4 mins rest), 4:13 (3 mins rest), 4:03.
“I ran 4:03 and it was a surreal feeling. I went out in 59-high and I was like, Oh my gosh, I’m doing mile repeats and this is the fourth one? I ‘settled in’ and ran a 62 in the middle of this workout. I was like, This is insane…I don’t think I had ever cracked 4:10 in mile repeats.”
There was the 9 x 800 workout Webb had told Centrowitz about: 2:13, 2:11, 2:09, 2:07, 2:05, 2:03, 2:01, 2:00, 1:48.9, with rest increasing from 1 minute after the first rep to 3:30 after the eighth one.
“I was doing it with Kevin Sullivan and Rod Koborsi and Chris Lukezic. And those guys did eight and we thought we were going to get down to faster than 2:00. We thought the last one would be like 1:55. Those guys only got down to 2:00. Raczko was like, ‘I want you to do another one’… It was this magical time…It blew my own mind. I was like, How did I do that?“
There was the 20 x 400 starting at 61-62 for the first set of four (1 min rest) down to 57-56-55-50 for the final set (3 mins rest).
And then there was the workout U.S. distance fans would have killed to see: a four-mile tempo at 4:48 pace with Ryan Hall, America’s top miler and America’s top marathoner running side by side on a trail in Leuven, Belgium (Webb finished up with 8 x 200, 26’s down to 24’s, while Hall ran another four miles).
Webb was firing on all cylinders. He’d never run 4:03 in a workout. Or 1:48. Or 50.
“You take all those workouts, you put them together, you’re like dang, that’s everything. All the pieces. Strength, speed, the speed endurance, anaerobic, anaerobic threshold. It was all there.”
That confidence came at a price. In the short term, Webb rode the wave of those good workouts, but he had also set a near-impossible bar for future versions of himself.
“That was the problem,” Webb said. “For the rest of my career, I could never even come close to that.”
***
On June 24, Webb won his third U.S. 1500 title, destroying Lagat over the final 50 meters just as he had in New York. A year earlier, during the midst of his up-and-down 2006 season, Webb had not even made it to the start line at USAs. That disappointment fueled him to reclaim his crown, and as he neared the finish line, those emotions came pouring out. He threw his arms up in the air, flexed, opened his mouth wide, and unleashed a primal scream. Once he broke the tape, he fell to his knees and pounded the track in exultation.
Video: Last 100m of 2017 USA 1500 (It’s certainly worth 25 seconds of your time)
“What ended up ultimately being something that could have and should have been better, just controlling that emotional fluctuation, also was one of the reasons why he was so successful,” Raczko said. “Because he did put himself out there, he did run on emotion so much, he was willing to go out and just try to conquer the world and dominate things.”
While Webb’s domestic results were brilliant, they were just a prelude of what was to come once he headed overseas. He began his travels with an 800 PR of 1:45.80 in Malmö, Sweden, where he finished second to an 18-year-old rising star named David Rudisha. Then it was off to Paris for a 1500 at the Meeting Gaz de France, part of the prestigious Golden League.
The local favorite was Mehdi Baala, the reigning European champion who a week earlier had run a world-leading 3:31.05 in Strasbourg. Webb was ready for the challenge. After following rabbit Kamal Boulahfane for the first 1100 meters, Webb assumed the lead at the bell but was passed by Baala as they hit 1200 meters in a quick 2:49.30, Webb giving the Frenchman a slight push as Baala cut in front of him. Webb ran in Baala’s wake down the back straight as the two men kicked away from the rest of the field.
Baala grimaced as he rounded the final turn, and though Webb swung wide, as he had at USAs, he could not make up any ground. Halfway down the home straight, Baala still had a step on his rival and the crowd at the Stade de France began to roar in anticipation of a home victory. But as they approached the finish, Baala’s body began to fail him. Inside, Webb’s body was failing too, but the hours of sweating in the dining room masked it, his rapidly pumping arms betraying no hint of the fatigue that lay within. By the time Webb pulled level with 25 meters to go, the Frenchman began to flail forward hopelessly, knowing he was beaten. The partisan crowd fell silent. Webb had run 3:30.54, a world leader and the fastest 1500 ever by an American-born runner.
“The race came to me and I didn’t really force it,” Webb said. “And I think that was one of the few times I was patient enough to just let it happen.”
With the performance, Webb had announced himself as a gold-medal threat at Worlds, but he had one more item to check off before then.
“After that, because I had run fast in the 1500, I wanted to go for a mile,” Webb said. “And that’s when the talks about where we wanted to go next started.”
Those talks would last a while. In the United States, the mile is historic, the distance that connects the generations, from Wes Santee to Ryun to Scott to Webb. But in Europe, it does not hold the same standing. After Paris, Webb’s agent, Ray Flynn, called a number of high-profile European meets asking to add a mile to the program. A round of rejections followed, but Flynn eventually found a small meet in the town of Brasschaat, Belgium, (population 37,000) that was willing to host one. It was settled: 34 days before the World Championships, Alan Webb would attempt to break Steve Scott’s 3:47.69 American record at the Flanders Cup on July 21.
The venue was decidedly low-key. The red six-lane track sat in the middle of a small park, lined on all sides with trees. Most importantly, there was no wind. The small grandstand was mostly empty by the time of Webb’s race that night, but the small crowd of a few hundred was decidedly pro-Webb. David Krummenacker, Ian Dobson, Dathan Ritzenhein, Lauren Fleshman, Molly Huddle and Amy Cragg were among the American pros who had also raced that night. Several other pros, including Deena Kastor, had made the trip from their European training bases to witness the attempt in person. Like Webb, all of them were working to resuscitate U.S. distance running. An American record for Webb would be a victory not just for him, but for the sport.
Webb employed two pacers, Australian Youcef Abdi and Kenyan Samson Surum, and followed them through the quarter in 56.1 and the half in 1:53.5, dead-on record pace. Surum chauffeured Webb through three-quarters in 3:50.3; he needed to run a 57 to eclipse Scott. Webb ran 56.
3:46.91. American record.
Alan Webb Breaks American Record in Mile:
“One of the things that I do remember is that the second-place runner ran 3:56,” said Flynn, who cheered Webb on from the infield. “And I remember looking up the straightaway when Alan finished in 3:46 and thinking that the guy who would finish second was just coming around the bend and he was still running 3:56. And that image stuck in my mind of a guy running 3:56 and being 10 seconds behind the winner. I’ll never forget that.”
For Webb, 3:46 marked the realization of a dream he’d had ever since running 3:53 to break Ryun’s high school record. But even in the moments after the race, he and Raczko were already thinking bigger. They were always thinking bigger.
“I had a genuine confidence that I could compete with anybody in the world,” Webb said. “And that was a feeling that I’d never had before…I had tasted it before, but that solidified it.”
There was no epic celebration. Webb went back to Leuven, had some pizza, one beer and went to bed. He had another race in a week.
“The excitement was that this was really setting himself up for Worlds and beyond,” Raczko said. “We really felt at the time that that was only the tip of the iceberg, that there were much greater times to come. His training was never about just trying to set the American record. He wanted to be the best middle distance runner there ever was, and this was just a great stepping stone.”
Raczko could not have imagined that when they left the track that night in Brasschaat, Alan Webb, at the age of 24, had already peaked.
***
The penalty of talent — in any sport, but particularly track and field, where precocity is so easy to measure with minutes and seconds, feet and inches — is expectation. And the earlier that talent manifests itself, the greater those expectations become. Given the magnitude of what he accomplished as a high schooler and the fact that he grew up during the dawn of the internet, no U.S. middle-distance runner ever faced higher expectations than Alan Webb.
But battling hype is like squaring off against a hydra; meet one expectation and more rise up to take its place. Webb ran 3:53. Okay, so when will make the Olympics? Webb made the Olympics. Okay, so when will he run 3:50? Webb ran the American record. Okay, so when will he win gold?
Add in Webb’s emotional nature and you had someone that fans of American distance runners couldn’t get enough of.
“For me, his enduring popularity has to do with the fact that I don’t think there has ever been a star who has been as human as he is,” said Chris Lear, who chronicled Webb’s freshman year at Michigan in the book Sub-4:00. “And by that, I mean, like who else has climbed the highest highs and crashed and gotten up again and done well again and just had this rollercoaster in front of our eyes, under a microscope?”
“I think it was [because] he was the phenom that people were really intrigued by him,” Flynn said. “But it was also his distance from the crowd. The fact that he wasn’t, at his best, part of a high-profile group. He was a bit of a mystery, not in a bad way, but in his individualistic training routines. The talk of his workouts seemed to pass around and people were amazed by what they heard.”
As a result, any scrap of Webb news quickly made the rounds on the messageboards; between 2004 and 2007, there were 1,678 threads — more than one per day — started on this website that included Webb’s name in the subject line. He had nowhere to hide.
“It’s still tough when you’re actually living it and the eyes of the track world are on you all the time,” Raczko said. “And there’s such a great expectation all the time. There wasn’t any meet that he could go to just for a low-key meet. Because even if it was a low-key meet, it ended up being a high-profile meet just because he was there.”
By August 2007, the Webb hype was at its highest since his appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman as a high schooler in 2001. Sports Illustrated even ran a feature on him, almost unheard of for a distance runner, and again, their expectations were hardly subtle. In an article by Tim Layden titled, “Just the Beginning,” the subhead read: “Former high school phenom Alan Webb could cap his best year yet with a gold medal in the 1,500 at the worlds. But the longer road leads to Beijing — and beyond.”
***
Behind his world-leading times of 3:30.54 and 3:46.91, Webb entered the 2007 World Championships in Osaka as the favorite in the men’s 1500. But by the time Webb stepped to the line for the first round on August 25, his air of invincibility had crumbled. It began with his final pre-Worlds race, an 800 in Heusden-Zolder, Belgium, on July 28. During the first 100 meters of the race, Webb felt a twinge in his hamstring and knew immediately that something was wrong. He considered dropping out, but it didn’t get any worse, so Webb hung in the race, which he won in a nearly two-second PR of 1:43.84. In case you needed a reminder of how fit Webb was, the runner-up in that race was Canadian Gary Reed, who would come up.01 shy of 800 gold in Osaka.
But when Webb crossed the finish line, there was no emotion. Watching on a computer back in the States, Julia could sense something was up.
“He runs a huge PR and he should be emphatic but he finishes and looks confused,” Julia said.
Webb only missed a day or two of running, though he couldn’t run fast on his hamstring for a couple of weeks. The bigger effect was mental. Webb couldn’t blast a speed session or rip a mini workout on Monday, and without that constant reassurance of his fitness, his confidence began to waver.
Webb did recover enough to run a time trial at George Mason’s track before leaving for Japan. After a 800m “warmup” rep in 2:00 and three minutes’ rest, Chris Lukezic paced Webb to 2:17 for 1000 meters. Webb was happy with the time — so amped, in fact, that after the workout, he tried to rip off 100 pushups in a row, a longtime goal, right there by the track (he made it into the low 90s before calling it quits). Webb’s hamstring had held up, but he still felt a hint of residual soreness. Deep down, he couldn’t shake the feeling that his injury was still in the process of healing. To make matters worse, Webb came down with an illness while traveling to Japan.
“He was definitely like classic Alan Webb, kind of freaking out,” Julia said. “If Alan’s not in his state of [positivity], things kind of spiral out of control. So it was definitely not an ideal situation for him to run that race. And especially with the pressure of All right, this is your chance, this is where you’re going to get the medal. The U.S. drought, all that stuff.”
When Webb toed the line for the 1500m final at Worlds on August 29, he thought he had a chance to win, but the confidence that had flown through his veins immediately after running 3:46 was long gone.
“It was very disappointing to not be able to use what I had that day in Brasschaat at the World Championships,” Webb said. “I didn’t get to race as the full guy that was there.”
Webb was in perfect position on the shoulder of the leader with 200 to go. With 110 remaining, he was still in third, but a boxed-in Shadrack Korir bumped Webb as he bounced outside and Webb could never get his momentum going again. He finished eighth as Lagat, the man Webb had beaten convincingly on three separate occasions in 2007, became the first American to win a global 1500 title in 99 years.
At the time, Webb was devastated. Though the external pressure was great, no one had higher expectations than Webb himself, and after the race, he went off — on himself.
“He was just so vicious, so hard on himself, that even the most negative columnist could not have criticized him more than Alan criticized himself,” said Dick Patrick, who was in Osaka covering the meet for USA Today. “I thought it was unnecessarily harsh.”
Looking back, however, Webb recognizes the importance of that night in Osaka in the development of U.S. distance running.
“It was a turning point for me to set that [mile] record, but also for an American to get a gold medal in that event was important as well,” Webb said. “So between the two of us, we covered it all…I feel blessed to have been part of that race that [ended the] drought of trying to get a gold medal in the 1500 at a Worlds or Olympics. Bernard did that.”
***
Though Webb viewed eighth place — and his season as a whole — as a failure at the time, he would never approach those heights again. Osaka was the last U.S. team that he would make. The rest of his career, was quite simply, a struggle.
Webb entered the Olympic year of 2008 with renewed vigor and doubled down on what had worked in 2007 in an attempt to avoid wearing down late in the year. He upped his reps in the weight room and added another mini speed session late in the week. If some was good, Webb thought, more was better.
“I kind of saw it happening and I thought, Oh, I don’t think that’s right,” Julia said. “But then I was like, Well how would I know, he’s the American record holder. Him and his coach have it down, maybe they’re onto something.”
As a result of the extra lifting, Webb bulked up to 151 pounds, far above his usual racing weight of 143-145. He |
as TPM notes,
[A] Facebook page has already been set up for the prospective all-white community Cobb envisions for Antler, "Antler PLE." PLE stands for Pioneer Little Europe, a movement of white nationalists that encourages members to band together in pre-existing communities and that has been championed on neo-Nazi websites like Stormfront.org. The Facebook page included a link to an article about McKinney, Texas police officer Eric Casebolt's resignation after he was caught on video slamming a 14-year-old, bikini-clad black girl to the ground and pointing a handgun at other teens attending a pool party. "He is welcome in our Antler PLE anytime," the post read.
Still, don't hold your breath, white power fans. From the Grand Forks Herald,The Return of Starting
Endless55 Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 24, 2017
Review of Split 2 Week 1
Week one of split two was like no other weekend of Vainglory we have seen. Saw was a legitimate counter on the Fold and WON A GAME. We saw CP Alpha return and it was absolutely terrifying especially if VONC was running it. We also get to see the return of other notable heroes like Flicker and Ozo. The players had some absolutely insane triple Acrobounces. I know Humanist was especially excited to see his buddy being played again competitively. I believe Humanist is Ozo’s only real friend. He has been with him through thick and thin! In NA, we see Hammers being back along with their star laner, StartingAllOver. In EU, we finally saw SK gaming lose a series to an interesting Mouse team. Let’s check in on EU real fast.
So I may or may not of thought L3oN was absolutely insane for this tweet. I actually stand by it because he has not been able to prove this on a live stage. Players unfortunately need at least one championship under their belt before they become legends in my opinion (*note ShinKaigan). That being said, L3oN really surprised me this weekend. He joined up with old teammates Justman00 and Imthedoom on Mousesports, to have a pretty solid first outing. I’m still not sold on how they get along behind the scenes. I hope they can start meshing as a team. The less pointing of fingers that happens the better. Do I truly care about this team in the grand scheme of things? No. If L3oN isn’t traveling to worlds then no team with L3oN on it deserves to be at worlds. That is extremely unfortunate, but we have seen in the past when a team dominates with L3oN and then struggles with a sub on the live stage. Of course, the troll master himself has to do what he does best, a nice kappa GGs towards his teammates.
If I am on the subject of trolls, then I guess I need to discuss NA’s version of L3oN, with StartingAllOver(SAO) from Hollywood Hammers. He of course, received a 14 day ban from Vainglory due to violating their Terms of Service. That hasn’t really deterred him on doing questionable things. Starting has been streaming once again on Twitch, which does have some high quality game play at times. That being said, he needs to be aware that people are watching his streams. Not just people, but maybe someone such as the head developer, CEO of Vainglory, Kristian aka EdTheShred. Ed wanted to leave Starting a little personal note in game to remind him to be a friendly member of the community.
Now, if this isn’t the greatest thing from the CEO then I do not know what is. Ed literally was just like “hey, I was in your stream for 10 minutes and you dodged six matches what the hell are you doing!? Please stop tx” (I paraphrased that, not a direct quote). I am still not convinced Starting clicked the “OK. I Promise to be Good” button. While Starting can be questionable with his decisions off the Fold, he does make some crazy plays on the Fold.
He returned this past weekend for the start of split two. With his team down points and in need of some big wins, he was back in big ways. He was able to take down Tempo Storm, Nova, and fall in the finals to TSM. It wasn’t even that SAO completely dominated, we saw his teammates step up and make some big plays. Status finished this past weekend with a Kill/Death/Assist of 40/25/22, while SAO finished 25/34/31. Having Status become more of a threat in the jungle is huge for Hammers. If teams have to start focusing on Status instead of Starting, then that will open up the door for the triple kills we have seen in the past from SAO. If we can see Starting clean up his positioning a bit, I believe we may have another team in the running of being a top three team.
As for the rest of the weekend, we see Cloud9 fall to Tribe during day one. Cloud9 seems to be in a slump since Mobile Masters and after losing in week 3 of split one. I think we will see this changing with the return of the draft queen, PhysiX, who was with them when they won the Unified Spring Finals. Then again, it may be best for them to be taking it easy leading up to worlds. They have no reason to get burnt out over a season that will get them nothing but a bit of pocket change.
Nova has fallen short week after week against Rogue. They have been looking for revenge and this weekend we would not see that beloved match up. Nova will fall to Hammers as mentioned above. Nova will have to have some strong last three weekends to get a place at worlds. Rogue went up against TSM and this was the match to watch for the weekend. Rogue took game one against TSM, but TSM was able to get the reverse sweep and move on to day two. For the rest of the weekend, TSM played flawless. They take down Tribe and handle Hammers in the finals.
Looking ahead to weekend two of split two, we have a lot of interesting match ups. My match to watch of the weekend would have to be Cloud9 verse Nova eSports. If Nova wants to stay in the running we are going to need a big win during day one. I think Nova does fall to C9 in a close match up. The rematch of last weeks finals is another match to look out for. TSM is looking to make it into day two, which could set up a C9 vs TSM. My player to watch is going to be Oldskool for this week. He struggled last week and I look for him to bounce back with his team. TSM is playing on another level right now, so I have them returning to the finals once again. Who will they play from the other side of the bracket? Gankstars and Tempo do not seem to be making any major moves yet, so they lose in their day one match ups. I look to see a great match up in day two between Tribe verse Rogue. Rogue fell short against TSM last week, so they are going to push past Tribe to have a rematch against TSM in the finals. TSM still prevails with their win streak continuing.
I will leave you with the final points. If you would like more in depth details then check out our recaps and predictions on TFResports podcast. -endlessHave you ever looked at a finished kit and noticed that the paint has a bit of depth? That the edges have a subtle darkness to them? Well that’s the result of a very common technique in the modeling world known as pre-shading.
Pre-shading, at it’s simplest, is essentially a layer of darker paint under the top colour to make certain areas pop-out. Commonly used in model aircraft to highlight panel lines it’s been adopted on Gunpla for panel lines as well, or more often, shading around the outer edges of a piece.
Pre-shading is a great technique that is extremely accessible for beginner and advanced builders alike. The only special bit of equipment you need is a double action airbrush (a pressure regulator is great too, but you can manage without one). Can you get the same effect with spray cans? Some folks will say yes, but the reality is that you’re never going to get the same effects from a product that designed for wide and consistent disbursement of paint.
At a high level the process is pretty simple, but things can get pretty complex quickly. Let’s start off with the basic steps…
Step 1:
Apply dark paint around the edges, or details, of your kit using your airbrush. Step 1, complete.
Before rushing on, let's take a step back and examine some of the finder points.
The final result is highly dependent on a couple things, namely the nature of the shading lines and the paint used. Airbrushmanship (that's a word now) is key for getting the most out of this technique. Thick lines, thin lines, straight lines, crooked lines, heavy lines, thin lines, whatever paint you put down in this step changes the enter look later on. Getting the right kind shading now is key and all about being able to work your airbrush. A dual action airbrush will you to change the amount of paint being sprayed, and when backed up by changing the PSI high or low, will give you the best control. In this case, a lower PSI (8-12) will let you get a broad spray while not putting out much paint. A higher PSI (15-20) will let you put more paint down in narrow lines, perfect for highlighting lines and other details. Keep in mind that every airbrush performs differently, and every paint-to-thinner ratio performs differently, depending on the PSI. I recommend practicing technique and technical aspects before starting on your favorite kit.
When it comes to paint selection for shading, the most common pick is a flat black or gray. While I think gloss paints would work in most situations, flats should always work better since you're applying more paint on top. You can also use colour paints for different looks, which I'll get into a bit later.
Flickr
For this example, the RE Nightingale's shield. The red piece is right out of the box and the black part has been primed...
Flickr
For my pre-shading layer I put down light gray around the edges of the red, black for the center piece. Why two colours?
Caution: Don't forget to start spraying before hitting the piece and don't stop until you've moved the spray off the piece. Stopping and starting in place is likely to give you dense, dark spots which will be visbile later. Also pay attention to how your airbrush responds to the PSI and paint mix. Mine, while on lower PSIs, has a tendency to sputter quite a bit.
Step 2:
Apply a coat or two of your final colour over the piece. Paint like you would anything else, but apply as many or as few coats as needed to balance the underlying lines with the coat per the effect you’re going with. One of the nice things about pre-shading is that, if your shading is too intense, applying a few additional coats can go along way toward muting the effect. There's no real rule on how many paint coats you should apply, but typically one or two should do. If you feel like you're applying too many paint coats to get the look you want out of your pre-shade then you probably need to tone down the shading to begin with.
Flickr
Here's how it looks after a coat of Tamiya Flat Red and German Gray. The light gray I used on the red resulted in a more subtle shade with less coats of red on top. The black on top of gray gave me the best chance of standing out with the dark gray on top, though it still got washed out quite a bit.
And that’s it, you’re done! Proceed to stop coat, decal, weather, etc as you would any other kit.
Technique is everything
In order to better represent some of the concepts I tested a some of the techniques on my favorite test subject, plastic spoons*! They may not be the best examples, short of using 10 different kits for a single tutorial, but I hope they help highlight different looks and techniques. In most of the examples I edged around the outside in a traditional fashion with a few lines across the center as an additional reference. In the bottom of the two cross lines I tried to add a bit of inconsistency, such as a dark spot, to demonstrate what happens if you start and stop over a piece or aren’t consistent with the pre-shade application.
Over 70 spoons lost their life in the making of this tutorial. RIP.
Shading Darkness & Colour Options
An important thing to consider is how subtle you want your pre-shading to look. While you can always decrease the appearance of the the shading by adding more colour coats on top, pre-shading up front with the right paint can give you better results in less time. For example, when shading white, a pre-shade base of black will stand out a lot more than a lighter gray. Meanwhile, using a pre-shade option with a bit of colour can create a more dynamic look and tie in other colours on your kit. The same will apply to other colours with varying ranges of coat coverage depending on how dark the paint is (e.g. dark blue paint will be better at hiding black shaded lines than yellow).
In addition, depending on the look you’re going for, different base colours can make a big impact by adding subtlety or contrast to the top coat. For example, if you have a kit with a lot blue and white, try shading with blue under the white parts to cary that color throughout the rest of the kit.
In the following examples I start with a white base, apply various pre-shading colours, and coat with an off white to demonstrate how the pre-shading starts to fade into the coat.
White Primer Black Shaded Lines White Coat x1 White Coat x2 White Coat w/o Shading White Primer Gray Shaded Lines White Coat x1 White Coat x2 White Coat w/o Shading White Primer Blue Shaded Lines White Coat x1 White Coat x2 White Coat w/o Shading
Black vs. Gray. vs. Other Base Colours
How does those same techniques work when applied over primer or other colours?
Gray Primer Black Pre-Shading Red Coat x1 Red Coat x2 Red Coat w/o Pre-Shading Basic Red Base Black Pre-Shading Red Coat x1 Red Coat x2 Red Coat w/o Pre-Shading Basic Red Base Gray Pre-Shading Red Coat x1 Red Coat x2 Red Coat w/o Pre-Shading Gray Primer Black Pre-Shading Blue Coat x1 Blue Coat x2 Blue Coat w/o Pre-Shading Basic Blue Base Black Pre-Shading Blue Coat x1 Blue Coat x2 Blue Coat w/o Pre-Shading Basic Blue Base Gray Pre-Shading Blue Coat x1 Blue Coat x2 Blue Coat w/o Pre-Shading
Thin vs. Thick Edges
When shading edges, or detail lines, it's important to understand the effect that line thickness can have.
At the very least, making thick lines is easier. One can work over an area back and forth until there's some semblance of straightness. Thin lines show flaws a lot more, as you can see with my poor line skills below.
White Primer Black Shaded Lines White Coat x1 White Coat x2 White Coat w/o Shading
Advanced Pre-Shading/Highlighting
In addition to the basics, there are few ways to mix up pre-shading process by.....
Black Basing/The Max Technique
The Max Technique is a bit of a twist on traditional pre-shading, named for professional Japanese modeler (he helped launch the Master Grade line!) Max Watanabe. In most circles it's simply called black basing. While essentially the same thing, the Max Technique works best for Gunpla while the general technique of black basing tends to be a better fit for model aircraft.
The Max Technique involves starting with a flat black base for the entire piece and slowly applying paint coats on top to fade in the colours you like. By working from the inside of the piece outward you can achieve the same basic effect as pre-shading but with potentially less obvious edge work. This is a fairly advanced technique because you need to use your airbrush to put down very subtle and consistent coats coats across all your pieces while maintaining good handling skills to edge outward. There's a more to it as well, such as specially prepared paint coats, which I'm not really sure I fully comprehend. If you'd like to read more, check out Saint-ism's page on the subject.
Black basing also starts with a black base, but your subsequent paint coats are layered in a slightly different method. Doog's Model's has an absolutely amazing tutorial on the technique.
The Saint-ism Technique
Some of the best Gunpla shading out there comes from builder Saint-ism, as the following image should hopefully demonstrate...
For more photos of this build, check out Saint-ism's website
How does he do it? As with the aforementioned Max Technique he puts down a base coat and paints highlights on top. What makes his method different is that instead of a base black coat, he starts with a colour similar to the desired finish and highlights on top with another colour that best accentuates the base. The end result is a look that is extremely vibrant. You can read more about his technique here.
Paint Modulation/Highlighting
Another advanced technique involves combining dark and light shading to introduce lighter and darker spots on a kit. Commonly called paint modulation, this technique is often used on military dioramas to give the appearance of dynamic lighting. Essentially trying to capture the way light would fall across and object and create different light and shadowed areas. MIG Jimenez has a great selection of photos to help illustrate the technique.
There's also a similar technique called colour modulation where prominent or protruding parts of a piece are painted with slightly lighter colours than the rest of the kit to help make them pop in the final product. Mike Rinaldi has a solid tutorial of the technique. While I'm not sure how much impact this would have on Gunpla models, it's worth considering for some of the non-mobile suit kits Bandai has made from the franchise. Though I look forward to someone using this method on a military realistic looking mobile suit build.Councillor Frank Di Giorgio got a bumpy start Tuesday as Toronto’s budget chief, retracting his minutes-old pledge to try to freeze residential property taxes in 2014 and then calling such a freeze “far-fetched.” Mayor Rob Ford nominated the veteran North York councillor for the pressure-cooker post at Tuesday’s executive committee meeting. Shortly after members unanimously approved the pick, the two spoke to reporters.
Councillor Frank Di Giorgio, the city's new budget chief, at Mayor Rob Ford's executive committee on Tuesday. ( DAVID RIDER / TORONTO STAR )
Di Giorgio was asked: “The Mayor has asked for a tax freeze in 2014. Can you deliver that?” He replied: “I think anything is doable. I think that we certainly can try, and if it’s doable it’ll be done.” Di Giorgio (Ward 12, York South-Weston) also told reporters he hopes to repeat his predecessor Councillor Mike Del Grande’s 2013 demand that city departments freeze spending. But during a later interview in his office over the lunch break, the low-profile Ford ally said reporters had misunderstood him and he was speaking about a departmental spending freeze all along.
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“I think we're going to have to limit ourselves to an inflationary tax increase as an absolute maximum,” he said. “I don’t know what that’s likely to be.” Statistics Canada posted a cost-of-living increase for Toronto last year of 1.5 per cent. Last July, Ford, who says he will seek re-election in 2014, gave city manager Joe Pennachetti direction in writing to set the stage for tax freezes in 2014 and 2015. After Tuesday’s meeting, the mayor said: “If we can get 0 per cent that’s great. I can guarantee you, worst-case scenario, it won’t go higher than 2 per cent. I’d love to have 0 per cent, but I can’t guarantee that right now, till I look at the books.” Council approved a 2 per cent residential tax hike this year, a 2.5 per cent hike in 2012 and a tax freeze in 2011, after Ford took office.
Di Giorgio, first elected to North York council in 1985 and a member of Toronto council since 2000, also seemed to suggest the city would need to consult the province before he could act on Ford’s desire to reduce the land transfer tax — which brought in $336 million last year — by 10 per cent. City staff told the Star that Toronto in fact needs no such provincial permission.
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After the meeting, as confusion swirled, Di Giorgio joked about running from reporters, but maintained the kind of grin rarely seen on Del Grande. Asked what direction Ford has given him for budget preparation, Di Giorgio said: “There’s no clarity as to what I’ve been asked to do, other than examine certain things, like: What’s the likelihood of doing something with the land transfer tax? What’s the likelihood of coming in, let’s say if (Ford) says to me, ‘0 per cent tax increase’? “I think those are far-fetched ideas, but I will look at them.” Di Giorgio told the Star on Monday that, as budget chief, he will rely on staff to do the “heavy work” of finding savings. Del Grande spent countless hours scouring department budgets looking for savings. Di Giorgio is known at city hall as a team player who flies under the radar, and for speeches with sometimes circuitous logic. The Star noted in a 2003 “bafflegab” feature this from one council speech: “Mr. Chairman, I think we find ourselves in an unfortunate position simply because, simply because we have tended to overregulate perhaps too often, or Madam Chairman I should say, we have a regulatory system that is trilateral in the sense that we have three levels of government that fall in a regulation system and two levels of government that do their part.” Di Giorgio has served on budget committee since December 2010. Ford put him on executive last November. He also sits on the planning and growth committee.Former professional League of Legends pro player and current eUnited strategic coach Ram "Brokenshard" Djemal will host a four-day European amateur scouting combine beginning April 24, Djemal announced on Monday.
The first day of the event will focus on the draft. The following day, April 25, will feature a single round-robin for playoff seeding. Semifinals and finals for the event will take place on April 26 and 27 respectively, with each day being livestreamed. The prize pool for the event has yet to be announced, with Djemal still negotiating with sponsors.
"I've always been an advocate of Challenger talent," Djemal told ESPN. "I've enjoyed working with [Challenger players] and helping build them up. I felt like this was just another thing I wanted to do to help build and provide exposure for a lesser viewed region like Europe. There are a lot of players who would thrive in the limelight but just didn't have the opportunity to showcase it to a large audience just yet."
The event will feature 20 players split into four different teams, drafted by Djemal and three other coaches, to compete throughout the event. Djemal intends to open applications immediately, with four players per in-game role: Top lane, jungle, mid lane, AD carry and support.
"If anything, this could just give several players their first opportunity playing in a structured environment or even on stream," he said. "I just wanted to be able to provide an environment for fresh players to see where they stand against some experienced challengers, and a lot of that will depend on the mix of applications I accept. Overall, I have high hopes that since it is a broadcasted event that some players may get traction based on their performance during the tournament."
The event will be the second of its kind in Europe after FC Schalke 04 Esports hosted an event at the end of 2016 to recruit for their amateur team. League of Legends creator Riot Games hosted a similar event in North America, but has not used the same model in Europe, which Djemal said motivated him to host his own.
Prior to the tournament, Djemal worked as a coach for a number of professional and amateur teams in North America, Europe and Brazil, including the likes of Team Dignitas, H2K Gaming, G2 Esports, eUnited and INTZ e-Sports. Before moving into the coaching role, Djemal competed as a professional jungle player, notably playing for League Championship Series teams compLexity Gaming, DragonBorns and Copenhagen Wolves.NR Narayana Murthy said the IT industry has dealt with the layoff issue several times in the past
Highlights Mr Murthy also said the industry should identify new areas of opportunity New recruits should be trained to ensure that they add value, he added Indian IT is seeing upheaval amid automation and clampdown on visas
As layoffs in the IT sector make international headlines, tech titan NR Narayana Murthy said that jobs of junior executives can be protected if bosses take pay cuts."I have a feeling that it is possible for us to protect the jobs of youngsters if the senior management people were to make some minor adjustments - adjustment of taking salary cuts," the co-founder of Infosys said to news channel ET Now "Let me give you example of Infosys itself. When the market became very tough and it shrank actually in 2001, we all sat together with senior management and then we said - look let us make some sacrifice and ensure that we protect the jobs of youngsters," Mr Murthy said.In recent months, Mr Murthy and other founders of India's second-largest software exporter haveof as much as 60-70 per cent for top bosses and severance packages for others, describing them as "grossly unfair to the majority of the Infosys employees."IT outsourcing has long been one of India's flagship industries but experts say automation, a failure to keep up with new technologies and US President Donald Trump's clampdown on visas is creating industry-wide upheaval.Thewhile research has claimed that hundreds of thousands of jobs could disappear in the next four years, although the companies themselves have refused to comment on numbers.The industry employs nearly four million Indians and rakes in revenues of more than $150 billion, according to the trade body National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom).Mr Murthy said the industry has survived major setbacks in the past and gloomy forecasts are not valid. "Let us remember we have gone through this several times in the past. We went through that in 2008, in 2001. So, this is nothing new. Therefore, there is no need for us to become extremely anxious. We have had solutions to such problems in the past," he said.While Nasscom is bullish about the future for India's tech titans, HfS Research, a US-based business advisory firm, estimates automation could mean a 14 percent decline in India's IT workforce with 480,000 jobs at risk by 2021.That's a worrying prospect for the hundreds of thousands of aspiring engineers at India's IT colleges.but conceded that the rate of hiring was slowing.India's top IT companies have been complaining for a while about the difficulty of picking up new clients as businesses explore automation, robotics and innovative technologies such as cloud computing. Amid reports of layoffs, companies like Wipro and Cognizant have said that under-performance is the sole reason for workers being asked to leave.Although layoffs are not uncommon in the industry, particularly in the final quarter of the financial year, union chiefs say staff are being made redundant in unprecedented numbers this year as firms deal with narrowing profits."Companies are unwilling to talk about the layoffs or how many techies have been served notice to leave as part of their annual appraisal," said JSR Prasad, chairman of the National Confederation of Unions of IT Employees.Retraining and upskilling programmes have been described as the urgent need of the hour. Mr Murthy said industry leaders should identify new areas of opportunity and train new recruits and ask them to ensure they are in a position to add value to the company in next one year, and if they failed they could look out for another job."It is not fair to simply send somebody home, and then let them become very very anxious, because they may have families depending on them," he said. (With PTI inputs)The OnePlus 5T is launching on November 21, and when it does it will ship with Android 7.1.1 Nougat, not 8.0 Oreo as many expected.
That's all part of the plan, according to OnePlus; the company is treating the 5T as an extension — essentially the same phone — as the OnePlus 5. From a software perspective, despite minor differences and a few additional features in the newer model, they are identical.
Stable Oreo builds won't arrive until 2018.
With the OnePlus 3 and 3T currently testing Oreo as part of an open beta program, OnePlus plans to add the 5 and 5T to the same program before the end of the year. The OnePlus 5 will get it in "late November," while the OnePlus 5T will be added to the beta in "late December" since, according to OnePlus, the software is more complicated.
Then, a few weeks later, the OnePlus 3 and 3T will receive final versions of Oreo, since they're a fair bit ahead in terms of development. Finally, the OnePlus 5 and 5T will get upgraded to stable versions of Oreo in "early 2018."
All told, OnePlus is confident that its 2016 and 2017 lineups will receive Android Oreo far before most other flagships, and that's good news for current and prospective owners. Even if it's a bit disappointing to wait until the new year for the stable Oreo build on the latest phones.Getty Images
Former Denver center Tom Nalen made a surprising confession during a press conference to introduce him as the next member of the Broncos’ Ring of Fame: Nalen said that in 2006, he attempted to injure Chargers defensive lineman Igor Olshansky.
On the play in question, the Broncos were lining up to spike the ball and stop the clock, and players on both teams just stood up. But Nalen dove into Olshansky’s knee. That infuriated Olshansky, who threw two punches at Nalen and was ejected from the game. Nalen was fined $25,000 for the cheap shot, while Olshansky was fined $10,000 for retaliating.
At the time, Nalen wouldn’t talk publicly about the play, as the Broncos’ offensive line always refused to talk to the media. But on Friday Nalen admitted that he wanted to hurt Olshansky, justifying it because Olshansky had grabbed his facemask on the previous play.
“I wouldn’t consider myself a dirty player,” Nalen said. “I know people will bring up the Igor Olshansky play in 2006, but if people would look at the play before that and realize why I did what I did — and even on that play I missed the cut — so you know definitely, I wanted to blow his knee out on that play because of what happened the play before. But that, you know, is that dirty? I don’t know. It’s revenge, kind of, so.”
Does Nalen really need to ask whether trying to blow out an opposing player’s knee is dirty? If he does, I’ll answer for him: Yes, it was a dirty play. The Broncos’ offensive linemen were often accused of playing dirty during Nalen’s time with the team, and there’s no justification for trying to blow out another player’s knee. No matter what Olshansky did, Nalen was in the wrong.A new Swedish study finds people can be conditioned to associate images with pain responses and improve their tolerance to pain, even when they are not consciously aware of the images.
Previous studies have shown that a person’s pain experience can be increased or decreased by associating a specific cue, such as an image, with high or low intensity pain.
However, until now it has been unclear if it is necessary to be consciously aware of the cue in order to learn the association.
In a new study, published in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), Dr. Karin Jensen and colleagues tested whether unconscious learning affected pain responses. The researchers used subliminal images to train participants to associate a certain image with high pain and another image with low pain.
The study involved 49 participants in all, randomly assigned into four experimental groups that would elucidate the impact of different levels of conscious awareness during the experiment. All participants were generally healthy, with no chronic illnesses or psychiatric diagnoses.
None of the participants reported receiving any medication apart from hormonal contraceptives.
In the experiment, images of different faces were presented on a computer screen. To some of the participants the images were shown so quickly that they could not be consciously recognized.
For each image exposure, participants were subjected to pain stimulation and asked to rate the pain according to a specific scale. As each image was repeatedly associated with either high or low pain, it turned into a high pain cue or a low pain cue that would affect the participants’ expectations.
The results suggest that pain cues could be learned without conscious awareness, as participants reported increased pain when shown the high pain image and reduced pain when shown the low pain image during identical levels of pain stimulation, regardless of whether or not the images were shown subliminally.
“These results demonstrate that pain responses can be shaped by learning that takes place outside conscious awareness, suggesting that unconscious learning may have an extensive effect on higher cognitive processes in general,” Jensen said.
Source: Karolinska Institutet/EurekAlert!
Subconscious Therapy Can Improve Pain ToleranceLionel Messi’s transfer value has been revealed (Picture: Getty)
He’s undoubtedly the world’s best footballer and he’s been linked with moves to Manchester City and PSG in recent months.
But exactly how much would Lionel Messi cost to buy?
In a world where Andy Carroll costs £35million and Gareth Bale £85million, it’s clear that transfer values are often distorted.
But one company has revealed its results on exactly how big the cheque would have to be to convince Barcelona to sell their man.
MORE: Wimbledon ask fans to let new signings live in their house
Brand Messi is just growing and growing (Picture: Getty)
According to sports marketing specialists Eurmericas, Messi’s value is a cool €400million (£331million).
It takes into account his value as a footballer, as well as the potential earrings from the lucrative sponsorship deals.
And according to a Eurmericas spokesman, the large price tag has not put off interested clubs.
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‘Three European clubs asked us to carry out this study on Lionel Messi, one of which is owned by a government, who would be willing to pay the valuation we have landed on,’ said Gerardo Molina on Spanish radio.
‘We can’t reveal their identities due to confidentiality; they asked us to carry this out to examine the possibility of making this signing.’
MORE: Accrington boss gives free tickets to weather hit supportersCLOSE Chicago Police say dozens of people watched a suspected gang rape on Facebook Live, without reporting it to authorities. An earlier version of this video mistakenly stated who was watching the live video on Facebook. USA TODAY
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel(L) talks with Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson during the graduation ceremony of new police officers March 15, 2017 in Chicago, Illinois. Police in Chicago on Tuesday said they are investigating the suspected gang rape of a 15-year-old girl that was streamed on Facebook Live. (Photo11: JOSHUA LOTT, AFP/Getty Images)
CHICAGO — Police on Tuesday said they are searching for five to six men suspected of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl in an attack that was streamed on Facebook Live.
The girl, who had been missing since Sunday, was found by Chicago detectives Tuesday — the day after the girl’s mother approached Superintendent Eddie Johnson as he was leaving a news conference and showed him screen grabs of the attack, according to police.
The video, which has been removed from Facebook, was viewed by dozens of people, but no one called authorities.
“The superintendent was visibly upset when he saw the pictures of the girl and was dismayed when he learned that people were watching the incident live and no one called police,” police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said.
Facebook declined to respond to specific questions about the incident, including whether the alleged assault was flagged by any Facebook users. The company says it reviews questionable content around the clock that is reported by users and has systems in place to ensure that time sensitive content is dealt with quickly.
“Crimes like this are hideous and we do not allow that kind of content on Facebook," the company said in a statement. "We take our responsibility to keep people safe on Facebook very seriously and will remove videos that depict sexual assault and are shared to glorify violence.”
Guglielmi said that investigators were "making good progress identifying persons of interest" in the assault.
With the emergence of Facebook Live as well as Twitter’s live-streaming platform Periscope, it’s become more common for violent incidents to be streamed to the world in real-time.
Last month, an Ohio woman was sentenced to nine months in prison after pleading guilty to obstructing justice for livestreaming a 29-year-old man raping a 17-year-old girl on Periscope. Marina Lonina, 19, had initially faced more serious charges of rape and pandering sexual matter involving a minor. The man charged with the assault, Raymond Gates, also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nine years in prison.
In January, four young African-American suspects in Chicago were charged for the alleged torture and beating of a white teen with mental health challenges that was broadcast on Facebook Live. Prosecutors pointed to evidence from the livestream to make the case that the boy, who suffers from schizophrenia, was the victim of a hate crime.
Facebook Live footage is expected to be used in the prosecution of a Minnesota police officer charged with second-degree manslaughter and two counts of dangerous discharge of a firearm for the high-profile shooting death of a motorist, Philando Castile. The aftermath of the controversial shooting was streamed by Castile's girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who along with her daughter were passengers in the vehicle. The trial of the officer, Jeronimo Yanez, is tentatively scheduled to begin May 30.
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Follow USA TODAY Chicago correspondent Aamer Madhani on Twitter: @AamerISmad
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them that the sprinklers came on, that I don’t know why. People expect a chick to be dumb about things like that. I’m careful, though. Almost no electricals in my apartment. Electricity and water don’t play nicely together. I use candles a lot. The grow-lights for the orchids are in the bathroom, and there are no sprinklers in there.
This apartment building has a secret. It’s this door here, between the garbage chute and the elevator. The lock’s loose. Going through this door takes me right up a set of stairs to the roof. The firemen probably won’t even look up there. If they did, I’d say that I got scared and confused, just picked a door that had no smoke behind it. Yeah, you have to come up. It’s where the plant’s going, see?
I’m going to miss this place, with its quiet asphalt roof. This is the second time since I’ve been here that I’ve sprinklered the plants, so it’s time to move on. I don’t like being such a nuisance to the neighbours. One time, in another building, I flooded someone’s apartment beside mine. Ruined his record collection. Made me feel really bad.
Up here it stays warm all night, and slightly sticky. I think it’s the heat of the day’s sun that does it, makes the asphalt just a little bit tacky. Sometimes I lie out here naked, staring up at the stars. When I roll over, there are little rocks stuck to my back, glued there by warmed asphalt. I flex my shoulders and shake my whole body to make them fall off. I like the tickling sensation they make as they come loose.
It’s pretty up here tonight. You can see so many stars.
The other night, I put two blue orchid petals right on my pillow, with a petal from one of them under my tongue for good measure. It tasted like baby powder, or babies. That’s a joke. Because I’ve got this spiky green hair and the ring through my lip, some people can’t tell when I’m joking. They think that people who make holes in their bodies must be angry all the time.
I’d found the orchid petals just lying on the ground out back of my building, by the dumpster. Didn’t know who would tear orchids up that way. Lots of people keep them in their apartments, or grow them competitively. The climate here is all wrong for tropical orchids, yet I bet there are almost as many growing in this city as you’d find in any jungle.
Anyway, that night, I laid my left ear–the left side of our bodies is magic, you know–on the fleshy, cool blue of the orchid petals, closed my eyes, and waited for sleep. I sucked on the petal in my mouth. They were a weird, intense kind of blue, like you get in those flower shops where they dye their orchids. They cut the stems and put the flowers in blue ink, or food colouring. The plant sucks it up, and pretty soon, the petals go blue. You can even see veins of blue in the leaves. This orchid had that fake kind of colour.
Not sure why I did that with the petals. You know how it is when you see a dog that someone has tied up outside in the cold, and it’s shivering and lifting its paws to keep them from freezing, and all you really want is to saw that chain free and hug that cold dog and give it something warm to eat? Well, actually, you may not know what that’s like. You’d probably rather bite a dog than cuddle it. But I’d seen those torn orchid bits lying there, and I just wanted to hold them close to me.
So there I was, with two inky orchid petals crushed between my ear and my pillow, and one under my tongue. It looked like a vanilla orchid.
I think I nodded off. I must have, because after awhile, I saw a rat the length of my forearm crawling in the open window.
I didn’t want to move. I could see the rat’s pointy teeth glinting; the front ones, the ones that grow and grow, so that rats must always have something on which to gnaw, or those teeth grow through their lips, seal their mouths shut, and they starve to death. Its teeth gleamed yellow-white, like some of my orchids, like my belly where the skin isn’t inked.
Anyway, I was dreaming, right? So I didn’t bother to move. No, stay away from the flower. I know it’s almost daylight, but it’s not quite ready yet. It blooms in early morning, and I think this is the morning it will open completely. I guess you can tell, and that’s why you came.
Anyway, in my dream, I watched while the rat climbed around my orchid pots, investigating. Some of the plants it peered at, then ignored. It only seemed interested in the ones with flowers on them. Those it sniffed at. Maybe rats don’t have too good eyesight, huh? Maybe they go more by a sense of smell? Not sure how it could tell how anything smelled, cause its own smell was pretty foul. Like rotting garbage, climbing around my room. Could smell it in my sleep.
Finally, the rat seemed to find what it wanted. It nosed at my Vanilla planifolia. I was proud of that vine; it was big and healthy, and some of its flowers had just opened a few hours before. The rat climbed up onto the vine, made its way to one of the flowers, and stuck its head inside the flower. Then it climbed back down again and made its way to my window. It stood in the window for a second, shuffling back and forth as though it didn’t really want to do something. Then it leapt out the open window and was gone. And this is how I knew for certain that I was dreaming; when the rat jumped, I saw that it had wings. Gossamer wings, kind of like a dragonfly’s, with traceries of veins running through. Only more flexible.
That woke me right up. I sat up in bed, feeling really weird, and all I could think was, with four legs and two wings, doesn’t that make six limbs? And wouldn’t that be an insect, not a rat? There was another thing, too. I couldn’t be sure, because it had happened so quickly, but I thought the rat wings had had a faint blueishness to them.
I got myself a glass of water and went back to bed. Next morning, the flower of my lovely Vanilla, the one the rat had rubbed itself on, was beginning to brown. That was odd, but not too strange; Vanilla flowers close within a few hours and fall off if they’re not pollinated. But it now had a faint scent about it of dumpster garbage in the summer heat. Never smelt anything like it on a planifolia. Some people would say that’s gross. To me, it smelt like a living thing, calling out. Scent is a message.
Look, you can see the firemen milling around outside now. That’s the super; the woman with the bright yellow bathrobe. Even in the dark at this distance, you can see that it’s yellow. Matter of fact, everything she wears is yellow–everything. I’ve seen her doing her laundry, and yep, even her undies are yellow. Weird, huh?
She’s just let the firemen in. They’ll go and break into my apartment, but they won’t find anything.
I think the bud’s beginning to open. No, you can’t rub yourself on it yet. Oh, poor little guy; you’re really only about half rat any more, aren’t you? You’ve got orchid tendrils growing up into your brain cells. Does it frighten you, I wonder? Do you have the part of your brain left that can get frightened? I don’t think you wanted to jump off that ledge that night, but I think the orchid made you do it. Phew, you stink! I know it’s pheromones though, not real garbage.
Even though I’d been dreaming, I closed my window from that night on. Then a little while ago, I stopped to hang with Micheline. She hooks on my street corner on weekend nights; teaching grad school doesn’t earn her enough to make ends meet. Sometimes, when business is slow for her, she’ll buy me a coffee at the corner coffee shop, or I’ll buy her one, depending on which one of us got paid most recently. She told me the oddest thing; how the street kids are starting to tell stories that they’ve been seeing angels in the city. It’s getting to be the end of days, the kids say, and the angels are here to take all the street kids away to heaven. The angels are small and fuzzy, and they have sharp teeth and see-through wings.
You know, I don’t know how I’ll ever find someone like Sam again. You’d think I’d have plenty of chances. I go out into the world every day, I meet people, I’m friendly, I’m cute–if you like your girls big and round and freaky, and many do. I get dates all the time. Smart people, interesting people. But it’s so hard to find people I click with. They just, I dunno, they just don’t smell right.
The great thing about orchids is that they have a million ways of getting pollinated. They trick all kinds of small creatures into collecting their pollen and passing it off to other orchids; wasps, ants, even bats. Bee orchids produce flowers that look like sexy lady bees, and when a male bee lands on the flower, ready for action, he gets covered in pollen. A Porroglossum will actually snap shut for a few seconds on an insect that stumbles amongst its blossoms and hold the insect still; just long enough for pollen to rub off on its body. Some of the Bulbophyllum smell like carrion so they can attract flies.
Us, all us orchid nuts who bring tropical orchids into places where they don’t grow naturally, and who cultivate them and interbreed them; we’re creating hothouse breeds that thrive in apartments, in greenhouses, in office buildings, in flower shops; all behind doors. They need to find each other to pollinate. They need pollinators. And what small animals get everywhere in a city?
Yes, you, my ugly, furry friend. You only want me for my orchid. Actually, you want me for your orchid, the one that’s learned how to travel to where the other orchids are. Most bizarre adaptation I’ve ever seen. It must have gotten seeds into your fur. Some of those seeds must have germinated, put roots down into your bloodstream. I thought it was wings I saw when you jumped from my window, but it was really the outer petals of the flower, flaring out from your chest in the wind from your jump. It’s a stunning blue, for all that it stinks. True blue orchids are rare. Lots of people have tried making blue hybrids. I went and looked it up. One promising possibility right now is to make a transgenic plant by incorporating enzymes found in the livers of animals. Those enzymes can react with substances called indoles to create a bright blue colour. D’you know one of the places you can find indoles? They are the growth regulators in orchids. We even put indoles in the packing mixture we use to transport orchid plants in, to keep them healthy. Your plant passenger there has tendrils in your liver, my friend. When you eat, it gets fed. I can see that you’ve got a new bloom on your chest there.
Maybe the plant didn’t get the knack of it the first time. Maybe when the first bright blue blossom opened, you tore it out, petal by petal, before it could mature into its garbage smell. But eventually, one of the plants put roots down into your spine, travelled up to your brain, found the right synapses to tickle, and you lost the urge to destroy it. Lost the will to go about your own business. Now you can only fetch and carry for a plant, go about the business of orchid pollination. Do you know that “orchid” means “testicle?”
Cool. My flower’s opened all the way. Yes, I know you can tell; look how agitated you’re getting, or at least, the orchid part of your brain is. Don’t worry. I’ll let you at it soon.
There’s a story that some people from India tell. If you want to bond a person to you forever, you have to prepare rice for them. While it’s boiling, you have to squat with your naked genitals over the pot. The steam from the cooking rice will heat you up, and you’ll sweat salty crotch sweat pheromones into the pot to flavour it. Make someone eat a meal with that sweat rice, and they’re yours for ever. Orchids and dogs would understand that trick. Scent is a message.
Here. Come on. Come to the flower. No, I’m not going to let it go. You have to come to me. Gotcha! Don’t bite me, you little devil! There. A snootful of chloroform ought to do it.
Jeez, I hope you don’t die. I think I got the dosage right; you can find anything on the Web. I just don’t want this to hurt you, or you to hurt me because you’re scared. Look, I even brought cotton batting to keep you warm in while I do this. Sam taught me how to do a little bit of tattooing. Just inside your ear should do it. Not much fur there, so it’s likely that somebody will see it.
Oo, that ear’s disgusting. Good thing I brought some alcohol swabs with me. Thank heaven for the gloves, too.
There we go. There’s not even a lot of blood. Your ear membranes are too thin to have many blood vessels.
You poor thing. First a chunk of your brain gets kidnapped by a flower with a massive reproductive urge, and now a human being is having her way with you. And you smell like wet garbage in the sun. But for you, that’s probably a plus. Probably gets you all kinds of rat dates. I just want a chance. Want to send out my own messages, on as many channels as I can. I mean, who knows where you go in your travels? You might end up in some kind of horticultural lab, and a cute scientist might find you and see your tattoo.
Huh. You’re a she rat. Sorry, sister.
I place personal ads, I dress nicely, I chat people up. Nothing. Plants, they just send their messages out on the wind, or via pollen stuck to an insect, or if they’re this puppy, they travel a-ratback to wherever their mates are likely to be. Human beings only have a few options. And even pheromones only work so-so with us. Never can tell if the message will get through. So I’m doing everything I can to increase my chances.
There you go, sweetie–the date, my name, my email address, and the name of the new sub-species of orchid that’s flowering there on your tummy; V. planifolia var. griggsanum, after me, who discovered it first.
Please don’t go into shock. I think you should be warm enough wrapped up in the cotton. I’ll keep dribbling some water on your tongue, keep you hydrated until you wake up. Lemme just have a quick look at this bloom on your chest… God, that’s creepy.
The firemen are gone now. Pretty soon I’ll go in and start packing. I’ve already put down first and last month’s rent on a little place in the market; one of those trendy new lofts they’ve been putting there recently. It’s got the right kind of sprinkler system in all the units. It’s probably already got vermin, too, being in the market, but that’s okay. The more of you I can find and tattoo, the better. Rats don’t live very long, and I bet you that orchid-infested rats live even shorter lives than that.
Oh, hey. You’re awake. Good girl. No, no, it’s okay. I won’t hurt you. The pot’s here, with the flower in it, and I’ll just step away from it, okay? All the way over here, see? And I won’t even move. Yes, you go ahead. Go and pollinate that baby. Though if it can be pollinated, it’s no baby.
I didn’t squat over a boiling pot of food; I made my room steamy hot, and squatted over an orchid plant; that one right there that you’re currently rubbing your body against. Watched my sweat drip into the moss in which it’s planted. My calf muscles were burning from the effort by the time I straightened up. That plant’s been growing in medium impregnated with my pheromones. It’s exchanging scent messages with your flower right now.
You’re done? You’re leaving? That’s okay. Just climb down carefully this time. We’re way high up. Atta girl, carry my message; go fetch!
This story first appeared in the anthology Lust for Life: Tales of Sex and Love, eds. Claude Lalumiere and Elise Moser, Vehicule Press, 2006
Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican-born writer who lives in Canada. Her novels include Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, and The New Moon’s Arms. She is a recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the World Fantasy Award, and a two-time winner of Canada’s Sunburst Award for the Literature of the Fantastic. The first draft of “A Raggy Dog, a Shaggy Dog” was written during a writing residency at Green College, University of British Columbia, in Canada.Summary
196 IPOs with $34.5bn raised in 2015 on the major American stock exchanges which is much lower than in 2014
43% of the IPOs in 2015 were by healthcare companies, followed by financial companies at 18% and technology companies at 15%
The weighted arithmetic mean of return on IPOs from their listing date till the end of 2015 was -5.4% compared to 5.9% Nasdaq growth, 2.3% DJIA drop, and 0.7% S&P 500 drop in 2015
Apart from technology IPOs that generated a return of 6.93%, most other sectors suffered, especially IPOs in consumer goods and utilities which were down 28.74% and 48.35% respectively
Aclaris Therapeutics Inc has topped the percentage return of 148% within less than 4 months of listing, while MaxPoint Interactive Inc lost 85% of its value in less than 1 year.
The biggest IPOs that raised more than $1bn have had mostly negative returns: First Data Corp has been flat, Tallgrass Energy has been down 45% since its IPO, Columbia Pipeline Partners is down 24%
Some of the popular better-known IPOs that did well include Fitbit up 48%, Atlassian that owns JIRA up 43%, Go Daddy up 60%, Match Group up 13%, and Square up 45%
Others have had mixed results: Ferrari is down 8%, Box has been flat
Methodology and Limitations of Analysis
This analysis considers only companies listed on the majors US exchanges
Most financial charts show performance based on the listing price but we have taken the extra step of adding the IPO price to the chart.
Performance for the IPOs is actual performance for the period from the IPO date to the end of the year; the figures have not been annualised.
Data has been accumulated from different sources, which may have different definitions of metrics, and hence, this analysis should be considered as indicative, and investors should do their own due diligence before making any decisions.
Overall IPO market in 2015
196 companies started trading at major American stock exchanges (NYSE, NASDAQ, and AMEX) during 2015. IPO activity was lower compared to 2014. In 2015 36% lower number of companies launched their IPOs compared to 2014 when the number was 304. Only $34.5 billion was raised in 2015 compared to $89 billion in 2014. (Source: NASDAQ).
Stock market volatility caused by geopolitical tensions, uncertainty over interest rates, and structural issues in developing markets could have resulted in lower number of IPOs and overall market conjuncture. 2015 became the worst year after the 2008 meltdown in terms of stock market growth. The best performance this year was by NASDAQ with 5,9% growth, but S&P 500 and DJIA dipped 0.7% and 2.3% respectively in 2015.
(Source: Own analysis,Yahoo finance)
Performance by industry
As shown by NASDAQ’s performance, Technology was the only industry that provided positive returns in 2015. The biggest damage was brought to the companies that were operating in a primary sector of economy.
Note: IPOs performance was tracked from the first day of their listing till the end of 2015, while industries performance were tracked through the whole 2015
(Source: Own analysis, NASDAQ, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance)
2015 may not have been the right year to be listed for most companies operating in the primary sector of economy. However, there were some IPOs that have managed to outperform their peers and stock market as a whole.
Here is the list of best 2015 IPOs performances by industry:
Basic Materials – Tantech Holdings Ltd (31.5%);
Conglomerates – Atlantic Alliance Partnership Corp (1,1%);
Consumer Goods – Multi Packaging Solutions International Ltd (33.46%);
Financial – Franklin Financial Network Inc (49.43%);
Health Care – Aclaris Therapeutics Inc (139.00%);
Industrial Goods – Aqua Metals Inc (6.6%);
Services – Shake Shack Inc (88.57%);
Technology – China Customer Relations Centers Inc (99.00%);
Utilities – 8point3 Energy Partners Lp (-23.14%).
10 big / popular IPOs of 2015
First Data Corp
First Data is a global payment technology solutions company having footprint of 6 million merchants & handling 45% of all US credit and debit transactions.
(Source: Own analysis, NASDAQ, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance)
(Source: Own analysis, Yahoo Finance, NASDAQ)
Tallgrass Energy GP LP is engaged in natural gas transportation, storage and processing. The Company holds indirect interests in the general partner of Tallgrass Energy Partners, LP (TEP), including all of TEP’s incentive distribution rights.
(Source: Own analysis, NASDAQ, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance)
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(Source: Own analysis, Yahoo Finance, NASDAQ)
Columbia Pipeline Partners Lp
The company operates in the natural gas transmission and storage business.
(Source: Own analysis, NASDAQ, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance)
(Source: Own analysis, Yahoo Finance, NASDAQ)
Ferrari is an Italian luxury sports car manufacturer. Fiat S.p.A. owning 90% of Ferrari on January 3, 2016 spun off its 80% stake to its shareholders. Combining high prices, strong demand, and high margins, Ferrari is able to generate substantial profits despite a low production volume (7000 cars annually).
(Source: Own analysis, NASDAQ, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance)
(Source: Own analysis, Yahoo Finance, NASDAQ)
Fitbit is a provider of health and fitness products. The share prices tumbled after Fitbit Blaze Smartwatch revea,l but the stock is trading higher than its June IPO price of $20.
(Source: Own analysis, NASDAQ, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance)
(Source: Own analysis, Yahoo Finance, NASDAQ)
Atlassian Corp Plc
The company is engaged in software design, development, licensing and maintenance, and also provides software hosting services. Atlassian serves over 50,000 customers globally, including 85 of the Fortune 100.
(Source: Own analysis, NASDAQ, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance)
(Source: Own analysis, Yahoo Finance, NASDAQ)
GoDaddy Inc
GoDaddy is Internet domain registrar and web hosting company. It serves more than 12 million customers and has more than 59 million domain names under management.
(Source: Own analysis, NASDAQ, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance)
(Source: Own analysis, Yahoo Finance, NASDAQ)
Match Group Inc
Match Group, Inc. is engaged in providing dating products. The Company operates through two segments: Dating and Non-dating. The Company operates a portfolio of over 45 brands. Goldman Sachs recommended selling Match’s stock and assigned it the price target of $12, saying that online dating sites have limited growth opportunities, whereas, Match trades at about 10 times expected earnings.
(Source: Own analysis, NASDAQ, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance)
(Source: Own analysis, Yahoo Finance, NASDAQ)
Square Inc
Square Inc is a financial and merchant services aggregator and mobile payment company. The company is given a “strong-buy” rating by most analysts.
(Source: Own analysis, NASDAQ, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance)
(Source: Own analysis, Yahoo Finance, NASDAQ)
10. Box Inc
Box provides a cloud-based, mobile-optimized Enterprise Content Collaboration platform – Box OneCloud ecosystem which gives access to around 1,300 iOS and Android third-party applications. Vetr upgraded Box from a “buy” rating to a “strong-buy” rating and set a $15.06 price target for the company.
(Source: Own analysis, NASDAQ, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance)
(Source: Own analysis, Yahoo Finance, NASDAQ)Under a new rule in boys high school lacrosse, only goalies will be allowed in the crease.
A couple of new rules approved by the ruling body of high school boys lacrosse will tinker with the look of the game in exchange for improving its safety.
The National Federation of State High School Associations recently gave a thumbs-up to the alterations based upon recommendations from its Boys Lacrosse Rules Committee.
"Safety is the main concern for any high school coach,'' said CBA boys lacrosse coach Ric Beardsley. "Rules in the last couple of years have gone toward safety and speeding the game up, and making the game more exciting.''
The biggest change involves allowing only goalies in the crease.
According to the new rule:
"No defensive player, other than a properly equipped goalkeeper, can enter his own crease with the intent of blocking a shot or acting as a goalkeeper. If another defensive player enters the crease, officials will stop play as soon as they notice the situation; however, if a shot is already in flight when this is noticed, the shot will be allowed to come to its normal conclusion before the whistle blows to stop the play.''
Fayetteville-Manlius coach Chris Kenneally said the change is designed to prevent players from slipping behind their goalie to block shots.
"That's a good thing for safety,'' he said. "The ball moves so fast that if you're not covering your man or in good position, you're giving up a good shot. You're better off covering your man, playing good team defense. You don't want some kid getting hit and getting hurt.''
Carthage coach Kirk Ventiquattro said he's seen opposing teams teach defenders to bail out goalies in this manner.
"I feel at times players feel obligated to do it,'' he said. "I'm always worried about players getting hit in the chest. So I like that rule.''
Beardsley understood the rationale behind the move but was skeptical about giving officials more to enforce, especially in those high school games that use two refs instead of three.
"The one thing that baffles me is the defense in the crease,'' he said. "You're putting too much on the officials to do. With two officials, you have more responsibility. You're going to miss things. It's the old baby-sitter theory. One baby-sitter can watch two kids. One baby-sitter cant's watch 15.''
The organization also addressed the issue of potential cheap shots in the closing minutes of a one-sided game by amending its stalling rule. Now stalling rules now are in effect in the last two minutes only if the score differential is four goals or less.
In the group's news release, James Weaver, NFHS director of performing arts and sports and staff liaison for boys lacrosse, said the previous automatic stall warning in the last two minutes "created a dangerous situation in that a team that was essentially out of the game was given more opportunity to punish the team that was ahead since that team was forced to keep it in.”
Kenneally said he's seen situations where a team that's up a lot late isn't trying to attack but still gets hammered by a frustrated defense.
"The defensive kids may be very frustrated that their team is losing,'' he said. "The offensive team isn't trying to score, (but) they are whacking the heck out of you. It comes down to a type of safety and sportsmanship type of thing.''
Ventiquattro said he'd favor a five-goal cutoff point because he's seen four-goal edges erased very quickly.
"I'm just a little hesitant on that,'' he said. "I like that rule. But I'm not sure the four-goal lead is enough. I've seen stranger things happen. I've seen a four- or five-goal lead erased at the faceoff X. I think it kind of hinders a team from coming back. A four-goal lead in our game with two minutes left is not that insurmountable.''
In another change, the failure of a player to wear the required mouthpiece now will be a technical foul (30-second penalty or change of possession) rather than a non-releasable foul.
In a more aesthetic change, a rule previously called for tape to be applied to the handle of the crosse for any player taking a faceoff. With new handle materials now available that are more durable than tape, the committee revised the rule to allow for use of new materials.All the expenses, in other words, are non-chargeable.
Scalia appeared skeptical of that argument, but it went over with three of the other four conservatives. (Justice Clarence Thomas, as usual, said nothing.) In essence, the three conservatives seemed to think that everything in government is completely corrupt and unions are just a part of the statist conspiracy—a special interest in league with big-government Democrats.
Justice Alito, the author of Knox, took point Wednesday. “Governor Blagojevich got a huge campaign contribution from the union and virtually as soon as he got into office he took out his pen and signed an executive order that had the effect of putting, what was it, $3.6 million into the union coffers?” Verilli responded that after Blagojevich’s order, a bipartisan majority in the legislature had ratified the decision to classify the home care providers as state employees eligible to unionize.
Alito next argued that union members may not want all these supposed benefits: “Now, what do you say to the young employee who is not very much concerned at this point about pensions, but realizes there's a certain pot of money, and it's either going to go for pensions or it's going to go for salary at the present time[?]”
Paul Smith, representing the union, noted that the workers had gotten hefty raises since voting to form a union. Alito scoffed. “The State can say, this is how much these people are being paid, it's not enough, we want to increase it, we want to increase it by 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent, whatever it is.... Why do they need to have the union intervene here?”
Chief Justice John Roberts seemed obsessed with the idea that this case concerns “Medicaid reimbursement rates.” (It doesn’t; the home-care providers are paid in part with Medicaid funds, but are hourly employees who get regular paychecks from the state, unlike doctors or other professionals, who get reimbursement from programs like Medicare and Medicaid.) For him, Medicaid has been hijacked by the nanny state—in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, he wrote that Medicaid “is no longer a program to care for the neediest among us, but rather an element of a comprehensive national plan to provide universal health insurance coverage.” Now he asked Verilli, “if the union wants to talk about Medicaid rates with the State because they would get a higher wage or could get a higher wage if Medicaid reimbursement was higher, is that within the -- their functioning as a union rather than a political group?” Verilli said that it would almost certainly not be.
Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested that public-employee unions are bad because they deal with government. “Suppose the young person thinks that the State is squandering his heritage on unnecessary and excessive payments or benefits and wages. Is that not a political belief of the highest order?... [Y]our position is that the public employees must surrender a substantial amount of First Amendment rights to work for the government?”Authorities have clamped down on separatists in the valley and placed them under house arrest ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Kashmir.
Moderate Hurriyat chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq was placed under house detention in the morning fearing that he was planning an anti-Modi rally in downtown Srinagar.
"A huge posse of police and paramilitary was deployed at the Nigeen residence of senior Hurriyat leader and he was asked not to venture out of his home," said Hurriyat spokesman Shahidul Islam.
Hardline Hurriyat chairman Syed Ali Geelani was placed under house arrest since Wednesday evening. Around 10 pm, police men in strength were deployed outside his residence at Hyderpora. JKLF chief Yasin Malik is also asked not to venture out of his house.
"We have asked the officers involved in the security to keep an eye on the activities of suspicious elements. Such elements always try to find an opportunity to disrupt the peaceful atmosphere in the state," said director general of police (DGP) K Rajendra Kumar after meeting the top officials in Srinagar.
Separatists have called for a shutdown against Modi's visit to Kashmir. While Geelani described it as "cultural aggression", Malik accused him of playing politics over flood tragedy.
Meanwhile, Srinagar wore a deserted look ahead of the Prime Minister's visit. Shops and business centres remained closed and there was thin traffic on the roads.
Security has been beefed up in politically sensitive localities. Modi will arrive in Srinagar around 12:30pm and will head for Srinagar's Raj Bhawan.
First Published: Oct 23, 2014 11:47 IST"The arts and the humanities belong to all the people of the United States." — The National Foundation of the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965
It was a philosopher named George Santayana from the 1800s who said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The phrase rings eerily true in our political climate today. Nearly every element of democracy as we know it seems to be threatened under Donald Trump’s reign; from human rights to health, and even the arts. The crosshairs of the Oval Office moved over the The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) when President Trump released his budget proposal last month. The proposal calls for the elimination of the two endowments and zero funding for CPB. The budgets for the NEA and NEH equal about $300 million annually.
While Trump pinpointing the arts might seem mild compared to the power that he could exude as the commander-in-chief, it’s Santayana’s quote that reminds us why these organizations were first created.
That’s something Jason Kelly, the director of the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute, thinks about a lot. When he first read about the proposed cuts, he went back to the original language of the National Foundation of the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965.
“When you hear [the words of the bill] you are like, ‘yes, exactly!,’” says Kelly.
He’s right. This legislation reads like a piece of classic literature.
“The first principle is that the arts and humanities belong to all people of the United States,” he says. “And they continue on, [saying] that the support of national scholarship in the humanities and arts is an appropriate matter of concern to the federal government.”
Kelly went on to quote part of the Act: “Democracy demands wisdom and vision.”
This is a sentiment that is pivotal when you consider that the document was penned during the Cold War.
“There [was] a real concern about nuclear technology, and the people who created this have in the back of their head that the arts and humanities help us think more generally about our futures, not just our pasts…,” says Kelly. “Specifically, in this document it states that it helped make us the masters of our technology and not its unthinking servants.
“Science and technology help us get places, and I am paraphrasing a guy named Glenn Seaborg [the head of the atomic energy commission in the 1960s],” says Kelly. “He said that science and technology provides us the means to travel swiftly, but they don’t tell us what course we should take in going there. It’s really the arts and humanities that help us do that. It’s that process of reflection.”
It’s not a new argument that the study of liberal arts is primarily a way to examine the world, but it’s helpful to consider what Indy might look like without them.
Places like the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Harrison Center for the Arts and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art are supported by the NEA. Organizations like Big Car Collaborative, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and the American Pianists Association are supported by the NEA. The Kurt Vonnegut Library and the Indiana State Museum are supported by the NEH. The impact of these programs stretch far beyond the arts; it touches housing, transit, research and public health.
“An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future.”
At academic research institutions, there’s a risk that significant amounts of research will vanish if these organizations are defunded.
“The research that is being done with that money will also disappear,” says Kelly. “The humanities and arts have huge pools of money that we can draw from to do our work |
his lower body.
I couldn’t understand a word that came out of his nearly toothless mouth. I don’t know for certain if he was tweaking, he may simply have been homeless. Every native I’ve run into since I got here speaks English, but degenerated by varying degrees.
It’s not just a Southern drawl. Not much of that here. Nor is it a self consistent local dialect. It’s a mushy, corrupted patchwork, ever-changing to suit the mood of the speaker. I’m not just trying to be difficult, there have been times when I sincerely had to nod and smile because I couldn’t understand the fellow speaking to me.
I have known plenty of brilliant Southerners. This isn’t about North and South. I recall struggling to describe the nature of that cultural divide to an exchange student once, realizing in the process how petty and artificial it is.
The only actual, literal rocket scientist I personally know speaks with a Southern accent so thick, he ought to wear a tablet around his neck to display subtitles. So whatever’s wrong with Florida has nothing to do with the larger Southern US, which has produced a respectable number of accomplished thinkers. It’s specifically a Florida thing.
When you’re little, everyone you trust tells you to follow your heart. What awful advice that turned out to be! I followed my heart all the way from a lush, temperate wonderland of natural beauty to a putrid swampy hellscape prowled by roving bands of mutants. Fuck you, heart.
That’s not to say I haven’t met some interesting people here, albeit nearly all of them from out of state. I don’t have a large enough sample size to say this with any confidence, but it does seem like Florida is a popular place to pass through when you’re young, figuring yourself out and deciding what to do with your life.
Passing through Florida, and through my life. Each of them like a momentary sip of water, just barely sustaining me as I languish in this human desert. The cab ran over another of the increasingly common potholes.
I would later learn that the city concentrates maintenance funding on the areas immediately surrounding the theme parks which bring in all those lucrative tourist dollars. They visit the parks, maybe they visit the beaches, then they’re gone. No sense in fixing up what they’ll never see.
Consequently everything outside of the oasis of city spending surrounding those theme parks looks like a borderline post apocalyptic banana republic. I’m exaggerating, but not by much. As with any state there are nice and not so nice parts of Florida, I’ll be generous and assume I happened to move to one of the latter.
The landscape consists of dodgy, cobbled together strip malls and various small businesses of questionable legality. All of them operating out of dirty single story hovels which change hands frequently. Payday loans, pawn shops, cash for gold, and churches.
Oh, the endless variety of churches! One on every street corner, as plentiful as coffee shops back home. Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist, Scientologists, Eckankar, even a few snake handlers. The more gonzo, sensationalist and fringe, the better.
Like Vegas without the casinos. Everything’s instant, value priced, while-u-wait. Culture without nuance, depth or patience, with a population to match. If you’re familiar with the website “People of Wal Mart”, imagine that, but everywhere you look any time you step outside.
Partly due to the cultural disconnect and partly due to the lingering shock of being dumped, I began floating through life high above everything, nowhere touching the Earth. It no longer had anything I wanted. Nothing with which to entice me to re-engage.
The sting of the breakup, though it felt as if it would last forever at the time, eventually petered out. The habit of disconnection I picked up in the process did not die with it, but persisted as a permanent new feature of my personality...one which quickly proved its worth as a pain avoidance mechanism.
Nobody could hurt me if I never sincerely invested myself in them. What an ingenious trick! Nothing prevented me from going through the motions. From saying all the same kinds of things I would’ve, if I allowed myself to return the love so generously invested in me by a string of women more emotionally adventurous than I.
This way I could have companionship, gratification and the various other benefits of a relationship, but with none of the danger. It never lasted longer than a few months though. They always picked up on what I was doing when, sometimes just experimentally, they tried to hurt me a little bit.
A test of some sort. Going to dinner with an old boyfriend, sloppy makeouts with some rando at a party or something of that nature. I was supposed to get angry. To yell, to cry, even to slap them depending on their tastes. Anything but an indifferent shrug.
If only they weren’t so curious, things might’ve lasted longer. But they had to know. They couldn’t just accept outward appearances as reality. They had to scrape at the skin, recoiling in horror when the wound refused to bleed. When only cold, dull metal shone back at them through the opening.
I know I’m the one who was in the wrong. To lead them on like that, letting them entrust their hearts to an emotional cripple. I should be guilty. But then, guilt is a feeling. I’m just about out of those by now.
It’s the same way anywhere there’s loads of people. Malls, airports, theme parks, bars. I imagine a sort of invisible force field just slightly larger than I am. A full body condom. To separate me from these people, however frequently I must immerse myself in them.
A Christian roommate back in college had his own term for it: Being in the world, but not of the world. A stopped clock is still correct twice a day. This particular world is one I have to be “in” for the time being, I decided...but I will never be “of” it.
There’s no avoiding interaction, not forever. Don’t think I haven’t tried. I don’t even leave my apartment lately, performing online jobs for a service called Mechanical Turk. Basically human assisted search results.
I did it on the side at first, but once you’ve stuck with it for long enough and are highly rated, you can make serious money at it. Enough for rent and utilities anyway, plus a little extra for the occasional pizza or energy drinks that food stamps won’t cover.
So I stagnated. Then I stagnated more. Days, weeks, months went by with no human contact save for text on my monitor. The only times I’d go out would be for booze or coffee. Or to hike. With practice, over time I whittled down the number of words I needed to say to the bartender (in order to communicate what I wanted) to the absolute minimum.
She didn’t notice what I was doing at first. When she did, she started giving me the stink eye every time I ordered. Not that I care. I don’t know her. I don’t fucking know any of these people. This may as well be a foreign country.
Back home, I loved to hike. You really can’t get away with being an indoor person in the Pacific Northwest. There’s an embarrassment of gorgeous wilderness just minutes from any city. Not so much here. Just endless flat expanses of asphalt or swampland, punctuated by big budget tourist attractions and gimmicky, low budget Americana.
I chose this apartment complex in large part because it’s directly adjacent to a much nicer, more upscale complex. They’ve got their own beautifully landscaped bicycle path, the closest thing to a wooded trail for miles.
Naturally, they’ve put up a rustic wooden fence as a “suggestion” that those of us who don’t pay for the path’s upkeep should stay out. Of course I just step right over that shit. I don’t know these people. I don’t care what they think of me, or owe them anything.
It’s one of the rare bright spots in my life since moving here. Nothing like a proper hiking trail but it makes for pleasant Sunday walks. The landscaping is a little overdone and artificial, like everything else in this state...natives included.
Even so, simply being out in the sun, more or less surrounded by trees, flowers and grass is a sorely needed respite. The only interruption is the occasional overly disciplined cyclist, wearing full body neon spandex and a teardrop helmet, rocketing past to one side.
One of ’em stopped once to lecture me for making use of the path. He could tell from my clothing where I must live. I just stood there, expressionless, until he tired himself out and left. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Except for incidents like that, I could be both outside and alone for the entire day once a week. I needed the exercise too. My hermitic lifestyle had begun to take a toll on my body. The regular diet of rice, beans and pasta plus the occasional pizza delivery also wasn’t doing me any favors.
Despite the weekly exposure I’d grown distressingly pale. All muscle definition vanished and with each passing day I felt myself growing weaker. Every Sunday, when I emerged from the apartment for a walk, the sun hurt my eyes a little more.
Deterioration. Progressively worse, resembling the transformation already underway within me. A gradual withering which I could imagine no plausible way to reverse. To hell with it, I decided. It’s not as if I’m terribly attached to life at this point.
It was during one of these Sunday walks, specifically a stopover in an undeveloped field of grass, that I found it. The field is one of the few places I can reach from the path that’s purely natural, neither landscaped nor built upon.
I didn’t think much of the object jabbing me in the back initially. I simply meant to lay down and look up at the sky, maybe listen to some music. But something sharp pressed into me as I reclined. Rolling over and retrieving the offending object, I stared.
Can’t say why I didn’t notice the smell sooner. Once close enough to my face, it made me gag. Something like the cracked, partly decomposed claw of a crab. Not any species I’ve ever seen. Too large for one thing, and black as night.
Here and there, coarse, pointy bristles protruded from it. Like the ones which cover tarantulas, seen up close. Coconut crabs? Out here? Not that I knew of. Lobsters? Not this far inland. As repulsive as it was, it made for a welcome curiosity. A disruption of my usual, increasingly mind numbing routine.
I contemplated bringing it back to the apartment, but decided against it because of the smell. Instead I took a picture with my phone, then laid elsewhere in the field until the sun began to set. I’ve become accustomed to the heat since moving here, but it’s downright pleasant in the evening.
Except in the Summer, and even then only for a scant few days, back home it was never warm enough that I could take walks after dark without a jacket. Strolling along beneath the stars, the now comfortably tepid air tickling my bare arms made me resolve to schedule some more evening walks in the following weeks.
Now and again I passed through great teeming clouds of gnats or some other tiny winged insect. I knew these small, localized swarms assembled in the evening for breeding purposes and felt mildly disgusted by that as I picked them out of my hair.
Then again, they inconvenienced me relatively little compared to what it must be like from their perspective. Imagine some gigantic, incomprehensible beast plowing into you while you’re just trying to get laid. A brief moment of disgust for me. But for many of those flies, a brutal and unexpected end to their already short lives.
They’re the lucky ones. I’ve got to go on living here. I took a shower when I got home to wash the remaining gnats out of my hair, as otherwise I could feel a few stragglers writhing against my scalp, fighting to free themselves. Down the drain with ’em.
I ordered a pizza online afterwards, still dripping, towel wrapped around my waist. I didn’t even bother getting dressed in time for the delivery. Just opened the door, took the pizza and handed him the cash. “Oh. I uh, I didn’t mean to…sorry!”
I didn’t so much as make eye contact. “Well, have a great evening and enjoy your pizza!” Token friendliness, and thinly veiled pleading for a generous tip. I shut the door in his face. I order pizza once a month at most. The rate of turnover is such that it’ll be someone else next time anyway, guaranteed.
Strangers in the night, just how I like it. The pizza was decent for what I paid, though some strange process happens as it cools down. It’s never anywhere close to as good reheated as it is freshly baked.
The same thing happens to any fast food I’ve tried. Addictively tasty when fresh and hot, but it slowly congeals as it cools, saturated fats solidifying until achieving a rubbery texture. It doesn’t stop me from eating it though. My insides are no less cold, no less limp.
I played computer games on one monitor while ‘turking’ on the other until the sun came up. All told I made nearly fifty dollars. Something about sleep deprivation really puts me in “the zone”. The energy drinks probably have something to do with it.
I enter this hazy, almost dreamlike mindset where the work flies by. I’m no less proficient in MOBAs when I get like this either. My skills improve, if anything. Time loses all meaning. My bloodshot eyes track the action with no conscious effort on my part, my every movement automated.
During one of these semi-lucid marathon gaming sessions, in the wee hours of the morning, I first glimpsed one. A whole, living specimen that must’ve followed the scent I picked up from touching that claw. I only saw it out of the corner of my eye mind you, and because I knew I was inebriated, I didn’t take it seriously.
Hallucination comes with the territory. It was hardly the first time I spotted blotchy, moving silhouettes in my peripheral vision. Mildly concerning the first time, but I don’t scare easily. I have a solid grasp on what’s real. On what’s even possible, versus the mind playing tricks on itself.
That infuriates some people. Usually ones with some frivolous worldview built on a mixture of sloppy thinking and outright fraud. I could be less abrasive if I were to qualify my statements as if they were just my opinions, but they’re not. Anyway, do they deserve that level of consideration? It’s their own fault for being suckered into such obvious hokum.
This fortified materialistic mindset insulates me against fear of the dark. In most cases I’m likely to be the scariest thing hiding in the dark anyway. I can’t pinpoint when I turned into what I am now, but any crazed vagrant, thief or meth head concealed by cover of night has more to fear from me than the inverse.
That’s just realistic threats, too. Ghosts, demons and the like never enter into my consideration. To reach the center in my brain responsible for fear, such ideas would first have to pass through the center responsible for separating the plausible from the implausible. They never do.
I simply know better. It’s a bleak, boring world out there. No sasquatches, no devils, no ghosts or chupacabras. Humans are the only monsters on this planet, myself included. The longer you live around them, the more of their attributes you absorb until one day you look in the mirror and see one of ’em staring back at you.
That reminds me, I should start smoking. Whatever it takes so that I die before the transformation completes. Death is my destination, as certainly as someone with a gun to his temple. I’ve just chosen to take a more circuitous, scenic route.
To that end, when I woke up the next morning with a pounding headache, I headed straight for the bar. Sheila was surprised to see me, I think. I don’t look at her face much. I’m also not actually sure that’s her name. Sharla? Shauna?
“Shit, you’re a mess.” No argument from me, I left the apartment without showering. My hair must’ve been a riot to look at, stiff oily tufts sticking out all over. When I said nothing, she sighed and asked me what I wanted.
“Whisky, neat.” She frowned. “This ain’t fuckin Star Trek. I’m not that machine. Whatever it was, you know. Tea, earl grey, hot. Can’t you say hello first? Maybe ask how I’m doing?” I smiled. Shirley’s not usually funny. Shanna?
“I just want my drink.” I paid upfront. A tab would’ve been too much of a commitment for my liking. The beginnings of roots I had no intention of putting down in a place like this. I already felt hungover and would undoubtedly regret this later in the day.
Morning drinking is one of those cliche signs that you’ve lost control of your life. I’ve got no life to lose control of, so I ought to be alright. My eyes wandered, then came to rest on the dingy little strip club across the street.
I think it used to be a Blockbusters. They repainted but didn’t bother to change the architecture, just blacked out the windows. The sign was missing some letters, and had been for the past year. The giant pair of neon outlined cartoon tits above that communicates their value proposition clearly enough. Most of their regulars probably can’t read anyway.
A pair of surly, shirtless men with huge beer bellies were duking it out in the strip club’s parking lot. Really going at it, smashing each other’s ugly, drunken faces with their fists, a trash can lid, and at one point the hood of a parked car. I looked away, having seen that sort of thing so many times around here that it wasn’t even worth paying attention to.
I’m not an eavesdropper by nature. I could care less what anybody around me is talking about, but it’s occasionally ridiculous or outrageous enough that my ears perk up. This is how I’ve learned everything I know about how their minds work, which is more than I ever wanted to.
For one thing, there exists no semblance of critical thought in their understanding of the world. Their method for determining what’s true basically boils down to what they’ve heard other people say. The more people say the same thing, the more credible it is in their estimation.
I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard them breathlessly discussing obvious internet hoaxes as though they were real. Confusing satire for news, or the contents of tabloids and chain letters as if they were the products of reputable journalism.
This is how they accumulate a sort of “folk wisdom”. What “everybody knows is true”. A mishmash of politically motivated rumors, investment scams or other get rich quick nonsense, and the sort of hollow Earth, Jewish conspiracy, ancient aliens bullshit of the sort commonly discussed on Coast to Coast AM and Infowars.
Whether they believe it boils down to how cool they think it would be if true, and the degree to which it reinforces their entrenched political views...which are themselves dictated in large part by fear, selfishness and stupidity.
According to the average conversation I overhear while drinking, Obama was born in Kenya, the government puts fluoride in our water and chemtrails in the sky to dumb us down (as if these people need any help with that) anybody who’s not some sort of evangelical Christian is out to get everybody that is, and these various menaces are all somehow in cahoots with each other.
Rolling up everybody you dislike into a single vague, sinister entity as if Jews have any truck with Muslims, or atheists with either is surely simpler than forming separate opinions of each group. Which is easier still than getting to know individuals, though I suppose I’m not one to talk as I avoid that like the plague.
Topping off their list of bogeymen, there’s the feminists, the gays, the blacks, the ACLU, the government and basically any other barrier to achieving their idea of utopia; a country under the exclusive control of people who look, sound, think, dress, fuck, and smell like they do.
That’s a wonderful joke to me, because if you ask one of these creatures to list the qualities they imagine all blacks possess that they find so disagreeable, what you’ll get from them is a spot on description of themselves.
They’re disgusting, aren’t they? It can’t just be me. There are days when I wonder if I’ve judged them too harshly. This usually happens when I haven’t run into one for a while. That little shred of guilt vanishes the moment I next hear one of them speak.
“Oh ya, dem fings is real. I seen ’em” says the plump woman with the ratty blonde hair seated near me. Whoever she’s speaking to is just outside my field of vision, but I don’t care enough to turn my head. I continue listening anyway, and discover she’s talking about ghosts.
“Dey had experts on dat show, I done watched it t’other night on da Histry channel.” Oh yes, of course. The History channel. Also known as the Hitler, ghosts and aliens channel. Gotta give the people what they want, integrity be damned.
“Expert” has a very particular meaning for these people. “Scientist” is a dirty word. It has political connotations for them. It’s those damnable “government scientists” who tell them that climate change exists, that the Biblical account of human origins probably isn’t accurate, that vaccines are a necessary precaution against pathogens, that fluoride is harmless in sufficiently small amounts, etcetera.
Just a bunch of dour, humorless spoilsports in their view, whose input on any matter of emotional importance is never welcome. “Experts” are another story. That’s any white or Asian man in nice clothes who argues in favor of their own ill formed opinions, with a command of the English language far enough in advance of their own that he sounds intelligent and credible, but not so much that he comes off as snooty.
These buffoons regularly appear in so-called documentaries about the existence of mermaids, the alien origins of Bigfoot and so on with “Expert” under their names at the bottom of the screen. It’s these “experts” the locals are referring to when they use the ambiguous “they”.
As in “Did you hear that they proved the existence of Atlantis?” or “They found evidence dragons really existed back in the middle ages”. Which it turns out was the poor fellow’s interpretation of The Last Dragon, an openly fictitious mockumentary which speculates about how the anatomy of dragons might work if they existed. If.
Doesn’t matter. He saw it, it sounded serious and authoritative, so in his mind he’s got a rock solid basis for making such a claim. There’s no use arguing. He’s got that vague but convincing memory to latch onto.
Even if you take out your phone and show him the exact program he’s talking about to demonstrate for him that it was never meant to be taken as fact, he’d shrug and say something like “close enough”. As if it was a reasonable mistake anybody could’ve made, and you’re the asshole for taking it seriously enough to settle the matter.
It’s maddening and never, ever worth the hassle. When you wrestle with a pig, you both get filthy, but the pig enjoys it. I learned that the hard way when I took a night class on programming.
A well built fellow in a pink polo shirt with a popped collar was impressing the anorexic blonde with the disproportionately huge bust seated next to him by explaining that time is the fourth dimension.
Not realizing the tar baby I was about to become entangled with, I muttered that time isn’t objectively the fourth dimension (since it isn’t as though they have numbers carved into them) and that there exist spatial dimensions in excess of the three familiar to us as well, one of which could be accurately called the fourth.
He “corrected” me, citing a Michio Kaku television special he watched the night before. Didn’t matter that we could both be right. That duration can indeed be added to length, width and height as one of the metrics used to describe a solid at the same time that spatial dimensions exist in excess of the three familiar to human experience.
What mattered is that he saw something on TV which sounded credible, so he felt certain that the irritating nerd contradicting his recollection of it couldn’t possibly know better. I drew a tesseract for him. To his credit he recognized it. Most people recognize a tesseract even if they don’t know the term for it.
“This is a four dimensional cube, or at least a flat drawing of one. Yet the fourth dimension expressed here isn’t temporal, but spatial. What’s being visualized isn’t the duration of the cube, but an additional degree of extrusion.
A line is an extrusion of a point, a square is an extrusion of a line, and a cube is an extrusion of a square. When you extrude a cube, you get a tesseract. That has nothing to do with time and everything to do with space.”
He scoffed but didn’t explain why. “Whatever nerd. Just go look up what I was watching, then come back and tell me that. You think you know everything.” Of course I don’t, but this particular topic was one I happened to know something about.
His posturing further impressed the tits on a stick whose narrow white ass he’d been blowing smoke up before I made the mistake of involving myself. “Ooohhh, you’re so smaaart. You should come to my place and help me study tonight.”
Maybe I really am the fool. He was presumably balls deep in her a few hours later, while I pulled another all-nighter playing MOBAs and narrowing search results for random internet retards. If you judge a method by the results it produces, impressive sounding horseshit outperforms factual accuracy every time.
The women I did occasionally capture the interest of seemed mainly attracted to the novelty of dating somebody who could string together a coherent sentence without straining himself. I’ve got opposable thumbs, an even number of toes and all my original teeth, apparently rare and enticing qualities around these parts.
A few tugged at my heart. Tempted me to engage, to become entangled. Really sweet, bright, worthwhile girls who had the misfortune of meeting me. Of being fooled by the human shaped outer shell, mistakenly imagining there was still anything of substance left inside.
Even then, they could tell what I was turning into. I don’t blame them for leaving. If I had any scruples I would’ve warned them off myself when we met, but I didn’t. Nothing that I once liked about myself remains. It all burnt to the ground the day I received that phone call while unpacking.
When my blood alcohol level rose to the point where I could no longer silently endure the braying and bleating of barnyard animals carrying on behind me, I stumbled out through the double doors in a blinkered stupor. Is the sun always this painfully bright?
The debilitating level of intoxication made the heat and humidity surprisingly bearable. I was soon drenched with sweat but only noticed when my hand became too slippery to hold onto the bottle. Wait, I paid for the whole bottle? Shit, I’d better finish it then.
Drank too much? Drink more, that’ll fix it. Booze logic at work. I can’t say exactly how I got there, but after a long unintelligible smear of blurry scenery, I realized I was back in the field. I really ought to wear a GPS collar when I drink, so that after I sober up I can have Google Maps show me the route I took. Something like those Billy focused Family Circus comics with the dotted line all the fuck over the yard.
I concluded it was an ideal place to pass out, and was in the process of laying down when I spotted the unmarked van pulling into the parking lot at the far side of the field. I pressed down as flat as I could, but continued watching with rapt interest.
Someone must own this field after all. I worried about how they might react to finding me here, drunk and disheveled. Not for long though. Curiosity quickly supplanted fear as I watched a quartet of men in black suits, white rubber gloves and sunglasses emerge from the vehicle.
Even if I were sober, they were far enough away that I couldn’t make out what they were doing in any real detail. Whiskey goggles only added to the difficulty. What is that, I thought. What the fuck is it?
Some kind of carrion. A dead animal, about the size of a man. Too many legs though! Too many for a bear, or a deer, or anything I know about. Jet black all over. Long spindly legs dragging behind as they heaved it into a body bag, zipped it up, then loaded it into the back of the van.
Fuck me. I studied the label on the bottle but could find nothing to blame for what I’d just seen. When I looked up, one of the agents seemed to stare directly at me. I froze. He turned a few degrees. Then a few more, surveying the field for any witnesses.
Despite my drunken incompetence, just by laying flat in the tall grass, I managed to evade notice. Once fully satisfied that there were no witnesses, all four men piled into the van and drove off. Why during broad daylight? Even in such a state, that seemed odd to me.
Unless they didn’t want to risk anybody finding whatever the fuck it was that they bagged up and made off with. Didn’t want to leave it rotting out here even a second longer than necessary, heading out to retrieve it the moment somebody called it in.
Cops? No, no. FBI? Maybe. Spooks of some kind. I don’t know enough about the agencies which handle hush hush, cloak and dagger type shit to venture a guess at who employs those men. Just that they weren’t the sort of fellows I should introduce myself to.
I remained there for a time, watching for any further activity. Then I abruptly vomited, getting some on my shirt. I stood up swearing at myself, every other word slurred to the point of unintelligibility. Then it struck me.
They did it. They finally fucking did it. I’m one of the local creatures now. God damnit. Maybe this is how it happens? Maybe nobody’s actually native to this fetid swamp, the prehistoric peninsula that time forgot. Maybe they come here and begin changing. By the time they realize what’s happening, it’s too far along.
Fuck me. Fuck this place. Garbage, all of it. But I could no longer exclude myself from the mess around me. Now I’m just another figure in the background, fitting in at last when I hoped I never would. Death, take me now.
I tripped in a gopher hole and stumbled, falling to my hands and knees. When my senses returned, it took a while to fully process what was in front of me. I never really bothered to explore the whole field before this, just wandered a short ways in and laid down to watch the clouds roll by.
But now, close to dead center of the field, I found myself peering down what appeared to be a borehole of some kind. A sinkhole, maybe? Is this what they look like? Didn’t sound right. This looked excavated, not naturally formed.
It was about five feet in diameter and so deep that I couldn’t see the bottom. It just faded into inscrutable blackness after about fifty feet. If I didn’t stumble on that gopher hole, I’d probably have fallen into the much larger opening instead.
What is this? Something related to construction? That must be it. A freshly dug well, possibly. Or the early stages of a geothermal heating and cooling setup for whatever building would soon be erected here. With atypically good timing, my stomach chose this point to once again empty itself.
The remains of my liquid breakfast spiraled down into the darkness, scattering along the way into so many soupy droplets. I dry heaved a couple times, confirming that was the last of it. I then repeatedly called out into the abyss. I don’t remember exactly why. Just to listen for the echo I think.
There’s a lot I don’t remember about that day. How I wound up at the field for example. I just know that I got home somehow, because that’s where I woke up, head pounding like Michael J. Fox working a jackhammer.
The sun had already gone down. Not recently either; when I stepped outside to gauge the temperature it was chilly enough that I decided against walking it off. My cat wove between my ankles as though deliberately trying to topple me.
It’s a stretch to call Goblin “my cat”. Just a stray who tolerates me because I feed and shelter her. A scraggly little creature that I welcomed into my life because she’s cleaner and better mannered than most of the people I’ve run into since my arrival.
I spent so much time developing an immunity to human attachment that I neglected to do the same for animals. I’m helpless but to dote on this grumpy, stubborn little critter. I’m sure I’d love her less if she could speak. Makes me wonder if the locals might be rendered equally charming by a sudden outbreak of mutism.
Goblin leapt onto my lap the moment I sat down at my computer, aggressively burrowing into my jacket. She gets clingy at night. Probably less to do with affection than the fact that my body emits a good deal of heat.
What was that, I thought. What exactly was it? A jumble of half remembered sights and sounds trickled back into my mind, bit by bit, as I struggled to sort out how much of it really happened. Most of all, I felt captivated by fleeting memories of the hole.
What’s down there, I wonder. Down that hole, deep in the Earth. What could be down there? What’s down in the hole? Gotta get my thoughts under control. Clicking the time in the lower right of the screen brought up the calendar. Thursday already?
Hardly the first time my sleep cycle became inverted. Takes forever to fix it, too. I’ve read you need to stay awake until evening, resisting the urge to crash before then. I never manage. Instead, I stay awake further and further into the wee hours of the morning, falling asleep later and later in the day until I come full circle.
It’s hell on my body, and increasingly my mind as well. When a series of soft knocks came at the door, I initially ignored them under the assumption I was hallucinating. Who would visit me? I stumbled to the door and opened it just a crack.
Camille, my next door neighbor. She brought me cornbread and grits the night after I finished moving in. I ate it all, but other than that we’ve had no contact since, save for occasional glances when we both retrieve our mail at the same time.
“I don’t mean to bother you, it’s just...I never see you leave your apartment anymore. Is something wrong?” I searched for answers to that question which wouldn’t fill many volumes. “No” I grunted. She didn’t buy it, probably smelling the whisky on my breath.
“If something’s happening in your life...if you’re hurting and don’t have anybody to talk to about it, you could come see me any time you want. I don’t know anything about you, so I can’t promise I’ll know how to help, but I’m a good listener.”
I just wanted her gone. “I go for walks sometimes. Don’t worry about me.” I began to shut the door, but she wedged her foot in there. “Somebody left a thing on your door.” She carefully handed me a post-it note through the narrow opening.
Sure enough. Looked to be from the landlord, too. “...Thanks.” With that, I pushed her foot out of the opening with my own, then shut the door the rest of the way. The note expressed similar concerns about “antisocial behavior”.
Asocial rather than antisocial, surely? What is there to complain about? In most ways, I’m a model tenant. I don’t blast music at odd hours, I don’t host parties, I don’t do much of anything. If not for the light coming out of my windows at night, one could be forgiven for assuming this apartment is vacant.
The note ended with something or other about an upcoming “community party” in the “clubhouse”, the same large structure which houses the office where I signed all the necessary paperwork to move in. What “community” exactly? I just live here.
I crumpled it up and threw it in the bin on my way to the kitchen. The moment I flicked the light switch, a single cockroach fled beneath the fridge. I grimaced. Not much to speak of in the fridge except the pizza I ordered the other day.
Another cockroach crept behind the microwave the moment I spotted it. In all likelihood there were hundreds hiding in various shadowed crevices of the apartment, only emerging to scavenge while I’m sleeping.
Revolting little creatures. Slick, glossy black carapace. Slender, bristly legs upon which it skitters about while its antennae wave to and fro, tasting the air. Closely related to the praying mantis but altogether less elegant, though my opinion hardly matters as the damned things are impossible to get rid of.
I heated up a slice of pizza, scarfed it down, then chased it with an energy drink. I knew by now it’d take several hours before I felt regular, so I drew a hot bath and turned the bathroom lights off. Taking a steaming hot bath in the dark is my go-to hangover remedy.
I don’t know if it actually expedites the process, but even the meager light from the apartment’s fixtures hurt my eyes in this state. What a relief when I at last slid my weak, pale body into the steaming tub. At once I felt the tension in my limbs begin to dissolve. Works every time, though lately it seems like it’s growing less potent.
Goblin pushed her head against the door until it swung open just far enough for her to enter. The gap in the door cast a long, narrow strip of light across the floor and up the wall. I grumbled but didn’t want to leave the warmth of the bath to close it.
Besides, I knew she’d just want to be on the other side of it a minute later. She rubbed up against the |
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The poor management of CPE has created an Internet-scale problem and potential for abuse. For example, the plurality of open DNS resolvers accessible on the Internet are on medium-speed DSL connections, the sorts of connections leased to home and small-business users. These devices are available for abuse in reflected and amplified DDoS attacks. The vulnerable devices themselves can also be leveraged against the consumer in middleperson attacks. In this presentation, we quantify this problem and provide recommendations for how the Internet community can address this public-health-like problem.
Abusing Microsoft Kerberos: Sorry You Guys Don't Get It Microsoft Active Directory uses Kerberos to handle authentication requests by default. However, if the domain is compromised, how bad can it really be? With the loss of the right hash, Kerberos can be completely compromised for years after the attacker gained access. Yes, it really is that bad.
In this presentation Skip Duckwall, @passingthehash on twitter and Benjamin Delpy, @gentilkiwi on twitter and the author of Mimikatz, will demonstrate just how thoroughly compromised Kerberos can be under real world conditions.
Prepare to have all your assumptions about Kerberos challenged!
Abusing Performance Optimization Weaknesses to Bypass ASLR The primary goal of ASLR is to effectively randomize a program's memory layout so that adversaries cannot easily infer such information. As ASLR is a critical defense against exploitation, there have been tremendous efforts to evaluate the mechanism's security. To date, previous attacks that bypass ASLR have focused mostly on exploiting memory leak vulnerabilities, or abusing non-randomized data structures.
In this presentation, we leverage vulnerabilities introduced by performance-oriented software design to reveal new ways in which ASLR can be bypassed. In addition to describing how vulnerabilities originate from such designs, we will present real attacks that exploit them.
First, we analyze general hash table designs for various programming languages (JavaScript, Python, Ruby). To optimize object tracking for such languages, their interpreters may leak address information. Some hash table implementations directly store the address information in the table, whileothers permit inference of address information through repeated table scanning. We exhaustively examined several popular languages to see whether each of them has one or both of these problems, and present how they can be leveraged. As a concrete example, we demonstrate how address information can be leaked in the Safari web browser by simply running some JavaScript.
Second, we present an analysis of the Zygote process creation model, which is an Android operating system design for speeding up application launches. The results of our examination show that Zygote weakens ASLR because all applications are created with largely identical memory layouts. To highlight the severity of this issue, we demonstrate two different ASLR bypass attacks using real applications - Google Chrome and VLC Media Player.
Android FakeID Vulnerability Walkthrough The team that discovered the Android MasterKey vulnerability in 2013 is here to present another new Android vulnerability with widespread impact: a flaw in Android application handling, allowing malicious applications to escape the normal application sandbox and get special security privileges without any user notification. This can lead to a malicious application having the ability to steal user data, recover passwords and secrets, or in certain cases, compromise the whole Android device. The vulnerability is embedded in all shipped Android devices since January 2010 (Android Eclair 2.1).
This presentation aims to: walk through the technical root cause of this responsibly disclosed vulnerability (Google bug 13678484), explain why it's a problem, show how an attacker would create an exploit for it, and finally demonstrate the exploit against a live device. The presentation will also coincide with the release of a free security scanning tool to help end-users scan for risk of this vulnerability on their end devices.
presented by Jeff Forristal
APT Attribution and DNS Profiling Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks are highly organized and are launched for prolonged periods. APT attacks exhibit discernible attributes or patterns. In order to maintain the command and control (c2) network redundant, APT attacks are generally embedded with multiple DNS names. An intuitive view is that APT attackers keep and control a high number of DNS-IP address pairs. Most of existing malware attribution works placed great emphasis on grouping the technological or behavioral contexts from the malware binaries. We studied a small sample of malware from a specific victim group who had been subjected to APT attacks. Our study indicates that the attackers follow some behavioral patterns of registering DNS domains and the frequently use of stable DNS-IP pairs. The gatherings of such evidence regarding malware binaries are not complicated. But it requires tedious online queries of open source information. We developed an automated solution to simplify the tasks of collecting and storing the information as a database for future analysis. Once the initial set of malicious DNS-IP pair, "parked domain" and "whois information" are identified; the database can be called to perform updates manually. This database can be used for further analysis by a visualization tool, and for identification of the possible identity or personas of the attackers. In our studies, we used Maltego for the analysis.
presented by Frankie Li
Attacking Mobile Broadband Modems Like a Criminal Would While there has certainly been some interesting research into the security of mobile broadband modems, or "dongles," in the past, it has almost exclusively focused on novel attacks such as buffer overflows over text message, attacks on the device's file system, and other advanced approaches. The level of skill and effort required to execute such an attack reduces the potential number of attackers, but there are easier ways to monetize from attacking these devices too.
This talk will focus on some more likely scenarios; web-based attacks that are not that hard to pull off but that will allow the attacker to cash in without too much effort. The speaker will demonstrate how to profit, steal sensitive information, and establish a persistent hold on the devices, and also how a seemingly modest attack could be used as part of a more advanced attack chain. There will also be an analysis of why it is easy being an Internet criminal, and how it will continue to be so unless drastic changes are made to how we approach and implement new consumer technology.
Oh, and there will be demos.
presented by Andreas Lindh
Babar-ians at the Gate: Data Protection at Massive Scale We are meant to measure and manage data with more precision than ever before using Big Data. But companies are getting Hadoopy often with little or no consideration of security. Are we taking on too much risk too fast? This session explains how best to handle the looming Big Data risk in any environment. Better predictions and more intelligent decisions are expected from our biggest data sets, yet do we really trust systems we secure the least? And do we really know why "learning" machines continue to make amusing and sometimes tragic mistakes? Infosec is in this game but with Big Data we appear to be waiting on the sidelines. What have we done about emerging vulnerabilities and threats to Hadoop as it leaves many of our traditional data paradigms behind? This presentation, based on the new book "Realities of Big Data Security," takes the audience through an overview of the hardest big data protection problem areas ahead and into our best solutions for the elephantine challenges here today.
presented by Davi Ottenheimer
Badger - The Networked Security State Estimation Toolkit The recently open sourced Cyber Physical Topology Language (CPTL) has allowed cyber defenders the capability of building tools to provide metrics for estimation of a security state. This provides a metric that can be used to assess the ongoing security status of data network. Using CPTL's framework, monitoring data from any arbitrary tool can be imported through standard data gathering methods such as syslog and SNMP queries. The toolkit specifically provides a running score from a many configurable settings based on metrics gathered on applications, systems, or networks. A graphical canvas in the Badger provides an at a glance view of the state of networked security elements.
BadUSB - On Accessories that Turn Evil USB has become so commonplace that we rarely worry about its security implications. USB sticks undergo the occasional virus scan, but we consider USB to be otherwise perfectly safe - until now.
This talk introduces a new form of malware that operates from controller chips inside USB devices. USB sticks, as an example, can be reprogrammed to spoof various other device types in order to take control of a computer, exfiltrate data, or spy on the user.
We demonstrate a full system compromise from USB and a self-replicating USB virus not detectable with current defenses.
We then dive into the USB stack and assess where protection from USB malware can and should be anchored.
Bitcoin Transaction Malleability Theory in Practice A mysterious vulnerability from 2011 almost made the Bitcoin network collapse. Silk Road, MTGox, and potentially many more trading websites claim to be prone to "Transaction Malleability." We will shed some light and show in practice how to exploit this vulnerability.
Breaking the Security of Physical Devices In this talk, I look at a number of household or common devices and things, including a popular model car and physical security measures such as home alarm systems. I then proceed to break the security of those devices. The keyless entry of a 2004/2005 popular make and widely used car is shown to be breakable with predictable rolling codes. The actual analysis involved not only mathematics and software defined radio, but the building of a button pushing robot to press the keyless entry to capture data sets that enable the mathematical analysis. Software defined radio is not only used in the kelyess entry attack, but in simple eavesdropping attacks against 40mhz analog baby monitors. But that's an easy attack. A more concering set of attacks are against home alarm systems. Practically all home alarm systems that had an RF remote to enable and disable the system were shown to used fixed codes. This meant that a replay attack could disable the alarm. I built an Arduino and Raspberry Pi based device for less than $50 dollars that could be trained to capture and replay those codes to defeat the alarms. I also show that by physically tampering with a home alarm system by connecting a device programmer, the eeprom data off the alarm's microcontroller can be read. This means that an attacker can read the secret passcode that disables or enables the alarm. In summary, these attacks are simple but effective in physical devices that are common in today's world. I will talk about ways of mitigating these attacks, which essentially comes down to avoiding the bad and buying the good. But how do you know what's the difference? Come to this talk to find out.
presented by Silvio Cesare
Bringing Software Defined Radio to the Penetration Testing Community The large adoption of wireless devices goes further than WiFi (smartmeters, wearable devices, Internet of Things, etc.).
The developers of these new types of devices may not have a deep security background and it can lead to security and privacy issues when the solution is stressed.
However, to assess those types of devices, the only solution would be a dedicated hardware component with an appropriate radio interface for each one of them.
That is why we developed an easy-to-use wireless monitor/injector tool based on Software Defined Radio using GNU Radio and the well-known scapy framework.
In this talk, we will introduce this tool we developed for a wide range of wireless security assessments: the main goal of our tool is to provide effective penetration testing capabilities for security auditors with little to no knowledge of radio communications.
Building Safe Systems at Scale - Lessons from Six Months at Yahoo Our profession is at a crossroads. The success of malicious actors such as phishers, spammers, malvertisers, and other criminals combined with revelations of pervasive government surveillance has changed the way users look at technology and has greatly increased our responsibility for building safe software.
The role of security has also evolved significantly for Internet companies. Companies that began with a mission to provide engaging or entertaining experiences now serve as a conduit for populist uprisings and free expression. That evolution comes with a cost, as the very same companies are now targets for top-tier intelligence agencies.
This talk will recap the speaker's first six months as the CISO of Yahoo. We will review the impact of the government surveillance revelations on how Yahoo designs and builds hundreds of products for across dozens of markets. The talk includes discussion of the challenges Yahoo faced in deploying several major security initiatives and useful lessons for both Internet companies and the security industry from our experience. The session will close with a discussion of the fundamental challenges that are left to be tackled for large Internet companies as well as possible solutions.
presented by Alex Stamos
Call To Arms: A Tale of the Weaknesses of Current Client-Side XSS Filtering Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is one of the most severe security vulnerabilities of the web. With the introduction of HTML5, the complexity of web applications is ever increasing and despite the existence of robust protection libraries, Cross-Site Scripting vulnerabilities are nowadays omnipresent on the web.
In order to protect end users from being exploited, browser vendors reacted to this serious threat by outfitting their browsers with client-side XSS filters. Unfortunately, as we had to notice, the currently provided protection is severely limited, leaving end-users vulnerable to exploits in the majority of cases.
In this talk, we present an analysis of Chrome's XSS Auditor, in which we discovered 17 flaws that enable us to bypass the Auditor's filtering capabilities. We will demonstrate the bypasses and present a tool to automatically generated XSS attacks utilizing the bypasses.
Furthermore, we will report on a practical, empirical study of the Auditor's protection capabilities in which we ran our generated attacks against a set of several thousand DOM-based zero-day XSS vulnerabilities in the Alexa Top 10.000 (we will also briefly cover, how we were able to find these vulnerabilities using a taint-aware browser engine). In our experiments, we were able to successfully bypass the XSS filter on first try in over 80% of all vulnerable web applications.
We will conclude the talk with an outlook on potential future improvements to client-side XSS filtering, based our analysis and experiences in bypass generation.
Capstone: Next Generation Disassembly Framework Disassembly framework is the fundamental component in all binary analysis, reversing, and exploit development. However, it is shameful that until the end of 2013, there was no single framework that can handle multi-architecture machine code with a friendly license. Especially, with the shift of the computer industry towards multi-platforms products, the lack of such a disassembly engine becomes serious and should be fixed as soon as possible. Unfortunately, at that time, there was no light at the end of the tunnel, as apparently nobody proposed anything to fix it.
We decided to step up and took the problem in our own hands to solve it once and for all. As a result, Capstone engine was born, and fixed all the outstanding issues. Our disassembly framework offers some unparalleled features, as highlighted below:
- Multiple architectures: ARM, ARM64 (ARMv8), Mips, PowerPC, Sparc, SystemZ X86.
- Multiple platforms: Windows & *nix (with Mac OSX, iOS, Android, Linux, *BSD & Solaris confirmed).
- Implemented in pure C, with bindings for Python, Ruby, C#, Java, NodeJS, GO, OCaml & Vala available.
- Clean/simple/lightweight/intuitive architecture-neutral API.
- Provide details on disassembled instruction (called "decomposer" by some others).
- Provide some semantics of the disassembled instruction, such as list of implicit registers read & written.
- Thread-safe by design.
- Special support for embedding into firmware or OS kernel.
- Distributed under the open source BSD license.
This talk introduces some existing disassembly frameworks, then goes into details of their design/implementation and explains their current issues. Next, we will present the architecture of Capstone and the challenges of designing and implementing it. The audience will understand the advantages of our engine and see why the future is assured, so that Capstone will keep getting better, stronger and become the ultimate disassembly engine of choice for the security community.
Last but not least, we will introduce some cutting-edge binary analysis frameworks built on top of Capstone, which open the whole new potentials for a range of areas like reversing, exploitation development, and malware detection.
Full source code of Capstone with new advanced features will be released at Black Hat USA 2014.
presented by Quynh Nguyen Anh
Catching Malware En Masse: DNS and IP Style The Internet is constantly growing, providing a myriad of new services both legitimate and malicious. Criminals take advantage of the scalable, distributed, and rather easily accessible naming, hosting and routing infrastructures of the Internet. As a result, the battle against malware is raging on multiple fronts: the endpoint, the network perimeter, and the application layer. The need for innovative measures to gain ground against the enemy has never been greater.
In this talk, we will present a novel and effective multi-pronged strategy to catch malware at the DNS and IP level, as well as our unique 3D visualization engine. We will describe the detection systems we built, and share several successful war stories about hunting down malware domains and associated rogue IP space.
At the DNS level, we will describe original methods for tracking botnets, both fast flux and DGA-based. We use a combination of fast, light-weight graph clustering and DNS traffic analysis techniques and threat intelligence feeds to rapidly detect botnet domain families, identify new live CnC domains and IPs, and mitigate them.
At the IP level, classical reputation methods assign "maliciousness" scores to IPs, BGP prefixes, or ASNs by merely counting domains and IPs. Our system takes an unconventional approach that combines two opposite, yet complementary views and leads to more effective predictive detections.
On one hand, we abstract away from the ASN view. We build the AS graph and investigate its topology to uncover hotspots of malicious or suspicious activities and then scan our DNS database for new domains hosted on these malicious IP ranges. To confirm certain common patterns in the AS graph and isolate suspicious address space, we will demonstrate novel forensics and investigative methods based on the monitoring of BGP prefix announcements.
On the other hand, we drill down to a granularity finer than the BGP prefix. For this, we zero in on re-assigned IP ranges reserved by bad customers within large prefixes to host Exploit kit domains, browlock, and other attack types. We will present various techniques we devised to efficiently discover suspicious reserved ranges and sweep en masse for candidate suspicious IPs.
Our system provides actionable intelligence and preemptively detects and blocks malicious IP infrastructures prior to, or immediately after some of them are used to wage malware campaigns, therefore decisively closing the detection gap. During this presentation, we will publicly share some of the tools we built to gather this predictive intelligence.
The discussion of these detection engines and "war stories" wouldn't be complete without a visualization engine that adequately displays the use cases and offers a graph navigation and investigation tool.
Therefore, in this presentation, we will present and publicly release for the first time our own 3D visualization engine, demonstrating the full process which transforms raw data into stunning 3D visuals. We will also present different techniques used to build and render large graph datasets: Force Directed algorithms accelerated on the GPU using OpenCL, 3D rendering and navigation using OpenGL ES, and GLSL Shaders. Finally, we will present a few scripts and methods used to explore our large networks. Every concept is intended to detect and highlight precise features and will be presented with its corresponding visual representation related to malware detection use cases.
Cellular Exploitation on a Global Scale: The Rise and Fall of the Control Protocol Since the introduction of the smart phone, the issue of control has entered a new paradigm. Manufacturers and enterprises have claimed control over not just how your phone operates, but the software that is allowed to run on it. However, few people know that Service Providers have a hidden and pervasive level of control over your device. These hidden controls can be found in over 2 billion cellular devices worldwide. Organizations have been quietly deploying these controls in smart phones, feature phones, basebands, laptops, embedded M2M devices, and even certain cars. Someone with knowledge of these controls and the right techniques could potentially leverage them for cellular exploitation on a global scale.
We've reverse engineered embedded baseband and application space code. We've torn apart the Over-the-Air communications and implemented our own code to speak the relevant protocols. Layer by layer, we've deconstructed these hidden controls to learn how they work. While performing this work we've unearthed subtle flaws in how the communication is handled and implemented. After understanding these flaws, we've written proof-of-concept exploits to demonstrate the true risk this software presents to the end user.
In this presentation, we will discuss and disclose how Over-the-Air code execution can be obtained on the major cellular platforms and networks (GSM/CDMA/LTE). Including but not limited to Android, iOS, Blackberry, and Embedded M2M devices. You will come away from this talk armed with detailed insight into these hidden control mechanisms. We will also release open source tools to help assess and protect from the new threats this hidden attack surface presents. These tools will include the ability to dynamically test proprietary system applications and simulate different aspects of a cellular environment.
CloudBots: Harvesting Crypto Coins Like a Botnet Farmer What happens when computer criminals start using friendly cloud services for malicious activities? In this presentation, we explore how to (ab)use free trials to get access to vast amounts of computing power, storage, and pre-made hacking environments. Oh! Also, we violate the hell out of some terms of service.
We explore just how easy it is to generate massive amounts of unique email addresses; in order to register free trial accounts, deploy code, and distribute commands (C2). We managed to build this cloud-based botnet all for the low cost of $0 and semi-legally. This botnet doesn't get flagged as malware, blocked by web filters, or get taken over. This is the stuff of nightmares!
While riding on the fluffy Kumobot (kumo means cloud in Japanese), it was discovered that we were not the only ones doing this! With the rise of crypto currency we now face the impending rise of botnets that mine for digital gold on someone else's systems with someone else's dime footing the electric bill. Through our efforts in building a cloud-based botnet we built enough tools to share a framework for penetration testers and security researchers. The anti-anti-automation framework will show those tasked with defense exactly what it looks like when their free trial gets assaulted.
Computrace Backdoor Revisited This presentation includes a live demonstration of security flaws in modern anti-theft technologies that reside in firmware and PC BIOS of most popular laptops and some desktop computers. While the general idea behind anti-theft technology is good, improper implementation can render it useless as well as harmful, or even extremely dangerous. We have found several proofs of unauthorized activations of Absolute Computrace anti-theft software on our private and corporate computers and discovered that this software can be used as an advanced removal-resistant BIOS-based backdoor.
While physical security and a lack of proper code validation have already been shown in prior research presented at Black Hat 2009 by Anibal Sacco and Alfredo Ortega from Core Labs, in our research we demonstrate network security flaws. Our demo will show how to own remote hosts running Absolute Computrace. And there is a cool extra surprise for those who have already heard about Computrace network issues.
Contemporary Automatic Program Analysis The ability to automatically discover security vulnerabilities has been coveted since Martin Bishop's team found the black box in the 1992 film "Sneakers." Automatic exploitation generation research coming out of academia demonstrates that we're getting close and DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge announcement indicates that we want it bad. Behind the facade of automatic program analysis is a lot of arduous computer theory and discrete math. But automatic analysis is supposed to make vulnerability research easier not harder!
This talk will begin with a brief history of program analysis; how manual analysis techniques slowly turned into automatic ones and how we started automatically discovering vulnerabilities and reasoning about code. Next, I'll demonstrate the current landscape of program analysis; how you can use existing program analysis tools and techniques to automatically find vulnerabilities in almost anything. Finally, I'll discuss the state-of-the-art of program analysis; how minor changes to existing projects and how small scripts (less than 100 lines) for existing libraries can yield world-class vulnerabilities. The talk will include several practical code examples and demos and will be accompanied by online reference material.
presented by Julian Cohen
Creating a Spider Goat: Using Transactional Memory Support for Security Often a solution from one area helps solve problems in a completely different field. In this session, we will show you how Intel CPU improvements designed to speed up computations have boosted security by creating a flexible memory monitor capable of detecting and reversing unauthorized memory changes.
Modern CPUs support the detection and resolution of memory conflicts between multiple threads that access the same data: This is called the Transactional Synchronisation Extension (TSX) in modern Intel CPUs. Hardware-supported TSX technology (represented by XBEGIN and XEND instructions) helps avoid expensive software locks. Instead, TSX can automatically detect read/write memory conflicts and roll back corresponding RAM changes.
We will show how TSX capabilities can be used for security. A special security thread reads protected RAM cells (data or code) in TSX mode; any other (potentially malicious) thread writing to the same cells will cause the CPU to abort the transaction. The abort context can be attributed to the address of the unauthorized memory write and to the instruction that caused it.
We will discuss the following practical security scenarios:
- Detecting unwanted memory accesses by suspicious threads and rolling them back (for example, in a HIPS system to verify if the code is malicious)
- Detecting the execution of suspected shell code (with the rollback of all RAM changes the code performed)
- Detecting memory changes with TSX but without the rollback capability. This could be highly useful for kernel and hypervisor self-protection (such as Microsoft PatchGuard).
We will show a demo of TSX detecting malicious RAM modifications. There are three leading security benefits of using TSX to monitor protected memory areas:
- Fully flexible via read accesses made by the security thread
- Operates in hardware, leading to minimal overhead
- Provides automatic rollback of memory changes (which is prohibitively expensive in software)
We will also discuss potential problems - for example, a DoS attack on TSX to exhaust the Level 1 cache.
Data-Only Pwning Microsoft Windows Kernel: Exploitation of Kernel Pool Overflows on Microsoft Windows 8.1 Each new version of Windows OS Microsoft enhances security by adding security mitigation mechanisms - Kernel land vulnerabilities are getting more and more valuable these days. For example, the easy way to escape from a sandbox is by using a kernel vulnerability. That's why Microsoft struggles to enhance security of Windows kernel.
Kernel pool allocator plays a significant role in security of whole kernel. Since Windows 7, Microsoft started to enhance the security of the Windows kernel pool allocator. In Windows 8, Microsoft has eliminated almost all reliable (previously published) techniques of exploiting kernel pool corruptions.
Then Microsoft eliminated "0xBAD0B0B0" technique in Windows 8.1, and there is no easy technique to exploit Pool Overflows on Windows 8.1 at the moment.
The brand new exploitation technique uses some tricks to convert pool overflow in several primitives:
1. Arbitrary memory read/write
2. Hijack of execution flow
3. Adjacent read/write
This talk presents a new technique of exploiting pool overflows, with very interesting effect: elevating privileges without executing any kernel shellcode or using ROP.
presented by Nikita Tarakanov
Defeating the Transparency Feature of DBI DynamoRIO and similar dynamic binary instrumentation (DBI) systems are used for program analysis, profiling, and comprehensive manipulation of binary applications. These DBI tools are critical for malware analysis, program feature collections, and virtual machine binary translations. An important aspect of these DBI tools is the transparent feature, i.e. the binary application (such as malware) being analyzed is not modified and is not aware of the runtime code manipulation.
This presentation shows techniques that break the transparency feature of popular DBI tools (such as DynamoRIO and PIN). We will provide code that presents different behaviors when running on native hosts vs. running with DBI and vs. running on VM. The detection is based on specially crafted X86 instruction sequences that expose the fundamental limitation of binary instrument and translation. In this talk, we will also present position independent NOP sequences that can be used to help evade detections and differentiate different types of X86 decoders.
Digging for IE11 Sandbox Escapes In June 2013, Microsoft started the first of their new bug-bounty programs, focusing on finding vulnerabilities in IE11 on the upcoming Windows 8.1 OS. Rather than spending my time fuzzing for RCEs, I focused on pure logic bugs and the best place to find them was in the sandbox implementation. As IE11 defaults to using Microsoft's new Enhanced Protected Mode (EPM) sandbox that repurposes Windows 8's App Container mechanism to more heavily restrict access to securable resources, it would seem to be a tough challenge, but it turned out not to be the case.
This workshop will contain a deep-dive into the 4 sandbox escapes I discovered during the 30-day bug bounty period, some which have been present since Vista and IE7. I'll run through the process I undertook to find these vulnerabilities, giving time to go in-depth on how to investigate the IE11 sandbox, run your own code and analyze the attack surface. Sample source code for all issues will be provided for use to allow you to test the issues out yourself.
In order to participate in the workshop, an installation of Windows 8.1 RTM will be required along with common tools such as Visual Studio 2013 and IDA Pro to analyze and develop the sandbox escape examples.
presented by James Forshaw
Dynamic Flash Instrumentation for Fun and Profit Many of the latest Flash exploits seen in the wild (CVE-2013-5329, CVE-2013-5330, CVE-2014-0497, etc) are protected with commercial tools like DoSWF and secureSWF. Malicious Flash redirectors are also utilizing the same tools. Static analysis of protected Flash objects is slow and frustrating: you need to identify the encryption algorithm and the key, implement the decryption routine, and extract the encrypted data from the Flash object. Code obfuscation techniques can also be a real pain in the *** when static analysis is the only option. If only there were a decent tool for dynamic analysis Flash files...
In this presentation, we will release and demonstrate the first tool that enables dynamic analysis of malicious Flash files. There is no need for decompilation - the tool utilizes binary instrumentation to log the interesting method calls. This approach not only significantly speeds up the analysis of individual files but also enables detailed automatic analysis of malicious Flash files.
presented by Timo Hirvonen
Epidemiology of Software Vulnerabilities: A Study of Attack Surface Spread Many developers today are turning to well established third-party libraries to speed the development process and realize quality improvements over creating an in-house proprietary font parsing or image rendering library from the ground up. Efficiency comes at a cost though: a single application may have as many as 100 different third party libraries implemented. The result is that third-party and open source libraries have the ability to spread a single vulnerability across multiple products, exposing enterprises and requiring software vendors and IT organizations to patch the same vulnerability repeatedly. How big of a problem is this? What libraries are the biggest offenders for spreading pestilence? And what can be done to minimize this problem? This presentation will dive deep into vulnerability data and explore the source and spread of these vulnerabilities through products, as well as actions the security research community and enterprise customers can take to address this problem.
Evasion of High-End IPS Devices in the Age of IPv6 IPv6 era is here, either if you already use it or if you continue to ignore it. However, even in the last case, this does not mean that your nodes (end-hosts, networking devices, security devices) are not already pre-configured with IPv6 connectivity, at least to some extent. At the same time, ARIN states that they are currently in phase three of a 4-phased IPv4 Countdown Plan, being already down to about 0.9/8s in aggregate. On the other hand, RIPE NCC has reached its last /8 IPv4 address space quite some time ago.
And what IPv6 does not forgive for sure is the lack of security awareness. Several times in the past it has been shown that this new layer-3 protocol, apart from the huge address space and other new functionalities, it also brings with it several security issues. In this talk, it will be shown that significant security issues still remain unsolved. Specifically, three different but novel techniques will be presented that allow attackers to exploit even a really minor detail in the design of the IPv6 protocol to make security devices like high-end commercial IDPS devices completely blind. These techniques allow the attackers to launch any kind of attack against their targets, from port scanning to SQLi, while remaining undetected. Moreover, in this talk, after presenting detailed analysis of the attacks and the corresponding exploitation results against IDPS devices, potential security implications to other security devices, like firewalls will also be examined. Finally, specific mitigation techniques will be proposed, both short-term and long-term ones, in order to protect your network from them.
Exploiting Unpatched iOS Vulnerabilities for Fun and Profit Patching all vulnerabilities for a modern, complex software system (i.e., Windows, iOS) is often difficult due to the volume of bugs and response time requirements. Instead, software vendors usually devise quick workarounds to mitigate the exploitation of a given vulnerability. However, those patches are sometimes incomplete, and attackers can utilize different attack vectors to re-exploit a patched vulnerability. iOS is no exception.
In this presentation, we will disclose our process for jailbreaking the latest version of iOS (version 7.1.1), running on any iOS device including the iPhone 5s as well as older iPads and iPods. We start by finding new ways to exploit vulnerabilities with incomplete patches. We then use these vulnerabilities to discover new avenues of attack. Finally, we chain together these vulnerabilities and new attacks to run unsigned code out of the sandbox with root permissions and to defeat mandatory code signing. We include a detailed disclosure of several new vulnerabilities and the exploit techniques that we developed.
Exposing Bootkits with BIOS Emulation Stealth and persistency are invaluable assets to an intruder. You cannot defend against what you cannot see. This talk discusses techniques to counter attempts at subverting modern security features, and regain control of compromised machines, by drilling down deep into internal structures of the operating system to battle the threat of bootkits.
The security features added in modern 64-bit versions of Windows raise the bar for kernel mode rootkits. Loading unsigned drivers, which is what most rootkits will attempt to do, is denied by Driver Signature Enforcement. PatchGuard protects the integrity of the running kernel, preventing them from modifying critical structures and setting up hooks. Although time has shown that these security measures are not perfect, and some may in fact be bypassed while actively running, an alternative approach is to subvert the system by running code before any of the security features kick in.
Secure Boot has been introduced to protect the integrity of the boot process. However, the model only works when booting from signed firmware (UEFI). Legacy BIOS systems are still vulnerable as the Master Boot Record, Volume Boot Record, and the bootstrap code all reside in unsigned sectors on disk, with no security features in place to protect them from modification.
Using a combination of low-level anti-rootkit techniques, emulation, and heuristic detection logic, we have devised a way to detect anomalies in the boot sectors for the purpose of detecting the presence of bootkits.
presented by Lars Haukli
Extreme Privilege Escalation on Windows 8/UEFI Systems The UEFI specification has more tightly coupled the bonds of the operating system and the platform firmware by providing the well-defined "runtime services" interface between the operating system and the firmware.
This interface is more expansive than the interface that existed in the days of conventional BIOS, which has inadvertently increased the attack surface against the platform firmware. Furthermore, Windows 8 has introduced APIs that allow accessing this UEFI interface from a userland process. Vulnerabilities in this interface can potentially allow a userland process to escalate its privileges from "ring 3" all the way up to that of the platform firmware, which includes permanently attaining control of the very-powerful System Management Mode (SMM).
This talk will disclose two of these vulnerabilities that were discovered in the Intel provided UEFI reference implementation, and detail the unusual techniques needed to successfully exploit them.
Finding and Exploiting Access Control Vulnerabilities in Graphical User Interfaces Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) contain a number of common visual elements or widgets such as labels, text fields, buttons, and lists. GUIs typically provide the ability to set attributes on these widgets to control their visibility, enabled status, and whether they are writable. While these attributes are extremely useful to provide visual cues to users to guide them through an application's GUI, they can also be misused for purposes they were not intended. In particular, in the context of GUI-based applications that include multiple privilege levels within the application, GUI element attributes are often misused as a mechanism for enforcing access control policies.
In this session, we introduce GEMs, or instances of GUI element misuse, as a novel class of access control vulnerabilities in GUI-based applications. We present a classification of different GEMs that can arise through misuse of widget attributes, and describe a general algorithm for identifying and confirming the presence of GEMs in vulnerable applications. We then present GEM Miner, an implementation of our GEM analysis for the Windows platform. We evaluate GEM Miner using real-world GUI-based applications that target the small business and enterprise markets, and demonstrate the efficacy of our analysis by finding numerous previously unknown access control vulnerabilities in these applications.
presented by Collin Mulliner
Fingerprinting Web Application Platforms by Variations in PNG Implementations Fingerprinting is an important preliminary step when auditing web applications. But the usual techniques based on the analysis of cookies, headers, and static files are easy to fool. Fingerprinting digital images is a technique commonly used for forensic investigations but rarely for security audits. Moreover, it is mostly based on the analysis of JPEG images only. In this talk we study the implementation differences between a number of PNG decoders/encoders, either build-in or commonly used with the main web application development platforms. As a result, we give a set of tests that can discriminate between various PNG libraries. As a consequence, it is often possible to identify the platform behind a website even when an effort has been made to prevent fingerprinting, as long as said website allows the upload of PNG images.
presented by Dominique Bongard
From Attacks to Action - Building a Usable Threat Model to Drive Defensive Choices By any historical standard, it would be fair to call today the "Golden Age Of Threat." As defenders, never before in our history have we known so much about bad guys, vulnerabilities, attacks, incidents, tradecraft, exploitation, etc. And it has become its own fast-rising industry of threat feeds, alerts, intelligence reports, standards, and tools.
But the sharing of threat intelligence is not a miracle cure. In fact, threat sharing is just the means to an end - we need a way |
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